From an e-mail received from one of the production companies we sent the Soul Searcher pitch to:

“You have a good script here, but I don’t believe it would work as a small or medium budget film… We could not commit to finance a movie over a $30m budget, therefore we cannot go any further with this.”

Oh how I laughed. And then cried. And then put a shotgun in my mouth. Not really of course – the power of suggestion.

Okay, here’s the thing. We tried to raise money. We really tried. And we’ve failed. We could keep trying, but sooner or later it’s going to drift away as our lives go on. I’ve been working a lot lately, and with an overdraft from my bank and the money pledged by Tim Parkman of Lessons Learned Ltd, we’re talking about a figure that we can… just about… shoot the film for. I put this to James tonight and we think it’s do-able. We’re going to get the crew together next week for a meeting. I’m beginning to feel like the boy who cried wolf, but maybe, just maybe, Soul Searcher could be happening very soon.

We had an informal meeting (aren’t they all where we’re concerned?) with our friend Dave Sewell, an accountant. We talked about our options for fundraising from private investors, business angels, setting up a limited company and so forth. My uncle has been approached to fund a film called The Drop and he passed the prospectus on to me for inspiration. It was pretty dry and didn’t make the film sound interesting at all. The financial stuff didn’t seem very compelling either. We could do so much better. We’d have some cool artwork to put in it for a start.