Showing posts with label River of Gods. Show all posts
Showing posts with label River of Gods. Show all posts

Tuesday, 9 March 2010

Take a Filmtrip into the Future


Declan Burke (pictured right) raised some interesting points in a Crime Always Pays blog post last Thursday. He considered the state of the book (or fate of the writer) in ten years time. Not being in the possession of a crystal ball, his ruminations left me with a number of unanswered questions. Scary, considering that I’m as likely to be published for the first time in ten years as I am this year. It’s just the way the industry is.

In fact, I was complaining about a general lack of enthusiasm, encouragement and output to a screenwriting friend the other day and the conversation turned to a Belfast-based production company that seemed to be doing some pretty innovative stuff.

Filmtrip’s website states, “We are a boutique production company specialising in film & TV cross platform productions, mobile app development and online.”

One of their cross platform projects involves Ian McDonald (pictured above left), a highly celebrated and award-laden science fiction writer from Belfast. His recent books include River of Gods and Brasyl and they deal with growing technology in a society not ready for it. Incidentally, he’s also written one of my favourite Northern Irish crime fiction novels, Sacrifice of Fools which blends police procedural, dirty politics, the crime underworld, social commentary and aliens.

It’s fitting that a writer who spends so much time looking to the future be involved in this project. Judging by the article on the Filmtrip website, E8 will sprawl many forms by exploiting every bit of entertainment technology it can get its grubby mitts on.

I look forward to the results.