So Romania was a success. The shoot went well and after a year of not working it felt great to be back in the saddle, doing what I love…making daft TV commercials.

But I’m still behind on the Masters and desperately playing catch up. I’ve greatly underestimated the demands of doing such a course and if I’m to succeed I’m going to need to be super organised. One of the reasons for not catching up as much as I had planned was that I was struggling to break my Wild West short idea. I went from Wild West story told from the point of view of an emancipated slave (I felt under equipped to tell this story), to Wild West story told through the eyes of an autistic man (a personal issue but too incongruous?!), to a Wild West story told from the point of view of two idiot brothers, inspired by two featured extras on my western TV commercial. What I was looking for was something more comedic and modern, which is my ambition, to do contemporary comedic takes on well known genres, like the Western or Sci-fi.

But it wasn’t coming easy. So on reflection I’ve decided to work up the story I wrote to get onto the Masters in the first place. A story based two of my most humiliating experiences. A tragi-comedy if you will. The premise:

When reserved nearly man DAN tries to win close friend RUTH’s affection by signing up to an acting workshop, he finds himself in a situation where he has to choose between retreating into his shell, or overcoming his deep inhibitions and showing for the first time how he truly feels.

It’s a story about unrequited love with a plot revolving around a wannabe filmmaker doing an acting course. I know it’s a cliche to write about writing or filmmaking, but I feel the need to get some of the more personal stuff out of the way before I can look further afield. Such as The McLaury Brothers, two idiot brothers travelling the Wild West, in search of fame, fortune and a misguided sense of what it means to be an outlaw.