Ian selected for Cofilmic Comedy Lab
I’m very pleased to say that I have been selected to take part in the inaugural Cofilmic Comedy Lab.
The scheme is for established comedy writers (apparently I count as established) that want to write comedy feature films. I’ll now be joining nine other writers, who were selected from submitted bios, writing samples and a feature film idea, in Manchester over the next couple of months to be mentored by a crack team of film and comedy industry figures to develop my comedy film idea.
The course is led by screenwriter Paul Fraser, collaborator with director Shane Meadows amongst others. Here’s more about him:
Paul is an exceptional screenwriter who, in collaboration with director Shane Meadows, made an extraordinary trilogy of films: Twenty Four Seven, A Room for Romeo Brass and Once Upon a Time in the Midlands.
Since then Paul has written Heartlands and directed Streetlife, and Barney Has The Blues. Other writing credits include My Father the Liar, and Tube Tales directed by Bob Hoskins, Dead Man’s Shoes and a children’s cartoon series, Sheep.
He wrote Somers Town, his fifth collaboration with Shane and has directed a number of commercials and music videos. He is currently developing scripts with Warp films, a book adaptation called Numbers and working on other projects in TV and film.
The first session is this Saturday where we will be joined by Steve Oram and Alice Lowe, the stars and writers of Sightseers, and Charlie Hanson, producer of Extras, Whites, Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace, Life’s Too Short, Cemetry Junction and more.
The scheme is backed by Creative England, and as such there’s a nice cherry on top for our ideas to go further than the lab:
Creative England is financing the COFILMIC Comedy Lab as part of their commitment to developing new voices for comedy feature films. This is a fantastic opportunity and those with the strongest ideas will be tracked by Creative England, with the possibility of further funding to take your ideas to the next level as part of the upcoming Talent Centres in Autumn 2013.
The sessions lead up to a pitch to industry figures which is exciting, so I’d better get working on my idea. Here goes…