2.Main Content
Digi Shorts
Matthew McGuchan
Matthew studied Fine Art Film at Central St Martins. Post-college where he made two 35mm shorts, both of which mixed animation with live action, The Enchanted Forest (1993) and Isle Of Dogs (1996, co-dir with artist Simon Faithfull).
He attended the Creative Writing MA at UEA in 1996. Since graduating he has pursued a career in screenwriting while also working as a subeditor and journalist at The Radio Times and (currently) The Sunday Times. He also writes a film column for a London local magazine, SE23Living.
Matthew had a feature film made in 2003 called LD50, which he says ‘wasn’t great’ but put him on the map and got him an agent, Sean Gascoine at Lou Coulson. Since then he has written a number of scripts for independent producers and has been commissioned twice by the Film Council’s 25 Words or Less scheme. He has developed features with Warp X and Element Films, and written a script for Gold Circle Films in Los Angeles. In 2005/2006 he wrote a half-hour TV drama The Trial that was produced for Channel 4’s Coming Up strand. At present, he has three radio dramas shortlisted by Radio 4, and is writing the teen horror Black Dawn for Apollo Films and redrafting the prison horror Blind Eye for Clive Brill at Pacificus Productions. He has also just completed his first HD short, entitled Housework.
Matthew has been selected onto Digital Shorts by Screen East with the project Jerome’s Weakness
Shot as a documentary, we follow a team of scientists who have captured a ghost boy.
The film will take the form of a documentary account of an imagined event. It will be filmed entirely at one location, a large, enclosed interior that functions as a makeshift laboratory, within which a second interior is constructed, a replica of a boy’s bedroom. Like a documentary, the piece will be edited together from several main sequences:
* An interview with the scientist Simeon Jerome;
* An interview with the parents of the deceased child;
* CCTV footage of the interior of the child‘s bedroom;
* Digitally processed footage “revealing” the presence of the ghost;
* Documentary footage of the scientists and their experiment.
Storytelling craft will work to sell the documentary conceit. From the audience‘s point of view, it will seem at first as if the boy is desperately sick. The exact nature of his “illness” remains mysterious. Working from the central premise “What if ghosts were real?” each point of view reveals a different aspect of the story: the arrogance and vanity of the scientist; the desperate hope of the parents; the sadness and fear of the child. Digital manipulation will be used to visualise the presence of a ghost as a “scientific” reality, while a hand-held “documentary” camera will capture the pressure-cooker atmosphere of the lab.
As Dr Jerome’s team fire up their machines in preparation for a sinister “transplant” procedure, the question is posed: how far would you go to save the one you love?