Irish Tag Archive

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June 1, 2013 • mycrofilms

Hot Water Bottle Comes Home

hotwaterbottle4My short film Hot Water Bottle has its first hometown screening today as part of this years Sky Cat Laughs Comedy Festival in Kilkenny. The film will screen as part of the Kitty Flix Presents Comedy Shorts Showcase at 4pm in The Watergate Theatre.

It’s great to finally debut it in our hometown, especially as part of such a fantastic festival. We all grew up on the Cat Laughs and it’s a real privilege to show some work at the festival. It’s also quite apt to debut the film in Kilkenny at our most walk of shame laden weekend. Tickets for the screenings can be bought here.

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December 17, 2012 • mycrofilms, vultures

Dan McGrain In The Nick Of Time

We’ve just launched our penultimate episode of detective webcom Vultures. It’s called Dan McGrain In The Nick Of Time and follows the titular sleuth as he attempts to get a mislaid diamond to a ruthless bounty hunter before his friends get horribly tortured. With hilarious results of course! This is probably my favourite episode of the second series so far as it replaces the mundane activities of ex-boyfriend stalking, sandwich stealing and writer stakeouts with a fast paced adventure. And running around is a lot more fun than sitting around.

It also continues the overall arc of Series 2 which sees the unemployed former detectives of V.P.I. being coaxed back into the detective life by their disillusioned former protegé Janine Drew. And like the first series, we’ve left it fairly late in the game to bring our villains to the fore (I like to keep ’em short and sweet). From the first episode we introduced the villainous presence of Johnny Curragh (who was first mentioned in hushed tones in Episode 5 of Series 1, The Adventure Of The Hidden Microfilm.) and his trio of villainous female agents known as the Blades. The first of Johnny’s Blades makes an appearance in this episode and Maeve Munroe is a ball busting bounty hunter who has tied up our heroes, awaiting McGrain’s rescue. Played by Amy Dunne, she’s a really psychotic, shouty addition to our little rogues gallery. Johnny’s Blades are our not too subtle version of Charlie’s Angels, albeit in villainous form and I’m pretty confident they’ll make a serious impact when the full trio unveil their fiendish, high kicking cackling and meanness in the last episode.

Speaking of which, the last (very final, like ever, done, fin) episode of Vultures (in webcom mode anyway) concludes the series with a rousing finale on December 23rd. That episode is entitled The Dicks Who Came In From The Cold and it marks our second Christmas set yarn. We thought it would be nice to finish the series as we started it in 2007 with a Christmas episode and the new episode has plenty of nods to the first one. Although it’s going to be a much better episode. Certainly more exciting and the shoot (which we completed on December 3rd) was a whole tonne of fun. We’ve got a lot better at this webcom making lark since then although we’ve made the second series with a lot less time and a lot less money… oh, the things we could do with time and money. But still, I’m thrilled with the team that has come together for the new series and very happy with how it’s all turned out. The Dicks Who Came In From The Cold should tie the whole thing up quite nicely and complete what we set out to do exactly 5 years ago in December 2007: make a really good Irish webcom and give it to people for free. We hope we’ve succeeded. Here’s a handy little embed of Dan McGrain In The Nick Of Time.

If you want to get your fill of Vultures, you can subscribe for free on iTunes, you can also subscribe on YouTube. For all information on the project including character profiles and all episodes and the various bric a brac, check out VulturesPI.com

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May 14, 2012 • mycrofilms, vultures

A Movie About Dicks, Private Dicks

We were delighted to get accepted into the inaugural Digital Comedy Lab with Vultures back in February. But now we’ll be even more delighted if we actually win the Digital Comedy Lab outright. If we do, we would receive a €50,000 budget to make a Vultures mockumentary feature film. Nice, eh?

It would be a fantastic achievement for us after the last couple of years work on Vultures. It’s pretty cool to have a webcom out there that people can watch and enjoy but it would be even cooler to have a feature film that people could watch and enjoy. Our Digital Comedy Lab trailer outlines the plot for a prospective Vultures movie, which works as kind of a Year Zero for Vultures (Please let me get away with using that term, I’ve wanted to for so long!). The trailer spoilers the fuck out of the new series anyway, as the prospective film would lead on from it, showing Janine quitting college. It then moves into her rallying the unemployed dicks together as they truck off to Ireland’s first ever detective convention. Then there’s a murder! So, it’s a classic closed house murder mystery with a host of suspects and motives and twists and our bumbling heroes are thrust into the middle of it. The twist on the format though is that it’s done mockumentary style which has some very tasty possibilities for a murder mystery (which is completely new ground… unlike the rest of Vultures, ho ho!). Our trailer also showcases us doing FEATURE FILM type things like showing our dicks all dickied up, Vultour and Janine without their glasses and Jack Street in a real mink coat. Speaking of the trailer, here it is!

If we get to make it, I assure you, it will be very funny. And clever. And exciting. And it will have comedy and detectives in it. If you want to see a Vultures mockumentary feature that’s like the bastard of Scooby Doo and Agatha Christie playing Cluedo, there’s something you can do for us. Watch the trailer. Share the trailer. Like the trailer. Show it to people, maybe keep clicking on it, go to multiple computers and play it. That kind of ethical stuff. Hey, it’s a competition right? In fairness, if the folks at BeActive hate our story and think our trailer is the drizzling shits, they probably won’t commission it anyway. BUT if our trailer gets enough views, it might help persuade them that Vultures is worth making. All help would be greatly appreciated.

And if it doesn’t get made, how will we carry on with Vultures you may ask? Eh…. radio? Or maybe RTÉ might pick it up…?

Okay, radio.

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January 26, 2012 • mycrofilms, v.p.i., vultures

A Cast Of Vultures

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.

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January 16, 2012 • mycrofilms, v.p.i., vultures

Vultures Have New Meat

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)

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September 2, 2010 • Uncategorized

Once Upon A Time In The Glorious Revolution

A short film I worked on last year, entitled Once Upon A Time In The Glorious Revolution, has just gone up on Youtube in a new re-edited form following it’s festival rounds this year. It’s written and directed by filmmaker Sean Clancy and it’s a fine slice of moody, Irish western action. Have a look and a check of it, below.

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