Tales from the crypt…

After four years of digital aging –pixels get better with dark time in the cellar –my short film Ride of the Yoga Valkyries got its Bravo! network ‘premiere’on their website.

Better late than never,I suppose. And it’s still available from the ‘Portfolio’link above.

The Delicate Art of Spec Writing

In the interest of building a portfolio of writing,I’ve been working on specs for a couple of TV shows. The goal is to finally seek out an agent and make a concerted effort to break into TV writing here in Toronto.

The first show I tackled was The Big Bang Theory,which turned out to be much more fun to write than I expected. The characters are great for a classic sitcom and silliness still allows for a reasonable dose of intelligence.

Now on the computer,I am breaking some ideas for a spec of the series Castle. Procedural dramas are a fixture of network programming and seem to be a must for the spec file. Castle follows a long line of writer turned crime solver series,more Remington Steele than Murder She Wrote. While the research behind the work is a definite downer —nothing like reading about murder cases to lower one’s faith in humanity —but the series has a buoyant energy rooted in witty banter that will be fun to write.

Comic Shorts

For the past few years,I’ve been putting some time into improv comedy. I’ve even performed live in front of an audience a few times now. Thanks to the Second City training programs,I’ve met a great community of quick-witted and playful folks. A few of us have begun playing around with some material of our own. Over the coming months we expect to begin performing it live and shooting some of it for the web.