Yesterday I finished a short screenplay which will be submitted for consideration to the Digital Shorts commissioning panel.

It’s about a college media student, Barry Buxton, who accidently kidnaps a famous, (on the run), writer. I hadn’t thought of entering the Digital Shorts this year, more out of laziness than anything else but over the past two weeks I’ve been in contact with a very interesting and I have to say very driven couple, Toshi and Phil.

She’s a British born Indian and he’s Black British, a combination that is rare even in this melting pot of a city. Indeed, Toshi has hinted to me about the problems that she faced when she first took Phil to meet her parents, (her mother being Hindu). But even more extraordinary is the character of the couple, she’s wheel-chair bound and I believe as a result of her illness and the drugs she has to take to combat the pain, she has ‘visions’.

The vision she has is to provide a facility for excluded school age children in Walsall, (a small town east of Wolverhampton and north of Birmingham). I got involved because I was recommended by Light House as somebody who could crew for them when they were making videos with these youths. I’m not too sure that I want to be involved in this as it seems a bit like social work and also a bit like a permanent job. But then Toshi mentioned that they were looking for scripts to submit for Digital Shorts and since I had an idea brewing I bashed out the story of Barry Buxton.

I’ve just sent it to someone they know who will apparently produce a storyboard of it. A curious thing is how I feel about someone else taking my script and envisioning it, perhaps quite differently to me. I have to keep reminding myself something that a ‘real’ playwright once told us at the Light House, “Don’t be precious about your script”.

It’s difficult!