A little update to let you all know the latest on The Marionette Unit. You'll have noticed we've been a bit quiet on the blogging front and rest assured, it means we're hard at work on the feature script. We've had some great feedback on the trailer, from the public, Steampunk enthusiasts and industry members alike. It may be quiet on the site a little while longer as we put the finishing touches on our draft and we'll get some news out to everyone as soon as we start sending the script out to our contacts here in London and LA. In the meantime, keep spreading the word of the film to as many people as you can! Thanks

It’s been a while since I’ve written on here about the film and it’s because we’ve been busy writing away on the idea. As an update, Paul and I are forging through the script and it’s shaping up nicely. The process has been amazing though. It’s important to us to try and get as much of the idea nailed before we sit down at our laptops on Final Draft and start putting it together. The reason for this is just to get the overall idea organised in our heads – and it’s MUCH easier to change things at this stage. You don’t want to get to page 90 and realise there’s a logic problem making you have to go back to page 1. Also, working on index cards, where each card represents a turning point or scene, means you don’t worry about the details or dialogue, even characterisation. You just work out the structure of the film. A lot of time was spent discussing the idea, what kind of film we wanted to make and what we wanted to say as filmmakers. All of this is changeable, so it’s a case of moving around and slowly narrowing down our choices till we’ve ...

Hello TMU fans, So there have been some changes in the world of The Marionette Unit. Firstly you may have noticed the website has changed... a lot! In fact it has been slimmed down. There are numerous reasons for this, but the main reason is because The Marionette Unit is now going to be a Feature Film. Yes our Victorian Sci Fi film is now being made into a full length film coming to a cinema near you. As we mentioned a few weeks ago, the director Azhur Saleem and I went to Los Angeles for meetings and promotion of our film. We also went ideally to secure funding for the short film. What turned out to be one type of trip, quickly changed into another. Everyone we showed the trailer to, industry members as well, told us this would make a great feature film. So after some discussion between Azhur, Paul and I, we decided to forgot about making a short film and go straight to making it into a feature! We are now busy writing the feature script in London and organising our next steps in regards to the feature film. One of those steps is related to the website. While ...

The Marionette Unit "Inception" teaser will feature at the Nova Albion Steampunk Exhibition (http://www.steampunkexhibition.com/) on March 14th in San Francisco. This is fantastic exposure for us within the growing Steampunk community and will hopefully generate even more fans for our film! Executive Producer Jett Dunlap will be in attendance to present the trailer and talk about the film.

What is it that they did? Last night at the O-Bar in Hollywood starting at 8 pm, a real buzz started to arise. People from all over the world were coming to see a trailer for a film that had not even been made. What right did these young filmmakers have to make a film backwards, and why by 9:30 were over a hundred people fixated on a 200 inch projection screen to watch a 2 min trailer, which many had already seen? My name is Jett Dunlap and I am an Executive Producer on this film. I saw this same little teaser trailer in October. My girlfriend had gotten home late and asked me to look at a preview to a film. She tells the story better, but needless to say I was not excited to see another "help me make my movie" pitch, though I watched it anyway to humor her. Then I saw IT. IT is something I looked for in movies, in women, and in products I represented. IT is the indescribable quality which separates greatness from oblivion that we too rarely see. This little glimpse, presented through the eyes of James Boyle and Azhur Saleem, hooked me. I ...

James, Paul and I are heading off to LA this week to promote The Marionette Unit and help secure funding for the short film. We're aiming to meet a lot of industry people who could be interested in helping on the film. It'll also be the first time in almost a year that we'll all be in the same room together, as myself and James are in London and Paul is in Vancouver. The long-distance writing has created its own set of challenges, but we've managed to soldier through with emails and late night/early morning video chats. Now to have the chance to talk across a table is going to be great. It'll give us the much-needed time to nail down the feature script. It's exciting and pretty nerve-wracking at the same time as we're going to be road-testing the trailer with a lot of people who do this purely for a living! Keep up with all the news as it happens either on this blog. Hopefully there'll be some pretty good news coming out of the next two weeks here!

Hey everyone, Azhur recently was interviewed by the website www.behindballet.com.au. They are based in Melbourne, Australia and it is the blog of The Australian Ballet. Looking at dance through the prism of fashion, music, art and literature, they unravel the stories behind their productions and mine ballet’s juicy past to find the new in the old and the old in the new. They took an interest in The Marionette Unit because of our central character Georgette being a ballet dancer. It is a great interview. Azhur talks about how the original idea came about with myself. He also mentions his inspirations for the dance scene in the movie as well as some of his film inspirations. Read it at : http://www.behindballet.com/making-the-marionette-unit/

Azhur Saleem and James Boyle have asked me to contribute my co-writer perspective of the "The Marionette Unit" filmmaking process to theirs. When Azhur sent me the first draft of The Marionette Unit, I had already been collaborating with him and James for about 12 months on other film and TV writing projects. We had established a rapport, which is essential in any enterprise, but especially so in creative projects. Our first creative meeting was for another feature-length idea, which we are still developing.  We met in a Starbucks on friday night after work and hashed out the initial plot in a couple of hours over cold coffee. The process was incredibly easy and organic. Ideas flowed and were assessed on one criterion only: Does it make the story better? I have had a number of writing collaborations in the past, but they have been ego driven: one party will feel strongly about something they had contributed and would fight for its inclusion in the final draft, to the detriment of the work itself. What I discovered in Starbucks that night was another writer who cared enough about story to check his ego at the door. Shortly after, Azhur asked me to pitch my ideas ...