It's great when you're Straight8...Yeah!

Or...my (ad)venture back into creativity now that I am a mum mum mum

Part One

So my wonderful friend Mel announces she wants to make a film on Super duper 8 and enter it into the Straight8 film comp www.straight8.net. This is around Christmas 2007 and the deadline is March 2008. Did I want to be involved? You betcha sweet bippy I did! I was gagging to do something creative as was wibbling new, and newly single, mum of seven month old bouncing, big and beautiful boy and needed to put my head somewhere other than the puree-encrusted Annabel Karmel recipe book! So my job was to think of a story and the brief was horror/film noir with a transformation scene using animation, to be shot in black and white. Hmm I thought for the next couple of weeks while Mel was away diving in Mexico…Hmm….

I had hmmed enough to go and buy the Dummies Guide to Filmmaking and have a few quick peeks at it in between feeding, mopping, changing, cooing, hugging, playing, walking, shopping, tidying up and swabbing the decks etc ad infinitum…which was enough to make me think about locations. I thought of setting the story in Richmond Park at a crossroads, possibly at sunrise, using the light to indicate the transformation, maybe a jogger would be the main protagonist. I wasn't sure about it though. Mel came back and I was still sitting about like a tit in a trance (metaphorically speaking- of course I wasn't really! I was on 24/7 mum-duty to my 'yes-I-can-walk-round-the-furniture-now-on-my-own-honest-mum' son) not having done the job I was meant to do- but I needed a Eureka! moment and it was coming…

One day there was a knock at the door as I was trying to get my son off to sleep. He was just nodding off (after a concerted effort on my part) so I wasn't 'best pleased' to be disturbed. There was an old lady at the door, wearing a large headscarf and raincoat, with a dark and weathered face, carrying a bag. She told me in a broad Cornish accent that she was a bona fide Romany Gypsy and would I be interested in buying some lace from her. I said no a bit too firmly, at which point she looked quite disappointed but politely said Thank you and went on her way.

This was at about ten or eleven o'clock in the morning. At the time my nipper could still be persuaded via quite a lot of rocking to sleep in his bouncy chair-bit of an effort but the pay-off was worth it! With el Nip finally asleep for a precious half hour/hour, if I was lucky, I went to have a bath and as I lay there I felt bad about being rude to the gypsy. I should have spoken to her about being Romany- how interesting would that be?! D'oh! Then it occurred to me that a gypsy would be perfect as a character for the film. Eureka…!

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