The Calling of the Sea

 This is a bit of an old project but since I hadn't started my blog before I finished this I thought I would dust it off and pop it onto here :) For my last project of first year I wrote and bound a short horror book about Selkies.

Selkies are folk creatures which originate from Northern Scotland. They are described as women who can transform into seals whenever they want by taking on or off a sealskin hood, and most stories about them revolve around men stealing their skins to force them to be their wives and taking away their ability to turn into seals.  

Despite this quite sad depiction, the general perception of selkies is that they're sirens that try to lure men to their deaths, and I find this disparity between what really happens in the original stories and the way that they're spoken about quite interesting and tragic.

I can't really share the actual book I made on here, but I did make a short reading of the first chapter of the and uploaded it on youtube :) I tried to distort my voice to make myself sound all cool which was a bit silly because I'm not an audio engineer and it doesn't sound great, but feel free to check it out if you fancy it :)

https://youtu.be/HOlc4lDPybc

It's behind you!

The dynamic duo is back at it again with another murder mystery! And this time its a g-g-g-ghost story!

To celebrate Melissa's birthday this year we ended up going to her old family home in the countryside, getting a bunch of lovely people together and scaring the living daylights out of them :) It was really fun and we ended up trying out a few new 'mini games' throughout the night, a lot of which worked quite well I think.

THE STORY

In the warm golden light of a Victorian candle-lit soiree a body is found. Mildred Maybrick lays dead with so sign as to how she died, but an optograph of the victim reveals the very last thing she saw...

Marianne Mumler?! But she died years ago! How could she still be here? And what could this ghouls motive possibly be? Well dear reader, this here is the end of a story of twisted revenge and betrayal.

In their youth, Marianne ate Mildred's birthday cake whole on the eve of her birthday, and never ever admitted to her fault. This lead, of course, to a life-long obsession with lifting this veiled lie, and after decades of failing, eventually Mildred snapped. In a last ditch effort, she invited her old friend to her home on the day before her birthday, and left in the fridge the perfect piece of cheese for the mousetrap she had set; a poisoned birthday cake, killing Marianne dead! Leaving her visage to ceaselessly wander the halls of her old country manor until she could enact her revenge...

Phishing for compliments

 Me and my friends have of(fish)ally made a movie!

I'm pretty proud of how it came out too :)), okay it might not be the best thing in the entire world ever but I would humbly argue it deserves at least second place (jokin')

I spoke about it in earlier posts, but it really was ridiculously fun to put together. I never really considered film as a medium that I could work through for future projects/ work but it is such a compelling format. I found my little 'team' I worked with really enjoyable too!

I've always really enjoyed story-telling in general (I really adore writing short stories!), and film is a great way to take those ideas and elevate them into a more digestible/ shareable narrative :)).

A shot from our first shoot on the beach (Melissa)

We ended up being real try-hards about it and filming across a boatload of locations, as well as including a cacophony of mediums like puppetry, mask making and hand-drawn animation to name a few. 

To make it a little easier on our tutors to mark as well as for us to put together, we split the project into sections that we could all make individually then put together to make a relitivley cohesive whole. It was a super fun to collaborate with everyone and I loved seeing all of our stuff come together in the end!

Second shoot in the forest (it was SO cold)

If you want to see a pretty freaky collection of videos of me and my friends looking scary and getting hit square in the face with a wet fish I've included a link to the theatrical release below, feel free to check it out :D

https://youtu.be/UwguQannYAI?si=sqFXwqnB2NtdWZM5

Revenge is best served cold on a Halloween Night

 Halloween has always been my favorite holiday, and this year I actually did a proper one! I've never had such a text-book halloweeny-halloween.

I went as Mae from Night in the woods, which turned out to be significantly more obscure than I was expecting (it was so cool though my hat was undeniably incredible)

fit check (we where already late)

We went to the Rossi Bar to catch Lois's gig (she is so incredible by the way oh my goddd) and it was super duper fun :)). A lot of my friends from my course where there and they all had such cool costumes!

A little after halfway through some guy stole the sword from my hat, and I got a little sad about it, thankfully it was rightfully returned to its hatty home. After I went home kitty found the guy that did it, tapped his balled head, tugged his beard and unzipped all of his pockets then ran away into the night, and all was well <3

Happy Halloween!

Wanted, Dead or Alive. £2.

Recently, me and a few friends had the absolutely incredible idea to host a pirate night. We had a treasure hunt (thank you to Melissa's Dad for writing the clues), did some coloring in and made our own flags! I gave everyone some excellent mustaches to go with our pirate costumes (all of which reflected their personalities perfectly not to toot my own horn). 

We also watched hook which is, as it turns out, a deeply deeply strange film. It was a genuinely exhausting watch, and almost immediately after watching it I went straight to sleep, 10/10 would recommend :))

Me and Melissa doing our makeup with a tinsy one person mirror

A Slice o' Life

This October has been one of my busiest in a good long while! I've been getting up to ever so much which has made this post a bit of a daunting one to put together, but there's so many lovely things that I've been up to that I want to share! Me and my uni friends have been working on a collaborative film project which I will be making a dedecated post for when I feel like it's properly finished, but it has been INDESCRIBABLY fun! I never realised how much I love film but working on fish face has been the most fun I've had on a project in a really long while. Storytelling has always been one of my favourite things and film is such an excellent vehicle for communication.

I'll be talking about some of the other things I've been getting up to with not even a bit of chronology in a bit so stay tuned for those!