It included a mile or so along the shores of Loch An Eilean, a fair size loch not far from Walter’s place.  I took a few snaps, if only to post them here, for posterity:

Oh and there’s this one. Sorry it’s so small. It’s a shame as well, because the devil’s in the detail:

Regular readers of my blog will know why the sudden interest in the 1954 creature feature.  Everybody else should read this.  Bottom line is we have a film to make.  It’s called Loch Ghoon.

Rather than piling into the production of a full 120-minute feature, the plan is to produce a five-minute teaser, shooting before the end of 2009.  This gives us a chance to cut our teeth on some existing material, but also gives us something to bring to the table when we’re asking for help from family, friends and, if and when it comes to it, potential financiers.

A perfect example of how this ought to work is the Slingers ’sizzle’ (featured in my last post) which turned up on the web just over a week ago.  Pitched as ‘Ocean’s 11 in space’, Slingers is a sci-fi series created by Sizemore (AKA Mike Atherton) and in the process of being brought to life by production company Sleepydog (AKA Toby Moores and friends).

I don’t know what it cost to produce the sizzle itself, but I’m guessing that 60k views in under ten days feels like a pretty good return; not to mention the groundswell of grass-roots interest articulated through every blog, fan site and forum with even the most spurious interest in this kind of thing. If I was a TV exec busy trying to option a new hit mini-series, right now Slingers would be looking like a pretty intriguing proposition.

I’m sure there are a few traditional TV folk looking a tad grudgingly at Slingers, wondering how it is that Mike and Toby have come so far in such a short space of time.  The reality is that they’ve had the support of a network they’ve been developing for many years, consisting of seasoned bloggers and social media beatniks with more than a little to offer in relation to the changing face of television itself.

Taking all of this into account, you’ll realise how damn lucky I am that Sizemore has agreed to help develop the script for Loch Ghoon.  We caught up last week, and talked it over.  It took him about an hour to nail the basics.  Maybe forty-five minutes.

A week on, and we have our teaser script, introducing an ill-fated character who’s already begging to be resurrected in his own comic book.  It’s great to finally be working with Mike on a project like this, a couple of years on from our very first encounter, at the Tuttle club, serendipitously captured by Thayer Prime:

I think it was Mike who said it looked like a rehearsal for Lord of the Rings.

I guess now we have our quest.

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Coming up next week: THEY CALL HIM MR CRIME…