Hello  - for the next 10 days I am in LA LA land on an Inside Pictures trip. Inside Pictures is this great innovation of QWERTY Films, Cass Business School and Skillset which every year selects about a dozen of the rising young Turks of the UK Film Industry and offers us a few weeks of intense networking, executive education and a general high powered boost to our careers.

The highlight of the program is the LA week, which starts this weekend.
I will be blogging on it regularly, not just for usual readers but at the request of Skillset, who are sponsors of the scheme, and indeed great supporters of our development and training activities here at slingshot.

So watch for more than usual activity over the next 10 days as I attempt to chronicle my adventures in the epicenter of the screen trade….

Randy Paunch continues to teach. GooTube really does reach beyond the grave.

So, in the world of web 2.0 the most exciting thing to happen in the first ten days of shooting TORMENTED was my post about Alex Pettyfer and his (alleged) penchant for taking off items of clothing (see below if you missed the controversy, which brought home forcibly to me the difference between real life and web social mores, as brilliantly illustrated by this sketch from The Wall)

In life 1.0, the shoot is going well. Cast and crew have gelled and 10 days in begun to settle into that reassuring pattern that signifies a healthy shoot. Each morning starts relaxed, each day ends in a mad frenzy. Or as Jon Wright - puts it “in the morning we are shooting THE GODFATHER, by the evening its NEIGHBOURS”

The results, so far, thankfully resemble the care and craft of the former rather more than the latter. Albeit the GODFATHER, with rather more hot teenagers and zombie demons.
Today we embark upon our first big stunt sequence and we have been joined up here in the West Midlands by our evil scientist, prosthetics professor Paul Hyett who joins us fresh from creating a new crop of albino nasties for THE DESCENT 2 and our Stunt Superman, Nick Chopping.

I won’t give away too much about the sequence, other than to note that it involves a variety of screwdrivers, a sofa and an indecent amount of blood. None of which belongs to Alex Pettyfer or April Pearson or Larissa Wilson or Mary Nighy or Georgia King.

Not yet. Their time will come.

We started shooting our 4th film, the high school horror TORMENTED on Monday. You can read about it all:

on Variety

or on Movie News

or in Metro, if that’s the way your taste goes

I should clarify, though, that despite a lot of erroneous web chat Alex Pettyfer is NOT starring as the movie’s revenging ghost, Darren Mullett. That honour belongs to the remarkable young actor Calvin Dean, pictured below.

Alex, who is also a talented young actor with a charming tendency to take off his shirt whenever possible is, in point of fact, playing another of the leads, Bradley - a fantasically charismatic but viscious bad boy who deserves everything that he gets.

It’s day 4 of shoot and all is going well, here at Fairview High. Not a fatality yet. More news, and full listing as and when.