jim vultour Tag Archive

1645

October 15, 2012 • mycrofilms, v.p.i., vultures

Jim Vultour And The Mystery Writer Writing Mystery

The newest episode of our webcom Vultures has hit the internets. There was a bit of a summer break but hopefully this episode brings the series back with a bit of style… and a man in a small car. Entitled Jim Vultour And The Mystery Writer Writing Mystery, it puts the focus on the character I play, the scruffy, myopic, socially inept Vultour. It’s pretty much him sitting in a small red car for 16 minutes but hopefully in a very entertaining way. We’ve synopsised the new episode as thus:

After the shenanigans witnessed in Janine Drew Presents Where Have All The Good Dicks Gone and The Lost Lunch of Niall Tennyson, the third episode further continues the stories of our quartet of disillusioned, unemployed detectives struggling to get some meaning into their lives. This time the focus is on the perpetually haggard and ill dressed Jim Vultour. Entitled Jim Vultour and The Mystery Writer Writing Mystery, it follows Vultour as he decides to stake out the home of up and coming mystery writer Kate Marple. Convinced she is stealing his ideas for her own book, Vultour sets out to prove her plagiarism the only way he knows how… stalking!

And that’s it! The new episode is written by myself and is directed by that wily rogue, the talented (and moderately handsome) Peter McGann. And here it is, embedded for your viewing pleasure.

It’s also the first opportunity we’ve had to properly introduce the character of Kate Marple, who you may have seen pop up in our Digital Comedy Lab trailer. Vultures has more characters and storylines than we will ever get to execute and so with the second series I tried to bring in some of our favourite new characters (Johnny Curragh, May O’Neil and Ronnie Drew have made it.. and a few more are still to come). Not all of them fit into the overall storyline but Kate Marple did. Myself and Paddy Dunne came up with the character back in 2008. She was a children’s writer (like Enid Blyton) but with a taste for really violent stories (not like Enid Blyton). We had an idea that she would be a love interest for Dan McGrain but that hasn’t followed through in the end (probably another reason why this series is so much shorter). But here she is, played by Niamh Moyles, and should hopefully prove just as lovely and violent as we always intended.

We’re into post production on the next episode Dan McGrain In The Nick Of Time (which will land next month) and will be wrapping this series up with a Christmas episode in December. In the meantime, enjoy the newest escapade!

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1374

September 14, 2012 • mycrofilms, vultures

Who Would You Be?

Here’s the trailer for the new episode of Vultures. We inadvertantly took a mid series break on the show as the summer ended up. That’s network talk for getting waylaid by all other kinds of summery noises and distractions. But now we’re back on foot to finish off the second series of the detective webcom we’ve been intermittently peddling since 2007!

The new episode is called Jim Vultour and The Mystery Writer Writing Mystery and sees us finally realising our ambition of shooting one episode entirely in a car. The story focuses on Jim Vultour’s attempt to stakeout a new character, crime writer Kate Marple, who he suspects of plagiarising his burgeoning detective literary attempts. So it’s a little bit of cat and mouse, and a lot of sitting in a car drinking tea. The episode was written by myself and directed by our acting/directing rogue Pete McGann. The trailer sees us continuing from episode two’s Ghostbusters dissection with the detectives asking who they would be in famous quartets. If it was The Beatles, Jack Street is definitely Pete Best.

We’re currently editing this episode and the fourth episode (no surprises, it’s Dan McGrain) and we’re also prepping for a new Christmas episode, which will round off this series of Vultures. There is still a chance that we’ll get flashbacks to how toe freezingly cold it was shooting the first Christmas episode (I wore three pairs of socks with my sandals) and throw in the towel.

Jim Vultour and The Mystery Writer Writing Mystery will go online at the end of September.

Photo by Ross Costigan. Or Compo if he was in The Last Of The Summer Wine.

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1263

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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