John Morton

There are many words to describe a collective of vultures. My favourite is a ‘vortex of vultures’ and I also like that a group of them circling in the air is known as a ‘kettle of vultures’. But for the sake of this entry, I’ll go with a ‘cast of vultures’ because it’s the most apt for my current doings.

We just wrapped the new installment of our webcom Vultures. It’s going to be leading the charge for a new series of Vultures short webisodes that will be released online between March and June. Unlike the bigger story arc orientated first series of the webcom, this time we’re offering smaller, self contained episodes that will be infinitely more digestible. The story catches up with the detectives of V.P.I. three years on from the ill fated Pinkerton feud as they struggle with unemployment, loneliness, mild alcoholism and general disenfranchisement. But in a really FUNNY way.

We shot Where Have All The Good Dicks Gone? this past weekend and it was great to get the old team back together, along with new members of our cast and crew. I got the glasses back on as Jim Vultour which was as blinding as I remembered. David Thompson and Seán Hackett return as Dan McGrain and Niall Tennyson respectively with Suzanne O’Brien returning as college student Janine Drew who now takes centre stage as the fourth ‘vulture’. Some familiar cast members will be returning this time around and we’ve got some new characters joining the cast.

The episode won’t go online until March so there’s no point in harping on at length about it now. What I will say is that it was a great shoot, a lot of fun and we’re looking forward to doing some more. For Mycrofilms, it felt like being on holidays. It also felt like being a public nuisance on the streets of Kilkenny. Again.

If you’d all be so kind, please subscribe to Vultures on YouTube, on iTunes and keep an eye on the website for more information. We’ll be unveiling new bits and bobs in the coming weeks. The lovely photos above were taken by Ross Costigan. He still hasn’t taken any photos of himself.

Nearly 3 years since we wrapped filming on our low budget detective webcom Vultures, we announced last week that it’s coming back for a series of new webisodes (like episodes…but on the web…)

So I’m going to write a little bit about why we’ve brought it back and what we’re doing and what to expect. Since we finished the first series in 2009 we’ve been shopping the show around in the hopes of getting it funded/broadcast/commissioned. And it’s just been a really long process. RTÉ weren’t interested. They turned it down in three different formats and told us that it wasn’t ‘broad’ enough and comedy isn’t really their thing. Yup. We should have paid more attention to what Graham Linehan said. We’re going to wear ‘not broad enough for RTÉ’ as a badge of honour. But it hasn’t all been negative. We’ve had some really positive responses and chats with nice people and there’s ongoing interest that we’re trying to sustain.

And sustaining interest explains the return of Vultures. The first series was filmed three years ago so we’re aware that considering the long commissioning process we’re now trying to sell people on older material. So we’ve decided to shoot some new material to freshen up the show.

It’s not a second series though! The process of making anything that took the time and the budget of the first series means that we won’t do anything until we have both time and budget! Which also translates as being less stupid nowadays… less. We wrote a second series that I’m really happy with and we’re still looking for funding. The new episodes, if anything, are like a Series 1.5. Like when Arthur Conan Doyle did all those flashback Sherlock Holmes stories to kill some time and generally be cheap about coming up with new material.

Unlike the long episodes we did in the first series (lesson learned: become your own script editor) these ones are all short and self contained and they bridge the gap between what we did in the first series and the storyline for the second series that we may maybe might make, possibly potentially. You won’t need to have seen the show before to enjoy them. We’ve got five lined up and we’re planning a new Christmas episode to complete the six for 2012. The first one is called Where Have All The Good Dicks Gone? and it shoots in Kilkenny this coming weekend (that is absolutely a Bonnie Tyler reference). The episodes will then be released between March and June on iTunes, our YouTube channel and VulturesPI.com.

The new material revolves around Tennyson, Vultour and McGrain, the unemployed former detectives of V.P.I. and new addition, college student Janine Drew. We’ve got the cast and crew on board and there’s also a few new faces lined up, so we’re looking forward to getting back into the fun stuff.

The only cast member we needed who we couldn’t nail down was Eddie Brennan who plays Fred Bass. Eddie perpetually has rugby training and all through the first series he would say things like ‘Fuckin’ hurry up, I’ve to go to rugby training.’ When approached about a scene in the new episode, Eddie said ‘I’ve got rugby training that day.’ So yeah, we’re gonna kill Fred Bass off in the first episode. Or maybe just get have him lost at sea. Whatever works. More updates as I have ‘em!

The sexy new promos are by Ross Costigan Photography. (Who coincidentally is currently getting ready to wear a new fur coat and pitch his voice up a few octaves)

With a teary eye, the final episode of Vultures has just gone online.

‘The Long Goodbye’ is the concluding part of our comic detective serial and follows on from the events of ‘Attack Of The Pinkertons’

The episode is synopsised as thus:

‘With Isabelle Vultour captured and the Pinkertons establishing their firm grip on the town, the gentlemen detectives of V.P.I. must concoct a plan to get Isabelle back, stick it to the Pinkertons and for Vultour and McGrain… avoid a threesome with Natalie Blaise? But in order to do so they must rally the troops. And the actions of the bullying Pinkertons has ensure that there’s plenty of volunteers. This is it. The final battle. The detective apocalypse. Who will reign supreme? Who will prove to the best detective force in town? Or will it all descend into a terrible mess? This is the long goodbye, where the goodbyes are long and the farewells are hard.’

Thanks so much to all the cast and crew who worked on Vultures over the past 2 years, without you we wouldn’t have a low budget webcom!

Also, a big thanks to the people who have watched it and have supported the show since we first shot and screened that first episode in Christmas week back in December 2007. We’re glad to have reached the end of the road with it, it’s been a hell of a journey and this is a rather fitting goodbye. A long one.

Quint Quigley (Kevin Mooney)

The profile for the fugitive stoner from ‘The Adventure Of The Hidden Microfilm’ has just gone online over at that very page.

Quigley was one of our favourite characters on page. We’d never had anything as exciting as a fugitive to work with and we wanted to flesh him out into something different than what we’d done before. So, yeah, stoner comedy and fart jokes. Voila, there he is. And we liked the idea that a fugitive who initiates a chase episode would in fact be completely brain fried and slow.

Our grand plan was for Quint to be the resident tech nut for V.P.I. Kinda like their equivalent of Q in the James Bond series. Hence, the name. Q central. But we never really got around to loading Quigley up with all the cool homemade implements that we wanted him to design. And he never did get to give V.P.I. cool gadgets to fight the Pinkertons with. But we did manage to get him across as a stoned and paranoid conspiracy theorist. So at least that base was covered. And thanks to Kevin Mooney for keeping that moustache for 3 months. Legend.

Quigley will be making his return in the forthcoming ‘Attack Of The Pinkertons’. There’ll be more announcements on that tres soon. In blog form! In the meantime, enjoying getting to know Quint a little bit better.

Thanks to Ross Costigan for another lovely profile capture in our ever expanding micro universe.

Shane and Nicky Hardy (Peter O’Connor and Geoff Warner Clayton)

A character profile for these two young scamps just went online over on the Vultures website.

Introduced in Episode 5 ‘The Adventure Of The Hidden Microfilm’, the Hardy’s are two young scamps caught keying cars by Janine. Janine evidently saw something in them as she’s recruited them to help her out with her own detective business, The Janine Drew Agency. You can find out more about these thick yet enthusiastic teens here. And you can watch The Janine Drew Agency in action here.

The boys are obviously based on teen detectives The Hardy Boys, much in the same way that Janine is partly based on Nancy Drew. We thought a modern Irish, slightly stupid and chav friendly version of the characters might be a nice twist. Spot the difference:

And yeah, there’s a bit of Scooby Doo in there as well. It’s a good look though.

There’ll be a lot more from this lot in the upcoming Vultures ‘Attack Of The Pinkertons‘.

That spiky haired scamp Jack Street has just updated his blog.
He’s got a lot of thoughts about local elections, Romanians and his arch enemy Hamish Lane.
And of course, a dead cat.

You can check out the musings of a filthy, snitchy informant over at his website JackStreetHasPanache.com

The newest installment of Vultures has gone online as of last night.

This is the fifth episode of Vultures and I’m probably the most satisfied (as in least complainy) with this one. The general consensus coming from the cast and crew screening was ‘the best one since Episode 2‘ which made me very happy indeed. Episode 2 has always been our best episode I think and it was nice to recapture the fast paced comic feel with this one. NOTE: If audiences prefer the ones with dead hookers and frantic fugitive escapades more than the ones about bin bags and blind dates, it’s a good indicator that audiences like things to be exciting!

Personally, my favourite aspect of ‘The Adventure Of The Hidden Microfilm’ is getting to see the depth of cast. The supporting characters are really effective in it and every actor has done fine work to create such distinctive characters. From my own perspective, playing one of the detectives, I think we’ve succeeded in freshening up the dynamic between V.P.I. and their relationship with each other. It got a little stale in episodes 3 & 4 I felt, but we seem to be back on track heading into the final strait.

So, do enjoy the fruits of our tired, low budget sitcom making efforts. This week I’m back to chopping the footage down for Episode 6, which will go online in August. If, for some reason, you have Vultures related needs, the only place for them is over at www.VulturesPI.com. We’ll have some real nice little bits and bobs in the coming weeks.

The character profile for Jane Tennyson has just gone online over on the Episode 4 page.

Played by Annette O’Shea, Jane is the slightly potty mouthed and somewhat aggressive Bangarda twin sister of Niall Tennyson, played by Sean Hackett.

Jane was another one of those characters that we had come up with very early on, but like Janine, we never got to put her into an episode until ‘The Case Of The Poisoned Dates’. In that episode we only just about got her established, and even at that I’ve a feeling that she was established to be something she might not be. But we do get ample time to spend with her in the upcoming ‘The Adventure Of The Hidden Microfilm’ where you’ll get a chance to see the character take a bigger part in proceedings.

In terms of the roots of this character, over on the Development page myself and Paddy have wrote another one of those needlessly over referential essays about characters that we do so like to write. This one is ‘The Making Of A Modern Law Lady’. And you’ll find out much more about the character and generally, why she exists.

As you can see, police dramas were a big part of our research. Especially TJ Hooker.

This is a little extra we’ve put up online as we approach the June 7th release of ‘The Adventure Of The Hidden Microfilm’.

When we needed a movie trailer to be playing in the background of Tennyson’s cinema trip in ‘The Case Of The Poisoned Dates’ there was only one movie star for us: Jason Statham.

We’ve had a long standing love of Statham. Kind of in an ironic way, but also in a way where we just plain like his gruff, ass kicking, high concept ways. Some legend is the Stath.

So this is our tribute to him: a fake movie trailer for a film called Dopplehammer. It features the vocal talents of Murt Brennan, Maria Murray, Eddie Murphy and Ross Costigan.

We’ve just posted a piece about the making of the Tatiana Leeson character from ‘The Case Of The Poisoned Dates’

Played by Edwina Whearty, the silent but deadly Russian mail order bride from hell was the last character we conceived for Vultures and undoubtedly, the most Russian of them all.

For information on the character and how we came up with her, please do check out her entry on our increasingly unwieldy Development page.