Whilst my passion may be for videogames, most of my formal training is in screenwriting. I recently completed a Master’s Degree in the subject at the University of Arts London, but have been experimenting with different screenplay ideas for a while. In particular, I tend to find myself attempting adaptation more often than not when it comes to my work and despite a full range of platforms and disciplines, I find that almost all of my work is unified by an absolute creative refusal to write contemporary stories that rely on realism. Whilst I absolutely adore the true stories of real people, with my own work I am usually trying to illustrate some kind of deeper point within the narrative, and bizarrely I think worlds where the rules are circumstances are far detached from our own are the best at demonstrating that.
A City of Sin
In ‘the City of Sin’ (Lynn, Massachusetts), an overburdened warehouse manager walking the knife edge between profit and prison during the height of prohibition takes the lethal steps necessary to protect his life and career…
This first extract is from a short-film adaptation of Edgar Allan-Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart. Poe adaptations are fairly common so I wanted to try and differentiate my take by avoiding the usual convention of just pushing the original story into a contemporary setting. So instead, I took inspiration (as I so often do) from tabletop roleplaying games, and namely a rule system called Call of Cthulhu. As the name implies, the theme is based largely around the ‘cosmic horror’ works of H.P. Lovecraft and other similar horror creators and hence usually when playing the stories are typically set in the 19th and early 20th Centuries.
I’ve always enjoyed setting stories around major historical events as it’s a great driving force behind plot, so I set up the Wall Street Crash as the backdrop for the time period. In my research for a location, one preferably within Massachussets as nearly all Lovecraft’s stories are set there, I stumbled upon Lynn ‘the city of sin’. The title comes from an old poem that supposedly is in reference to rampant crime and corruption, but more research into the city revealed more interesting features: a looming peninsula reaching into the Atlantic, a history of economic hubris and industry collapse, and an iconic centuries-old obelisk on a hill overlooking the city.
So much potential for future stories, but the point of this project was an adaptation and so I forced myself to stay on topic. The story itself follows Sherman Banks, a dockside warehouse owner in his 40s that recently lost his wife that is now struggling to find purpose. The Wall Street Crash makes his life yet worse, strangling his workforce and cutting revenue down to a sliver, forcing him to move into his own office to save money.
Soon he finds himself in a spiralling situation, as two extremely unusual gangsters offer him a lucrative deal that he accepts, the burden of which starts driving him away from his friends and peers. A private investigator starts poking around asking questions, and at the same time Sherman starts obsessing over a mysterious employee with piercing blue eyes, one he is certain is up to something, and could easily bring about the end of him. Unless of course, he puts a stop to him first…
An early extract of this project can be read here.
Free Delivery
A Free-running courier is dragged into a bizarre dystopian world of London gang violence to find purpose and support her family.
Alex Daley does not have much going for her at the moment. She’s broaching her mid 20s working as a parkour instructor, still living with her mum and being outperformed by her 15 year-old sister. The city of London isn’t doing much better for itself either, buried under the weight of a spiralling economy, extreme food shortages, and wildly disparate welfare. A future difficult to picture, I’m sure. Yet, this is an everyday reality for Alex, one that gets worse due to the looming financial threat of her injured mother’s critical surgery.
She’s forced to join one of many ‘Courier Gangs’, groups that violently fight for supply and distribution of even the most basic of resources. All Alex wants is to feel a sense of value, to stop being a loner, to finally make mum smile again. What she isn’t expecting, is to stumble into a city-wide conspiracy manipulating the gangs of London into a potential all-out war. Fighting for her family, her sense of self, and the safety of her community, Alex will have to find out just how much it’s going to cost to get what she needs.
Written as the final project for my Screenwriting MA, Free Delivery was an extremely valuable learning experience of figuring out the broad difference between a good idea and a good story. I used to keep a list on my phone of good story concepts that I have recently abandoned since realising that whilst coming up with an interesting premise or thrilling conclusion is a great exercise, filling the vast gap between acts 1 and 2 is significantly harder than everything else.
The film itself is an exploration for me of a sort of contemporary setting, of satire and commentary, and of a kind of family and social dynamic that I don’t often try out. The film itself is only on a 1st draft in terms of structure and there are pieces of the sub-plot that I would definitely move around if I sat down and went through it again, but I am still happy with it. In particular, the action sequences I think are a great demonstration of my skill with conceiving and directing the flow of movement, violence, and drama through mostly non-speaking set pieces. If interested, you can read a full plot breakdown and extract here.