After a rather short meeting with our university we came to the conclusion that our aims and ambitions are far greater than theirs. We mutually agreed to take a year out to develop and make Casimir Effect, then come back next year to finish the degree as this would save a lot of headaches in the long run, and open up a lot more doors for us.

Now we are an indie production company, we will retain 100% of the rights to Casimir Effect. We can also apply to official film agencies and government bodies for additional funding. Our main aim is to get matched funding, so we need to make sure we hit or come very close to our fundraising goal, if we can do this we should be able to apply to get the same again from the film agency. This would double our budget from £10k to £20k and the more we get the more they will give us. We will be asking a number of industry bodies for funding, to add to our initial funding plus any donations and money raised through auctions. So essentially for every £1 you donate we will get £2. So keep an eye on our targets and current funding, then when it comes close to deadline if we need it we hope you can help out. Keeping to our targets is more important than getting a rush of funding at the end.

We also now have full control of the film, and our aim to turn Casimir Effect into a TV series becomes more plausible as we won’t need to fight to get the rights back from the university. So we can start looking into each characters storyline for an eight part television series.

The loss of support from the university is no real problem for us as we have a number of industry professionals, the equipment will still be accessible through Skillset and many of our HoDs have their own kit. The university won’t cover equipment for 3rd parties, so we would have to get our own insurance anyway. Were meeting with our sound guy this Sunday and getting wardrobe sorted in the next few days. It’s all go from now on.

The current batch of eBay auctions are doing well, there will probably be some bidding wars towards their end time.

Well now I have had time to recover from the Hub 3 and had a good night’s sleep in my own bed, I can gather my thoughts for the weekend and the tasks at hand. I’m still on the tail end of that throat infection I had at the Hub, not swine flu thankfully, but the coughing is a pain.

Anyway a good time was had by all evening if at times things were a bit none stop. My posts were vague because of the limited time I had in my hotel room and not getting much sleep. Most of the parties nights were good, everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves and even though I didn’t go to most of them the report I got back were good ones, plus the bleary eyes in the morning gave things away. The costumes were very impressive, I’m used the bigger US conventions and what I saw was some very well made costumes and props. I think there should be a costumer’s award presented and judged by the stars. The talks were fun, the buzz from the green room was that the old guard was training up the newbie’s and telling them what to expect. In many ways I wish I didn’t have the throat infection as it was a bit of a damp squib for me not feeling 100% so I couldn’t bounce around talking.

I have been negotiating with a cinematographer and the chap we wanted is very interested and we should be having a weekend together to go through the script and get contracts sorted. I’m also approaching a number of the other HoDs we have been after this week to get final confirmation off them. Were still on the case with locations and hope to have most of them confirmed before Christmas. Then the big parts over and done with and we’re into a stage of procurement for the film.

We have a number of eBay auctions going up over the next months to go into the funding pot, I have some cash coming to me I’m going to pop in there to. Also I have news from the US, one of my friends that has been looking for funding over that end has ask me for in depth marketing and financial info as he has a number of business contact that might be interested in sponsoring us. We also have the donate buttons at the bottom of each post, for any of you who aren’t the hording type or have some money spare any donations welcome.

Well that’s it for now.

Well the Saturday was fun, Lydia and I finally got our VIP passes and were able to do stuff unhindered. We caught a few of the talks, most of which went down the usual angle of talks at the hub other than Gareth refusing to talk about John Barrowman. The green room was good better than most I have been to at conventions, at least they catered for all tastes and made as healthy as possible, the green room people should pat themselves on the back. We got talking to a few people about the film and will be receiving a few donations from con-goers to auction off for the film. So keep your eyes on our eBay page over the coming months.  Sadly we didn’t get any pictures of yesterday; I’ll try to get some today.

There was a surprise visit from Kai Own who ended up doing a comedy sketch with Gareth, which from what I can guess was written for John Barrowman and James Marsters, Kai and Gareth still had the crowd screaming. Then after the hectic day we all got chance to just sit and chill as a hand full of people came over to natter.

Not sure what to expect today, Kai hasn’t been booked on anything but we presume he is talking over James Marsters slots. So once more we brave the microcosm of the Hub 3.

Were not dead yet, though it might seem that way, we have been busy this month, We have cast our final main character, though we cannot announce who it is yet it’s a good one and I’m sure some of you out there will squee a bit over the casting. Hopefully in a few weeks time we can announce this.

We have started looking at locations now, there are a number of places we would like to use and a number of places we can use. The problem is the ones we can use are not much use unless we spend a lot of money on them, so we will dig in at the ones we want until we get a price we want and hopefully that price is free. Well let s look at it this way to build the sets would be a minimum of £8,000 and that’s most of our budget, so getting locations even at low cost is worth it.

We are on our way to reaching the Christmas goal of £5,000 raised. At the moment the post stands at around £380, it will go up to around £500 after this round of auction, and the next auctions will have sorter lengths so we can get the pot filling faster. We also have a number of other angle to get our budget, Mostly it means going through the flat finding what we don’t use/need and selling it. So a few odd things may appear in the auctions, but everything will still go to the film. We will also be opening our donation/sponsorship system you can support us with donations.

The main reason for being quiet here is we have been working on the website, version one should be going live on the 24th October. We won’t close down the social networking sites, however all main news updates will be on the new website, and we will post links to the social media sites. This is basically to save time, then we don’t have to post as much, in most cases we can set up an RSS feed. We will however encourage those following us to post comments and be an active part of the new site.

We will be at the Hub 3 in Birmingham this weekend so if you are there track us down and say hi.

Things are moving forward at a good pace, there is a lot of juggling at the moment and plenty of opportunities. We may be using a 4D Camera system, 3D Monitors and other such cool stuff to make this film come true. We have some interest from Gareth David-Lloyd (Torchwood), to play the male lead in the film, were still chasing a female lead.

I spent yesterday speaking to one of our Science advisors; mostly it was to make sure the technology we show in the film is plausible, even if there are some narrative freedoms being applied. We know what were putting in isn’t going into the realms of impossible.

Today has been mostly looking up rendering engines, at the moment for the free engines LuxRender is the best we have, it has the best rendering of light and that to me is one of the most important parts of doing any CGI is the accuracy of light. I’m also tasked to write a love letter to the Renderman Crew at Pixar, to try and blag the use of their render engine for the film as our budget is currently £0. I have also started to compile our crew list, while Lydia is writing a prose short story that we will use to develop the script from.