Earlier this year, I stumbled on a piece of ancient history that I'd not seen for more than 20 years: Showreel 86, my 15 minutes of fame, when film director Alan Parker critiqued my 16mm, eight-minute short film Board Game and awarded it a prize on BBC TV. Back then, when the show's host,

television presenter Mike Smith, asked me what I planned to do with my prize money, I stammered my reply, ‘Make a longer film.’ 

I did have plans to make a longer, 25-minute story as a step up from eight minutes. That project – a weird science fiction thriller, called Smudge – proved to be too ambitious and too expensive, despite my BBC prize money. I cooked up a couple of alternatives and tried to raise funding from the London Arts Council and private investors. Neither got off the ground, although I shot some tests and another quickie short on Super 8. 

I ended up making not a longer film, but a shorter one, half the length of Board Game, the four-minute Dogplant, as a commission for Channel Four TV who paid me as writer and

director. I was off to the races, or so I thought. But then I took off for the States and spent many years chasing feature screenplays while getting involved in the special effects trade. It took me far too long to get back to making short films again.

In all that time, I kept kicking ideas around, and briefly resurrected Smudge for my third (and final) film school application. The inspiration for the story had come from an abandoned photograph that I found in a photo-booth in Oxford Circus tube station. During my commute to my editing job on When the Wind Blows I spotted a strip of four photographs, the kind a person takes for passports, unclaimed in the self-service photo collection tray. Image One: a startled looking businessman in a suit, looking somewhat sad. Image Two: a slightly

different pose, leaning forward. Image Three: a motion blur as he continued to exit his chair, presumably unaware his photos were continuing to flash. Image Four: white out. It struck me as funny, and I pinned it to my cutting room wall.

Below is the resulting story as submitted to the advanced filmmaking program at London’s National Film and Television School. They didn’t go for it. It’s a shame, because I think it would have made a fun short. I wanted Ronald Lacey – the wonderful Nazi with the scarred hand in Raiders of the Lost Ark – to play my lead. And my makeup artist friend, Nigel, was going to transform him into a motion-blurred Mister Hyde.

Some stories never leave you alone. This was one of those.