IN THE BEGINNING...

Max Curtis in Follow The Crows

As I'm sure most of you are aware by now, we'll be launching our funding campaign on the 30th of this month. For those of you who are interested, or want to know more, click here to the event.

So today I'm just going to talk a little bit about what got us to this point. As we approach the end of the line, as it were, I'd like you all to know where we began. Of course more information will be put out there the closer we get to Friday, but for now, here's all you need to know!

In early 2015 Marcus Starr and I were discussing possible project options. Having both worked on countless short films, corporate videos and the like for several years we yearned to make a feature narrative film. We talked about what movies we loved and what kind of movies we wanted to make ourselves, but all of them required large budgets (or large in comparative terms to the money we had available) and lots of actors, locations, effects and the like.

We started talking about how you would go about making a feature film on a budget of, basically, nothing, and the idea came up to shoot over weekends and evenings, approaching the entire thing like a sort of series of short films.

At first it began as a kind of anthology, presumable in the horror mold, like Creepshow or Tales from the Darkside or something. But a worry that it would become obvious that really it was just a series of short films, put and end to the idea.

Sometime later the concept of a chase movie arose, and a desire to cast Max Curtis in a lead role, lead to the genesis of a plot which saw Max traveling across the country, desperate to escape the clutches of a hit-man hellbent on killing him. The idea never really got much further than those initial stages, but it did lead to a discussion about the locations available in our neck of the woods.

In Wiltshire there are lots of sprawling country landscapes, and it was access to this location (coupled with the hype of having just seen Mad Max: Fury Road at the cinema) which lead to the concept of creating a post-apocalyptic movie. The setting was then taken further, with the idea that through world building you could create short "segments", and generate an anthology about life in a world void of society, law and order.

Slowly, but surely, those individual plots began to merge together, threads from each carrying over into others until a basic plot outline broke its way through into what would become Follow The Crows: Max traveling across the country, the world building segments, shooting at weekends, post-apocalyptic settings.

It would be a little while before things would really start to come together, but the idea was there, and Marc and I just couldn't leave it alone. We prodded at it and poked at it and took it apart and put it together again until it would eventually form into what you'll see on the screen when the film is released. But we both knew this was the beginning of something, and we both knew that we wanted to see it through to the end.