The last couple of years have been ones of enormous creativity for me. I’ve gone with the flow of story ideas and written those tricky first drafts for several shorts and two feature-length films. I’m co-developing projects with writers at home and in the US. I’ve worked on directing two short films (one of my own and another for an educational project), have been an editor, script advisor, and worked on Arts Council funding proposals.
The temptation to start another script is already pulling at my imagination and I have two ideas which I know would be a joy to immerse myself in. This is where discipline kicks in! Having an over-active imagination is all well and good but it needs taming and reining in at times. 2022 needs to be predominantly a year of rewriting, redrafting and developing my existing material.
The Ration Ticket and Little Lamb Who Made Thee will be the focus for honing and improvement in subsequent drafts. I’m proud of both of these scripts which are not only close to my heart but highly commercial. It’s an exciting prospect to go back to them and put in the work, love and development they deserve.
A local theatre company has also expressed an interest in performing Blessed Spear in October 2022, an edited version of King Lear which I developed with Rebekah Owens. I’m now looking at rewriting that script into a contemporary setting exploring identity in a fractured society where physical and spiritual homelessness find expression in our pandemic abandoned theatres.
My PhD work is revealing wonderful stories around the archives which are worthy of short film treatment. Working with the Shakespeare collections in the West Midlands I will be developing the Theatre Archive Film Project on some of those inspiring stories.
The film of The Trial of Lady Godiva by Stephen Hardy for Coventry University is near completion and I will be working on a visualisation of the Tennyson poem with Sonia Ritter and Connor Alexander. Our sincere hope is that this will lead on to more of this type of work.
Here's hoping that, Covid variants permitting, filming will continue on The Forest and No Man's Land.
I wish to thank all the wonderful creative and collaborative people I've worked with this year who have allowed me to develop and make progress on so many projects. I literally couldn't have done it without you. That spirit of shared creativity and passion for the arts is inspiring and life affirming. Given current restrictions it can take a while to get things completed but with such wonderful support and generosity of spirit I know we'll get there.
All is looking good and very busy going into 2022! The unpredictability of life at the moment breathes anxiety but in that instability also lies great possibilities.
Wishing you all a wonderful New Year, and a healthy and happy 2022!
The best of success, Karin. If hard work, great ideas, and graciousness of character guaranteed that, it would be certain.