I recently received word that I got funding through the Frameworks Scheme to direct a short film called 23 degrees 5 minutes.

I thought it might be nice to blog the progress of the film & show work in progress and the ups & downs ( & fun) of producing a short film.

The background of the film: The film is based on a short story by a writer called Austin Kenny. It was the story of a maths professor who was driven to the edge of madness by a series of numbers. Shay Healy sent it to Cathal a few years back seeing if we thought it could make a good animated film. It wasn’t right for us at the time but it was a story that always stayed with me.

I had never directed a Frameworks film before although I had produced a few including ‘Give Up Yer Aul Sins’ & last Years ‘Granny O’Grimm’. So I decided I would like to have a go at adapting Austin’s great story into something that could be told in a short time and produced for the available budget. Austin’s original story had a lot of characters and was told on a larger scale than what we could afford to do in CGI on a Frameworks so the first challenge was to reduce the story to just two characters.

I also met up with Austin & chatted to him about the story and he gave me a lot of info on the Fibonacci sequence which is a central part of the story. It is a sequence of numbers that can be found in everything from the way bees multiply to the way leaves grow on a plant or the way a shell can grow. It’s found all over nature and easy enough to see how someone could get caught up in its significance.

So anyway, I worked on a draft for a script trying to get it down to 6 pages but still get an idea for the numbers, the relationship of the professor to his student and to get an idea of a man losing it and becoming obsessed all in an incredibly short space of time.

We got shortlisted for the scheme and then myself & Colm Tyrell, who will be producing, had to sit in an interview with members of the Film Board, the Arts council, RTE & an outside assessor. We were grilled but obviously we stated our case well enough as we got the news a few weeks back that we were successful in our pitch and were being awarded the funding.

Here is a look at some of the sketch elements we had with us for the pitch.

The style has already moved on quite a bit from here but its always nice to show the humble begininngs of any of these ideas.

Stephen Robinson, who is acting as Art Director, came up with a real cool look going forward and so I will post a bit on that style the next time!