Today is the 15th anniversary of the first day of shooting on The Dark Side of the Earth – the original amateur version. “Today made a very bad start to principal photography,” I wrote in my journal in 1995, as half the actors forgot about the filming and didn’t turn up.
It’s also been over five years since this blog started. So what do I have to show for these five years, other than a blogroll of rambling nonsense? I have a lovely 35mm pilot of which I’m very proud, certainly. I also have almost two hours’ worth of behind-the-scenes podcasts and documentaries, and I wonder if there’s a way for these to reach a wider audience. In the new year we have a meeting with Film Education, a charity that provides schools with learning resources based around major films. It would be great for other people to be able to benefit from the trials and errors of the Dark Side. Aside from Media Studies, there are plenty of other areas of the curriculum that Dark Side could tie into – science, (e.g. the principles of lighter-than-air craft), geography (extreme climates), history (the Victorian era), English (archaic language, Victorian literature), art (production design), drama studies, even maths and technology.
And on that thought I shall leave you. Have a very happy Noel (Christmas, not Edmonds). I hope you can get wherever you want to go for Christmas through all the snow, since there are literally millimetres of the stuff all around…