The three minute Doctor Who script was sent off to the BBC last week.  It was a fascinating experience working with the Heathbrook primary children as they enjoyed turning all the principles of scriptwriting are turned upside down.  I realised early on that I had to explain to them sequential action.  To do this, I had just one question: What happens next?  And every time they moved the action forward, I would have to stop them elaborating (and there is smoke coming out of the console and blood is dripping on the floor kind of stuff) and then repeat 'What happens next.' 

Many of the ideas involved killing off the main characters in the first thirty seconds.  I had to explain that they must not kill everyone so soon.  Oh the fun, the lunacy, the anarchy.

And out of it, came a  decent three minute scene with two main changes of action and a good resolution.  Oh, yes, and the Doctor gets to live another day.

Two weeks ago I was watching Doctor Who with my daughter when up flashed an invitation to Primary schools to write a short script.  What a great idea!  Kids get a chance to write something which, if lucky, gets filmed.  I looked up the project on the BBC website and they have a great resource of old scripts and storyboards -- just what one needs to show kids.

So I have got the school's permission to work with a few children.  There are five kids, all nine years old, a predominance of girls, which surprised me.  It has to be their creative work, though of course I am there to guide them, which I suppose will mean typing all the long words.  I know that they don't need my creative ideas as all the ideas they have come up with are mind-boggling.  The challenge will be to focus their minds on making a story with a beginning, middle and end.

One of the most special jobs I have done recently has been to film the talented pianist, Ivana Gavric.  It was in a magnificent setting: a Regency drawing room hung with paintings.  We arrived at ten in the morning and worked through to two in the afternoon.  Four different shots of Ivana playing and then an interview with the music journalist, Andrew Stewart. It was a pleasant shoot with a good team.

The editing took a week to complete and then we came to put it onto the Internet.  Interestingly we had issues with syncing.  It seemed that as soon as the video was sent through to Vimeo, we lost sync on the beginning of the video.  We then posted it then to YouTube and it was suddenly okay.  As I said to Ivana afterwards, even with all this amazing technology, one should always remember that it is not perfect.  Everything has its limitations.