John Morton

We’ve just launched the first episode in the brand new series of Vultures. It’s called Janine Drew Presents Where Have All The Good Dicks Gone? and here it is:

Online feedback to the episode has been great so far and we’re really happy (and kind of relieved) with how well it’s gone down thus far. It definitely sets our stall out for the next few episodes in terms of story, tone, style and yes, length! Speaking of the new episodes, we’re back at our James Bond (or Kevin Smith if you like) tricks of announcing the title of the next episode at the end of this one. In this case it’s revealed to be The Lost Lunch Of Niall Tennyson.

Niall Tennyson, under the spotlight.

The deductive minds among you will see a pattern emerging with the titles. Four episodes, four detectives and yes, four different leads! That’s the plan. There will be a fifth… but it’s cliffhanging at the moment. We’ve got rehearsals lined up this weekend for the next of our two final shoots. Yes, we actually rehearse this show. Who’d a thunk it?

If you haven’t already, please subscribe to Vultures on YouTube and also on iTunes. We’ve also given the website a bit of a spring cleaning too.

Photography by Ross Costigan. Yes, he was in the episode. Did you like his nice green coat?

We’ve just announced the date for the return of the Mycrofilms webcom Vultures.

Janine Drew Presents Where Have All The Good Dicks Gone? hits the net this Monday, March 19th (I made that title way more complicated that I needed to). It’s the first new Vultures episode since The Long Goodbye in 2009 and the first of what will be four incoming webisodes between now and June. We’re also lining up a new Christmas episode but we’ll see how everything else goes first.

Everything else being the various walls that we’ve flung Vultures shit at over the past few years, some of which have stuck. The feature film version of the show (which has the equally long but sleeker working title of The Dicks Who Came In From The Cold) has been shortlisted for the Digital Comedy Lab which will see 2 filmmaking teams (1 Ireland, 1 UK) get €50,000 to make a feature mockumentary. So we’re going to get really competitive about that because we want to win. The plot of the movie is the same storyline that we had been saving for a potential follow up series and we’re confident it’s suitably cinematic. The quartet of new webisodes bridge the gap between the lives of the detectives in the first series and our ultra exciting second series story (none of which are too indebted to each other).

Speaking of mockumentaries, the new episode is the first Vultures one to be shot in that format. It follows Janine Drew’s attempts to make a documentary about unemployed detectives in her hometown for her first year college project. The results are tragic and comical. Yes, we’re going for a general tragicomic tone on this one. We hope you enjoy it when it hits.

If you don’t, it’s entirely my fault as it’s the first Vultures episode I’ve written and directed entirely on my own. Yup, I’m finally off the stabilisers. I could probably blame Alan Slattery, my trusty producer…. and I guess in some way, I will.

All the main cast are returning as well as other familiar faces and some new ones, like this ginger rogue Ronnie Drew, younger brother of Janine Drew. He’s played by Colin O’Brien who I had the great pleasure of working with last year on Devious Theatre’s production Shifting. He’s a fantastic young actor and also a total scumbag, which helps.

The episode will go online at some undetermined time Monday and can be viewed on VulturesPI.com, YouTube or if you’ve subscribed on iTunes you’ll get it there. Give it a look, spread, support and share, it’s all very much appreciated.

Photos by Ross Costigan… who may or may not be in the episode….

Here’s a look at the new Vultures logo.

As created by Paddy Dunne, our wonderfully talented designer/co-creator/Pat Cairo, it’s a new logo for our friendly local detectives. We were just going to replace the dog with Janine but we decided to go for something more dynamic and vaguely SS. Deprendri Mysterium Dickius is the new Python-esque unpronounceable V.P.I. motto which will be wheeled out at choice moments in the new ones.

We’re editing Where Have All The Good Dicks gone at the moment which will hit interwebs next month. At the same time we’re prepping for the next 5 webisodes, which will be following throughout the year.

You can subscribe to all audio visual detective yarns over at the YouTube channel and all other info is on VulturesPI.com

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 four lined up and we’re planning a new Christmas episode to complete the ‘series’ for 2012. The first one is called Janine Drew Presents 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.