(AND WHY THAT JOURNEY INCLUDED A BARN!)
[Above: the Tokos teaser poster, created for our funding campaign by the fab Ignacio Mazuecos.]
Some projects take a long time to get off the ground, so you need to stay as dedicated and optimistic as possible, and you also really need to love the story that you want to tell. But time isn’t always necessarily a bad thing, because when a script goes into development limbo, it’s interesting to see how much it can change shape and evolve throughout that period.
One particularly good example of all the above is a short film that my team and I are currently trying to raise funds for, called Tokos.
Let’s go back to the start. Way back. On 19th February 2013, I woke up from a very surreal dream while I was apparently delirious from tonsillitis, and I knew that my dream would make for a vivid and unusual short film idea, so I immediately reached for my notebook and pen (and yes, I am that nerd who writes dates in their notebook entries!).
[Above: the notes I quickly scrawled down after having the surreal dream that first inspired this story.]
In the dream, I was in the POV of a man who learned that his ex-girlfriend was pregnant with his child; she then became trapped inside a strange, red, barn-like building (very much inspired by the rail bridge covering in Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice), and when he went to rescue her, the shape of the barn continuously changed, revealing room after room that he had to go through. And it slowly became clear that all the rooms related to this man, his abilities, his personality flaws, his fears, and how all that was linked to his anxiety about becoming a dad. It was never about saving the woman at all – it was about personal growth.
I was very excited about the idea, but its fantastical, visual nature meant that it was always going to be a higher-budget short, and at that time I was very, very early on in my career. I had just directed a crew for the first time, when we made Ashes (on an absolute shoe-string budget), and I knew I needed a bit more experience under my belt before I jumped into something of that scale.
A couple of years later, I started working with the award-winning screenwriter Tommy Draper. We co-wrote the short film Night Owls together, which was a great process; around that time, he also became a dad, and so I knew his life experience would be very useful if I wanted to turn my ‘expectant father in a surreal barn’ idea into a script.
So, when we were driving back from a film festival screening of Night Owls, and we were buzzing because that project had gone really well, we started talking about which film to make next; I pitched my barn idea, but Tommy pitched a screenplay that he had started writing, a modern day fairytale about a singer who has her voice stolen by a witch…
“Ok”, I said. “Let’s do your idea first.”
The result was Songbird, a bigger budget, much more complicated shoot, and my first proper foray into genre – and so I felt more ready to tackle something ambitious after that, and me and Tommy then got to work co-writing what we then called The Barn (as well as collaborating on drafts for Night Owls & Early Birds, the feature-length version of Night Owls, around the same time). As expected, the idea worked well on the page, the collaboration between myself and Tommy was just what the story needed, and we were very happy with the result.
[Above: concept art for The Barn by the super-talented Qingling Zhang, initially created for the short film of the same name.]
But you can’t just go from writing a screenplay to instantly shooting a higher-budget short. We knew it would take time to raise the finance we needed, as well as finding a producing partner who had experience working on that level of production. And I didn’t want to just sit on my hands within that time – so I went on to direct two more, much smaller (but still beloved) projects, Growing Shadows: The Poison Ivy Fan Film and Lepidopterist (also co-written by Tommy), alongside developing The Barn.
Tommy and I also submitted The Barn screenplay to multiple writing competitions, and we were delighted with the result. Among its accolades, The Barn was a Quarterfinalist in two ScreenCraft competitions, frequently appeared on the Coverfly (RIP) ‘red list’, and was even a finalist for ‘Best Unproduced Short Screenplay’ at FilmQuest – a festival I’d always wanted to be a part of, but had never been accepted for until that moment.
[Above: the original screenplay for The Barn received a few accolades - but then the pandemic came!]
And then… the pandemic happened. Everything changed – even more so than we realised at the time.
Things still progressed to a degree during Lockdown. I was able to have lots of Zoom calls with great industry contacts, which is how I came to be introduced to the producer Jo Lewis. Not only did she come on board The Barn project, but we’ve worked together on numerous projects ever since.
However, in a post-pandemic world, raising funds to make a film seemed even harder than before – and particularly for short films where there are rarely any returns on investment. I had wanted to apply to the BFI NETWORK Short Film Fund with The Barn – but we would’ve needed to raise too much money on top of the maximum amount they could give us. (Tommy and I ended up pitching another project he’d been writing to BFI NETWORK instead, and we were lucky enough to receive finance from them for that film – it’s how A Different Place came into the world!)
There are very few funds out there for high-budget shorts; the few that do exist turned down The Barn, even after the positive reactions to the screenplay. Eventually, after lots of discussions, Jo had a genius idea: if we could expand The Barn into a feature, we could still tell this story (just on a bigger scale), but more funding options would be available to us.
And so that’s what Tommy and I did. We expanded the world of The Barn, giving a back story to its characters and delving more into who they were before the events that were shaped in the original screenplay. We’ve been working on the feature script whenever we’ve had time, around our other commitments, and we’ve got a rough outline for most of the scenes now. Adapting a short into a feature isn’t as easy as one might think, particularly when the story worked in such a contained format, and there’s still plenty for us to figure out (the next thing I’m eager to tackle is the structure of the script, and how the different timelines will weave together), but it’s already clear that this story will work really well as a feature in the future.
[Above: Qingling Zhang's concept art for the 'party room' - a scene which appears in every version of the script to date.]
Features do take a very long time to get made, though, and much as I loved working on this new, extended version of the story, part of me was still mourning the short that never got made, particularly as it’s something I had been looking forward to for so long.
And then I remembered some advice that another filmmaker, Margo Roe, had given me back in 2019 (this is the last time jump in this blog post, I promise!). We were on location for a short film called Going Country, when she was working as 1st AD and I still did Production Design, and I told her about The Barn during a break between set-ups; I told her how much I loved the concept, but we were struggling to get funding for a higher-budget short. Her advice was to take the themes of the film, maybe key visuals and characters or certain scenes, and put them into a condensed format – something more abstract, like a proof of concept that would also stand on its own as a short.
At the time, I didn’t want to do that. Condensing the story felt like ‘killing my baby’, as the phrase goes. But when Tommy, Jo, and I started work on the feature-length version of The Barn, I knew that nothing was getting killed – quite the opposite, as it was growing even bigger – and so any new script we wrote would only be in addition to that, not replacing it.
[Above: my concept art for a scene in Tokos.]
That was how Tommy and I came to write Tokos. The script still features the young father-to-be, Robin, and his expectant ex-girlfriend, Emily; we still see the standout moments of the original screenplay, such as the distorted children’s birthday party, and we still have the minimalist setting and limited colour palette (representative of a nursery) that I wrote about in my notebook way back in February 2013, straight after my tonsilitis-caused-fever-dream. But now, the story takes place entirely in Robin’s mind, and all in a single filming location, as the audience gets an unblinking look into his growing anxiety about becoming a parent. With Tokos designed to be shot almost entirely from Robin’s POV, it also gives me the exciting opportunity to direct a ‘single-take’ style film for the first time.
There’s enough from The Barn in Tokos to make it feel like the story that I loved – but at the same time, it also feels like its own thing, something extremely stylised and special. As soon as it was written, I was immediately excited to share it with audiences. We just couldn’t call it ‘The Barn’, as the structure of the barn itself was the first thing to go, partly for budgetary reasons (and if you want to find out more about why we ultimately went with the name ‘Tokos’, just watch this video).
Now we had a smaller, contained, much more achievable version of the script… so why didn’t we make the film straight away?
To try and cut a (already long) story short, the cost of filmmaking has skyrocketed in the financial crisis that followed the pandemic, and although Tokos isn’t a super-high-budget short, certainly not as high-budget as the original version of The Barn would’ve been, it’s still a highly visual piece that still needs finance. The team have tried to get it off the ground for a few years now, we’ve done multiple location recces and revised budget breakdowns, and pitched the project to many, many funding sources, but – despite continued strong feedback on the material – none of our attempts to receive a full production fund have been successful.
[Above: my concept art for the most ambitious - but brilliant! - scene in Tokos.]
Which brings us today, and one funding option for Tokos we hadn’t tried: crowdfunding. So, if you’ve read through all of this blog post, if the psychological horror of The Barn and Tokos sounds like something you’d love to see, or you simply think 13 years of sheer determination and love for a project is worth some support, then please, please head on over to our campaign page and either donate or share the link with someone you know who might be interested.
Even working on the crowdfunding campaign – yet another evolution of The Barn and Tokos’ story – has been a joy. We’ve assembled a wonderful team already (I’ve been releasing interviews with them on the Triskelle Pictures YouTube channel throughout the campaign), and we’ve obviously had plenty of time to really plan exactly how we’ll pull off an ambitious but brilliant short film – so I can assure you that any donations will be in very safe, enthusiastic hands!
And by helping us to make Tokos, not only will you be enabling a brilliantly bold and visceral short film to come into the world, but you will be part of an ongoing story; off the back of Tokos, we will then look to develop the feature-length version of The Barn (affectionately nicknamed ‘Big Barn’ by some of our team!), with Tokos working as a proof-of-concept in addition to being a standalone short, and Jo and I have also discussed the idea of an accompanying XR creative live experience version of The Barn, inspired by our recent work in immersive arts. But that’s a story for another day.
So yes, this project has been coming for a long time, but I love how it has changed, grown, and ultimately improved along the way; and with the wealth of experience my team and I have gathered over the years, from making Ashes all the way to exploring the higher-tech world of XR, and blending all of that into our approach for shooting Tokos, now genuinely feels like the right time to make this film. We just need your support in order to make that happen.
