Impact50 / East Valley Rhinos

Some of you will be aware that I recently joined a filmmaking collaboration called Impact50. It’s more easily explained if I backtrack a bit:

A few years ago, Chris Jones, who runs the London Screenwriters Festival and other things, created an initiative called 50 Kisses, the idea being that writers would submit short (2-page) scripts along the theme of A Kiss; of those submitted, 50 would be chosen and offered to filmmakers to make. [I submitted one that was a little bit ‘out there’, hoping that might make it stand out from the crowd, but it didn’t get selected. You can read it here.] The resulting 50 best films would then be pieced together to make a feature film, which you can see (for free) here.

Cut to a few years later, and same kinda thing but this time there’s more of a solid premise to it all - being that there’s a meteor heading to destroy earth and there’s nothing that we can do about it. Like Armageddon but without Bruce Willis going down a hole. And the Aerosmith ballad. And the budget.

Surprisingly I didn’t submit a script, but I did read all the ‘winning’ entries, and from those one stood out:

A sweet story about a group of rugby players who went to hospital to fetch an injured team-mate. Having played rugby, and experienced the camaraderie and the banter, it strongly appealed to me.

Here’s a short piece I wrote for the Impact50 site about the production, and you can see the resulting film here.

After the initial deadline, Impact50 has now entered a 2nd phase, with the goal of creating a more diverse collection of films to compete the feature. I’ll hopefully be writing/producing a couple, and you can either write some scripts, or produce one of the newly-submitted ones … So get involved!