Happy F@cking Birthday was made as part of MAP 48.8 Filmmaking challenge over the weekend of the 20-22 January 2023.

It’s a story of a botched robbery which ends in tragedy.

I love taking part in timed challenges like this one, and similar in the theatre world for 24 Hour Plays. To be able to create something quickly excites me, and it also means that I’m not able to edit, edit and edit as there isn’t time. The audience are more forgiving for the odd plot-hole or over-written dialogue.

The participants of the filmmaking challenge met at 53Two in Manchester on the Friday night. Names are pulled out of a hat. Writers are matched with directors, numbers of actors are randomly assigned, actor names pulled out of a hat along with the prop and line of dialogue which has to be written into the script.

Once the groups are formed then the countdown begins. I was part of Team Mask. Our prop was a mask, and our line of dialogue was ‘I don’t care if we’re related, I’ll do whatever it takes’.

We discuss ideas, the prop, the line of dialogue and in some teams the scripts are written in the venue so that the actors can start learning lines right away. I admire writers who can work efficiently like this – I’m not one of them though

Having just gone through a difficult 12 months I wanted to use this weekend to go out of my comfort zone and write something fun, entertaining and would give the crew an enjoyable project to work on. I think I managed to do that with this film.

The brilliant cast are John Joyce-O’Keeffe (Charlie), Jason Johns (Billy) and Josh Betesh (Barry). The director is Kitty Ball, Cinematography by Jack Berry and Sound by Gwyneth Evans.

Once we wrapped on set, then our director Kitty had another full-time job the next day of editing the footage. And she did an awesome job.

I couldn’t wait to see the final film screened 48 hours later. I even managed to get a paraphrased famous movie monologue in the screenplay which I was happy that Kitty left in.

Imagine my surprise when I won the ‘Best Writer’ award at the 48.8 Award Ceremony. I’ve never won anything in my life and it came at a time when I was considering my writing future.

A week later we also won the ‘People’s Choice’ Award which was voted for by the general public. All in all I’d say this was a pretty F@cking awesome weekend.