Screen Academy Scotland - Alumni

Catriona McInnes
MFA Advanced Film Practice 2008

Napier University and Screen Academy Scotland student, Catriona MacInnes’ first film “I’m in away from here” was one of only two British films in competition at the prestigious Venice Film Festival which opened on the 27 August. The film was in competition for one of three prizes which were awarded by an international jury. Catriona MacInnes who trained at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama recently completed a Master of Fine Arts in Advanced Film Practice at Screen Academy Scotland. I’M IN AWAY FROM HERE is her first film as a writer/director. In 2008 Catriona also made her debut screen performance as a leading actress in the feature film LEAVES directed by Ian Waugh.

Len McCaffer
MA SPD 2008

len_mccaffer@yahoo.co.uk

Len trained as an actor in Manchester, and then worked as a professional actor for theatre, film and television - including roles in ‘Taggart’ and ‘Monarch of the Glen’. He joined Edinburgh-based theatre company ‘White Rabbit Cowboys’ as an actor, writer, and producer, and got interested in filmmaking when he experimented using Super-8 projection to go between the three characters he was playing in a one-man show. This led to more film input, and then to a multimedia show for Edinburgh’s Dumbiedykes Youth Theatre, which in turn landed him a job with West Lothian Youth Theatre. He now runs filmmaking workshops 3 times a week for Boxstar in Livingston.

As a largely self-taught filmmaker, Len was drawn to Screen Academy‘s SPD course because he thought it would firm up some of the skills he needed for his work with Boxstar. Although he still works freelance as an actor, he was keen to find a way into the Scottish film industry. “I’ve known for the past 4 years or so that what I really wanted to end up doing was making films, so the Screen Academy course was the obvious way to learn how to work with other filmmakers , and build up contacts for future work. At the moment he is collaborating with fellow Screen Academy students and alumni on two projects: a documentary on the Saami (Lapps) with Jonathon Barraclough (MA SW PT, 2008) and Lassi Valkonen (MA SPD, 2007); and a short film with Britt Crowley (MA SPD, 2008), and Marco Federici (MA SW, 2008).

Len has just finished producing and directing a half-hour drama, ‘Those Big Red Hills’, about West Lothian’s bings and shale oil industry. Len used his acting contacts to involve professionals like ‘The Raven’’s James Mackenzie, featured alongside over three dozen non-actors from the area, and raised funding to employ fellow student Duncan Finnegan (MASW PT, 2008) as scriptwriter. ‘Those Big Red Hills’ opens at the Vue Cinema , Livingston, on 17 April, and will also screen in 66 primary schools throughout West Lothian.

Graduation film: Pull, Black & White HDV short fiction film. 5min, One take
Golden Knight Award: Best Short film, 46th Golden Knight Awards Malta International Film Festival 2007

Laura Anderson
MA Screenwriting 2007

www.landerson.co.uk

Simon Arthur
MFA Advanced Film Practice 2007

Simon, who is based in New York, has secured initial funding to shoot his feature, ‘Silver Tongues’ upstate, and plans to largely devote the next year and a half to this. However, he is also in talks with US indy companies regarding another feature script, ‘Sultan Sun’; and is writing three new feature scripts, ‘The Followers’, ‘Riot’ and ‘The Ascendent’.

Update Oct '08
Simon is working on Fire Burning Bright (collaboration with SAS alumnus Mattias Karlsson: Engage). Short Films ‘Silver Tongues’ and ‘Rebel Song’ are just finishing up on the festival circuit, having played over 70 festivals so far. Shortlisted for Sundance Screenwriters Lab, with feature project, ’Sultan Sun’

Timo Langer

MA Visual Communications, eca.
MFA Advanced Screen Practice 2007 info@timotheus.co.uk

Timo, originally from outside Bonn in Germany, came to Screen Academy from the German Film School in Berlin, where he completed a three year course focussing on Special Effects. Prior to that, he had spent a short time studying at the New York Film Academy, followed by a year on a Photography course at Bolton University in England.

Wanting to learn more about what he calls 'traditional film' after his Special Effects course, Timo applied to a number of places in the UK including Surrey Institute of Art, the London School of Printing, and Edinburgh College of Art. He chose to do a Masters in Visual Communication at the latter: "a big advantage was that there was no tuition fee, and I had always liked Scotland."

He found it a good course. "As it turned out, one of the good things about the course was actually that in 2003 I met Bobby Glassford, at that time an undergraduate at eca". Robert Glassford, from Whitburn, West Lothian, says he flunked out of High School but then went on to do a 1-year course in Art and Design, followed by an NC in Photography, and then an HNC in Photojournalism, all at Bathgate Technical College.

Like Timo, Robert found himself in New York City, where he worked for a year for the Sharon Group in graphics and display, then came back to Scotland to do an HND in Television and Operations at Telford College in Edinburgh. He followed this with a BA(Hons) in Film and Television at eca and did the PG Dip there with the full intention of coming to Screen Academy for the MFA, but his increasingly productive collaboration with Timo proved the more attractive option at the time. " I wanted to get to the point where he and I were in synch. Blimey Productions, the company we formed along with 7 other mainly-eca graduates, was growing, and I wanted to concentrate on that." The company now runs and works out of a new multimedia arts hub which opened as a Festival venue in 2007, closed and then reopened as grv (green room venue) last November.

Timo and Robert have been collaborating since 2003. Timo worked on Robert's graduation film, 'The Big Forever', which had a music score by Chris Mansell ('Pi', 'Requiem for a Dream', and Golden Globe nomination for 'The Fountain'). 'The Big Forever' went on to get a nomination for BAFTA/Scottish Students on Screen in 2006.

Timo took the chance he was offered to do the MFA the first year it ran: "it was a bit bumpy but good, with a great film budget of 7,500.00. Working very much in synch with Timo, Robert Glassford co-directed and co-wrote Timo's MFA graduation film, 'Dach' (German for 'Roof'), a 9-minute film set in a tower block. 'Dach' screened at EIFF, Leeds International Film Festival , and the St. Petersburg Student Film Festival, all in 2007. Earlier this year it featured at the Boston Underground Film Festival, and goes to Dallas International Film Festival in April.

Timo is now working as an editor on the first stages of Mark Cousin's 'The Story of Film', as well as editing two of the Scottish Documentary Institute's upcoming human rights films. Both have been selected, as a directing team, to take part in the MEDIA-supported 'Engage' project, a 6-month European development and co-production training programme linking Ireland, Scotland, and Estonia.

Timo and Robert feel they share a kind of common ground - a kind of shared vision - which they plan to explore. In a manner which seems to reflect the way their collaboration grows from project to project, the pair's latest coup has been to win the Craft Award for Technical Achievement and Excellence/Scottish Students on Screen, which came with a prize: £1000 of film stock and £6000 equipment rental - just the kind of boost they need for their next venture. 'Invaders from Earth' is a short which began as a kind of play-off of '40s and '50s sci fi films, but set in a Scottish environment.

Robert explains, "the direction we would like to go in is to drive Scottish cinema out of the pervading entrenched, grim Social Realism rut, and we're currently looking for producers to work with who are up to this kind of challenge. We don't want to keep doing what's been done for the last 3 decades: there is room in Scotland for the industry to be more than stuck in a tower block. Having said that, 'Dach' was stuck in a tower block, but it was different: on top of the stereotype block was a bunch of kids playing a life-and-death dice game, where when you lost you had to throw yourself off the roof. So it actually moved into a kind of fantasy".

Update
Timo has been continuing to make music videos with Robert Glassford. Blimey Productions, likewise, is continuing to feature on the film scene in Edinburgh. Timo is also working with Robert and Donald Foreman from Ireland on “City”, “Blade Runner meets Amores Perros”, a social drama set in the future selected for participation in the ‘Engage’ project.

He is also editing “The First Movie”, a feature documentary by Mark Cousins about making films with kids in Iraq. This film grew out of “First Impressions”, a 14-minute selling documentary, also edited by Timo. Shot on the same subject, on location in Iraq, this short has now had festival distribution.

Timo’s short film ‘Invaders from Earth’ is in development.

www.blimeyproductions.com

www.thegrv.com

David Bishop
MA Screenwriting 2007

Email: vicious_imagery@hotmail.com

Basil attended the Cannes International Film Festival to find potential partners for his feature documentary, ‘A Chinese Case’.   He has shot and edited travel documentaries for online distribution, and is currently collaborating with the Norwegian Tourist Board to make 30-40 short travel videos, to go out online spring 2009.   He is starting work on “The Cow That Saved My Life”, a documentary about his grandmother and her cow.
 
Basil works as a freelance director in London, currently directing a kids TV series for Jamie Oliver’s production company, and may spend some time in China next year directing music videos and commercials.

Simon is currently on the MEDIA ENGAGE programme run through Screen Academy Scotland, possibly collaborating on a low budget feature with a Polish Producer. He would like to develop a sitcom, but for the moment he is promoting ‘Treasure of Sierra MiDrumbie’, a comedy drama (developed through Moonstone in 2007), and re-writing a feature script ‘Fallen’ a drama set in the Congo Free State in 1900. He recently attended a 2-day course on ‘The Art and Business of Adaptation’ (Mead Kerr).

Update Oct '08
Simon was selected for TAPS’ (Training and Performance Showcase) Continuing Drama course in August. As a result he has just completed a set task of writing a 23-minute stand-alone drama which, if shortlisted, he will be helped to further develop. 4 out of the 50 participants will have their scripts filmed on the Emmerdale set, from which a DVD showcase will be produced and circulated to relevant industry professionals.

Simon also recently participated in the ‘Engage’ programme, and, with the help of a London-based agent, is continuing to look for production companies to develop and produce his scripts.

Gemma is working full time as the Programme Manager at Broadview, a London-based corporate communications company focusing on web television. Her job, making use of and honing her computer and budgeting and scheduling skills, involves dealing with big corporate companies and developing elements of their corporate media strategies.

Out of hours, she has set up her own company, ‘The Room’, in partnership with Matt Strachan (PG Cert from Screen Academy Scotland), producing short films and theatre projects. (www.theroom.org.uk)

Gemma also does freelance script reading for Scottish Screen, and has recently joined the team at the Birds Eye View Film Festival 2009 as a shorts programmer.

’She Wanted to be Burnt’ is also due to screen at Women's Film Festival A Corto Di Donne in Pozzuoli in Naples in June.

Lin Anderson
MA Screenwriting 2006

lin@lin-anderson.com

www.lin-anderson.com

Riverchild wins Scottish BAFTA

Riverchild wins at Celtic Media Fest

One-time secondary school teacher and author of 5 crime novels, Lin Anderson came to Screen Academy as an experienced writer wanting to learn how to work on screen. "I had just started on a contract for Hodder & Stoughton for book 4 of my Rhona MacLeod series and I knew I needed strict deadlines and a concentrated structure to get back to writing. I also had a family, so taking a year out to go on a screenwriting course in England was out of the question. I read about the MA Screenwriting course in the paper and thought "this is a godsend".

Lin had previously been nominated for a TAPS Writer of the Year Award for her screenplay, 'Small Love', a short film for Tern TV made through Scottish Screen's New Found Land scheme. On the course, she developed 'Freedom Isle'(Eilean Soarsa), about a Hollywood screenwriter who inherits a Scottish island; and teamed up with two SAS students, Producer Mattias Karlsson and Director Damian Wood to make 'River Child'. 'River Child' won Best Fiction Award, BAFTA Scotland New Talent, Scottish Students on Screen in March, and has now been nominated for Best Short Film Drama at the upcoming Celtic Film Festival in Galway, Ireland.

"The best thing about the course was the teaching on story structure and form, and the focus on how to tell a story visually, how to put what you see in your head into a script. The lessons I learned feed into all ways of writing: I still go back to my class notes if things aren't working." Lin also enjoyed the chance the course gave her to work in more than one medium, and to build filmmaking teams: to make contacts with fellow students whose skills helped turn her scriptwriting into finished films.

"Mattias, Damian, and I worked so well together while we were at Screen Academy that I'm continuing to work on further film projects with them, even though Mattias is now in Sweden and Damian is in Brazil".

Russell Beard
MA/DIP Screen Project Development 2006

Russell started working for Al Jazeera International as a fixer and on-screen guide in summer 2006. After directing, shooting, and producing packages for the company as a freelance stringer in Scotland and Italy, he moved to London to join their London office. Russell now works as Assistant Producer on Al Jazeera International’s travel/culture show, ‘48’, liaising with their Entertainment Editor and Senior Producer: ‘Hong Kong 48’, ‘Greenland 48’, and, most recently, ‘Tri-City 48’ in Gdansk, Poland, where he will be Field Producer and Second Camera. He is also developing personal documentary projects, and is currently collaborating with a writer in the Scottish Borders on ‘Stable Lives’, a drama feature film project which he began during his time at Screen Academy Scotland.

View the shows Russell is currently working on with Al Jezeera:

Clip one

Clip two

Dr. Donald Mackenzie
MA Screenwriting 2006

Please contact him via his website’s contact form:
http://www.write2screen.com/screen.html

Alistair Rutherford
MA Screenwriting 2006

alirutherford@aol.com

Alistair came to the Screen Academy with some professional scriptwriting credits already under his belt. None of those were in film or TV however and the chance to undertake an in-depth study of screenwriting techniques in his home town of Edinburgh was too good a chance to miss.

He particularly liked the course’s focus on story, on structure and ensuring that everything that goes into a script must be there for a reason. Alistair has been able to use the skills he’s learned in not only his screenplays but also in the other forms of scriptwriting that he does, e.g. stage plays.

As a consequence of doing the MA Alistair has forged a strong working relationship with producer Mattias Karlsson, an award-winning Screen Academy Scotland MFA graduate. They are currently developing a science-fiction thriller feature and a website for the project, entitled ‘Backflip’, has been developed by Mattias where the synopsis and some stunning concept artwork can be viewed. The link is: http://www.officialbackflip.com/

Alistair recently received a professional theatre commission for the 2008 Leith Festival to write a full-length stage play. ‘Homecoming’ was performed in June 2008 at the Leith Festival.

Alistair’s other current projects include being a member of the writing team for a children’s TV animation series, in development, and based upon ‘The Oddies’ book series. He has 2 short films in development with London-based producers. He is also collaborating with a writer-director, based in London, on the rewriting of the director’s martial arts comedy feature. He is producing three short promotional films for an Edinburgh lawyer’s new website. In addition he has been commissioned to write, direct and produce a 5-10 minute historical drama for the Leith Museum project.

Previous credits include writing additional material for ‘Haunted Hogmanay’ (Ko Lik Films, BBC Scotland, 2006), BAFTA Scotland nominated 2007 and British Animation Awards nominated 2008. In addition he wrote an Afternoon Play broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2004 and wrote comedy sketches for all 4 series of the Why Front on BBC Radio Scotland. In 2007 he was hired to write for a new interactive, MP3-based audio game called ‘Bunja’.

He is keen to expand upon his existing contacts within the industry, particularly producers or directors who are looking for writers to work on existing ideas and treatments. He is also interested in talking to agents who are looking for writers to represent.

www.iglooanimations.com

hermann@iglooanimations.com

After receiving a BA in painting from Reykjavik's Academy of Arts in his native Iceland, Hermann worked as a storyboard artist and motion graphics designer for Sagafilm in Reykjavik, at the same time keeping up his painting. He applied to Glasgow School of Art to do a Masters in Painting and was put on their waiting list. He'd heard good things about the MDes Animation course at eca, and saw it as a challenge: "a way to mix my painting skills and job experience and see what happened."

Hermann had never made a film of his own before doing the course, but what attracted him was its reputation for a "traditional" approach to animation. Although you could do CGI and 3-D, the focus was more technical. "I really appreciated the fact that the staff were very open about the department's shortcomings: I knew before I started there, for example, that they didn't have loads of computers, but that didn't bother me at all. The department was also a bit understaffed, which may have made some things difficult for undergraduates, but I really enjoy working away on my own, as long as I have regular input from the staff, and the quality of the teaching was excellent."

Hermann felt one of the best things about the Masters was having the time to do his own work. Being supported in this work by staff built up his confience, although he admits he would have benefitted from a closer relationship with the iindustry:"I didn't really make a lot of work contacts with companies I could approach after I graduated."

Hermann's graduation film 'Dog' -one minute of drawn animation - is, however, proving to be an excellent calling card as it has been exceptionally well-received on the national and international Festival circuit. In 2007, 'Dog' featured in Edinburgh International Film Festival's Trailblazers' slate of shorts, Nordisk Panorama, and Reykjavik International Film Festival.

This year it is travelling even more widely: Sundance in January; Clement-Fearrand; Projector 2008 Animation Festival Dundee; Minimalen Short Film Festival Norway; Florida Film Festival; Aspen Shortsfest; and Indianapolis Film Fest still to come. Hermann is particularly pleased that 'Dog' will show at Tribeca in April, the only Screen Acadeny film to be accepted there this year; and at the well-known Annecy International Animation Festival.

In the meantime, he has several animation projects on the go, the most ambitious of which is for a short doc, 'Privacy', directed by Alice Nelson for the Scottish Documentary Institute's upcoming human rights collective feature. He is working on this with Trevor Courtney, a frequent collaborator who graduated in 2007 from the same MDes Animation course at eca. "It's a big challenge for us. More than half the film - 4 minutes - is animation, which may not sound like much time in film terms, but in 2-D drawn animation means 2880 drawings!"

Hermann has several projects on the go with Igloo Animations, the Edinburgh-based company he runs with Screen Academy alumnus Trevor Courtney. The company has just finished animating a short documentary, ‘The Right to Privacy’ for the Scottish Documentary Institute. Directed by Alice Nelson, the film screens at the Edinburgh International Film Festival 2008 this month. Igloo Animations makes its own short films and commercials, but is also always keen to work with other directors.