With the Dark Side Guides series complete, you may be wondering what will be next. If you visit this website with any regularity you will have realised that I’m addicted to making behind-the-scenes featurettes. It’s mainly because I love making films, and making dramas, even short ones, costs money that I don’t currently have, whereas documentaries are cheap (particularly when the footage has already been shot).
So what will be next? Well, fifteen years ago I was in the middle of making the original amateur version of The Dark Side of the Earth. This April will mark the fifteenth anniversary of the shoot wrapping, and I plan to commemorate this with a special documentary, reuniting the original cast and revisiting the Malvern Wells back garden where much of it was shot. I’ve already started trawling through the ridiculously over-long bloopers video that I made back in ’96 to accompany the film and have found plenty of humourous moments to include, from Matt’s infamous face-first fall into a fire, to a great bit of dinnertime footage where Chris’s mum walks in just as he’s viciously punching a baked potato.
Chris is currently away travelling, but I hope we can get everyone together in late March or April to shoot it. Whether you’ll get to see the full doc on this website, I’m not sure at the moment, but I promise you a clip or trailer at the very least.