Project Icarus update and Klowntown

As a result of having too much film work and non-film work on at the moment, I've decided to drop out as co-director of Project Icarus. I'm still filling in the roles of editor and producer (therefore Project Icarus is still a Xylokaine production), but I won't be there to direct the actual shooting, making Project Icarus the first Xylokaine production I haven't directed. Excited to see where this goes. For more information, visit Project Icarus on Facebook. In other news, I started work on a script last week for a short film that I could send into any future film competitions, instead of reshooting new footage for each individual competition. To my surprise and satisfaction, the entire time it took to write the script - from planning to sending to the cast - was five days. The result, Klowntown, can be summed up with the following statement I gave for an upcoming newspaper interview.

Klowntown is a short docudrama about a new race of humanoids who move into a town, and the townspeople's reactions. The film is set in a universe where clowns don't exist either as a career or cartoon, or anything at all, so the townspeople give this new race of people the nickname Klowns. The new race completely resemble clowns as we know them. Although the film focuses on clowns, which are mostly seen by our society as funny - bar the people with phobias of course - the film also serves as a social commentary on apartheid, racial oppression and humankind's seemingly innate inability to tolerate change. The basic idea was to take something that's typically seen by society as humourous, slam it into serious and controversial subject matter, and see how it turned out. It will hopefully leave viewers slightly confused - wondering whether they're supposed to laugh at the Klowns, sympathise with them, or both. So, while it's both funny and serious (or maybe neither depending on how you see it), Klowntown will hopefully at least make people think.