The projects that never happened...

“Dawn of the Apocalypse” was going to be a Vietnam and present day set zombie movie shot on the campus at the University of East Anglia with some friends on the film course. Being that it was almost the end of the first year it never came about – it would have been half-spoof, and half-serious. We’d bought a number of props, done a vague ‘location scout’ (which was really just us staying up all night and wandering around the empty campus like ghosts – which was actually really fun just in itself). I had plans to utilise the architecture of UEA (very concrete, very 60s) and inflect a similar visual vibe as that of “Dawn of the Dead”.

“Slasher Sluts” was a cheap & trashy exploitation style horror short that I wanted to put together with some of my friends at university. Unfortunately it never got going – it was impossible to get anyone together.

“Valeters” was a script I had planned to write after completing a summer job working in a garage (I was a service washer, valeter and driver). I jotted down a bunch of ideas, inspired by things that happened there while I was working, as well as the look and feel of Kevin Smith’s “Clerks” (a movie which clicked with me perfectly that very summer). However, I never got around to writing that script, but it’s still an idea. An updated version of this idea is now being written in 2010, with the aim of submitting to the BBC Writersroom later in the year.

“Slang” was a short script I wrote, with the intention of filming it, which was centred around a couple of university students talking to each other – their dialogue littered with a whole manner of their own personal slang. Indeed it was inspired by my own time at university where my friends and I developed an extensive list of our own in-jokes, references and slang.

“Mercia Community Television” was a worthy, but ultimately unsuccessful attempt, to put together a local television station and community for the Herefordshire area. Good ideas are always worth trying, even if they sometimes don’t work out.

“T-34” was an idea for a film that was briefly batted around with a fellow filmmaker, which would have centred on the titular tank, but alas it never came to pass.

“Flying Bastard Zombies” is an idea I still have sat in the bank (one day maybe, you never know), which I first came up with around the time I was coming up with the “I Am Zombie Man” idea (in early 2006 – prior to the excellent “Grindhouse”). It was my idea for a low-down and dirty exploitation style horror movie, inspired by the likes of “Zombie Lake” and “Oasis of the Zombies”. Thus far it has remained just one of those ideas on the dusty shelf.

“Adagio for Xbox360” got as far as the treatment stage. It was a simple idea for a comedy short targeted at YouTube (and a way for those involved to gain more channel hits). I was inspired to lay out the idea after my own Xbox360 broke after 9 months of ownership, and this idea would have been a short film about one man’s dramatic ordeal of his Xbox dying on him.

“Zed Heads” was another idea that got into the treatment zone, this time for a comedy two-hander between two zombie fanboys arguing about the various merits and faults with the "Dawn of the Dead" remake, and George A. Romero’s long awaited return to the zombie genre movie that was "Land of the Dead". A cool idea, but one that drifted onto the dusty shelf incomplete.