Let's experiment!!

Photography chemicals have arrived and into my makeshift darkroom (my garage) I go!! About to go and start experimenting with some cameraless photography ideas, the products of which I shall share with you soon! Since I last blogged I have mainly been frantically trying to organise this magazine of mine...trying to get together some interviews, shoots, articles, etc. Also went to the casting session for the short film I am co-producing as part of High Five Films. Such a brilliant evening, we had a great group of actors turn up and spent the whole night doing improv work. It's the first time I've really seen people working like that and they were so great, can't wait to see where things go from here! High Five Films, btw, are about to relaunch their website at http://www.highfivefilms.co.uk so keep checking for when it goes live...they're a great group of film-makers based in the Oxford area and worth keeping an eye on!!

Speechless...

Went to see Black Swan today and was blown. a. way! I went along with my sister (and co-creator of our new online magazine BLANKexpression!) and we could barely move when the credits started rolling we were so stunned by it. I can't ever remember a film that took my breath away quite like Black Swan did, I felt like I'd gone the last half hour without breathing at all. The whole film was unrelentless in it's intensity and though there were many occasions when I didn't want to look at the screen I found it practically impossible to take my eyes off it! Just amazing. It really inspired me as well for my magazine project as I've been looking into human states of being for some of my research and I found the transformation of Nina incredible to watch. Black Swan also moves between reality and fantasy so seamlessly so that you can hardly tell what's real and what isn't and this another idea I have been fascinated with recently since researching my project. The project itself, is an online magazine currently being created - BLANKexpression - and we are still in fact looking for people to contribute to our Big Bang Issue so if anyone is at all interested please get in touch at tess.n.blank@gmail.com We are looking for writers, stylists, photographers, artists, film-makers and all kinds of creative people who would like to get involved with this exciting new project!

"That's all your life amounts to in the end: the aggregate of all the good luck and the bad luck you experience"

I have been working lots recently, and as my job is late-night work have been doing little else but sleeping in the time inbetween...hence the terrible lack of posts on here! Have just today finished watching the channel 4's recent short series 'Any Human Heart' and I must say I loved it! (The quote in the title is taken from the William Boyd novel that the series was adapted from) It made me dream of being a writer myself, not that the life of it's main character Logan Mountstuart is one I necessarily want, but it did make me want to sit down at an old typewriter, tap in a title and just start writing... Such a lovely story though, sad and funny and happy and exciting. And I thought Matthew Macfayden was just so brilliant in it as the middle of the Mountstuarts - played by three different actors throughout the series. Also recently watched Hitchcock's 'Marnie' which I was watching as part of my research for my university project. I'm looking into fantasy and reality and into human states of being, dreaming, transfixion, hypnotism etc. 'Marnie' explores reality and deceit in many ways throughout and I loved the different ways it looked at these themes - from Marnie's multiple characters she plays, to the lies she tells her mother and the lies she has indeed been, without knowing it, telling herself. Tonight 'Boardwalk Empire' starts and, as a big Scorcese fan, I can not wait! More tomorrow!