About "For Guano Boy"
Nearly a dozen dedicated contributors, including the team behind 2023's "Grady Film Festival", are helping to bring the short film "For Guano Boy" to life for 2024. The project ties together obscure 3D animation, ambient collages, and five narrative threads about lost souls navigating a strange, uncomfortable, alternative Britain, all to explore how lives can go so wrong, and the hope we can still hold on to nonetheless.
The project started gestating in May of 2023, principal filming started as early as August and plans to continue non-routinely into early 2024, for a release mid-to-late of that year. Our main desire is simply to have the film made and available, and to give it some chance of an audience, as we just want it to exist and be the best that it can be, and hopefully folks in the future who find it will be glad too that it exists.
Some notable contributors to the project are:
- Alfred Ogdino, a young writer-producer with prior work in public events organising and music video cinematography, notable for his leadership skills and love for the sardonic works of Rob Shearman.
- Math Baxter, an underground actor-director with prior work making esoteric poetry and SimCopter performance pieces, whose previous videography work has been seen by the Mayor of Preston, and whose previous writing work nearly won awards.
- Dumi, a political activist and computer coder, notable for having seen every Tom Hanks movie, and for purportedly nearly-dying during a childhood "saw fight".
Featured Storylines
- Emily, after partaking in a "spiritual ritual" with a group of friends, has shut herself off from everyone, retreated to her crumbling candlelit home, and has vowed to never look upon the outside world again. But, one day, she is compelled to leave her home, to look for... something. With the aid of an AI audio description device, she steps outside, refusing still to open her eyes, and what she uncovers will bring her back to the past she spent all this time trying to hide from, but closer to those spiritual forces that condemned her and her friends so long ago.
- After Jerimiah finds he has a terminal illness, he and his wife Sharon, young newlyweds and high-school sweethearts, get recruited into a cloning scheme, where over-eager scientists swear they can bring him back from death: they just need to wait for the new him to grow up first. Twenty years on, Sharon discovers she's stuck looking after a young, personality-less shell of a person who will never become her husband, not even close, and that in waiting for him to become so she's never really been given the chance to grieve or move on from his death, whilst his clone is stuck with his one purpose in life being to fill a void that he would never have been able to fill.
- Milton's family is dead, and he now spends his days eating constantly and watching his favourite cartoon, trying to fill the void and drown out the noise. But eventually, something starts calling out to him, through his house, through time, and through his favourite cartoon, trying to give him a new purpose: to partake in "victimless evil", to watch and revel and celebrate in the suffering of others, and to relive the lives of those who are lost to their own inhabitions.
- Pewter Parson Pimm wants to become something larger than himself: immortalised and unstoppable. He rents a large camcorder, recruits a young stranger, and begins to create a filmed rambolic manifesto on right and wrong and the purpose of life. But, things don't go exactly right, and he has to grapple with if he's truly got it within himself to put his potential immortality above all else.
- There is a seagull, and she is "wrong". She wants to get home, needs to, but... she's starting to wonder if she ever really had one. Why won't the other seagulls accept her? Will, one day, even soaring above it all, witnessing the beauty of the world from above, not be enough?
All these stories interweve and, in the end, come together, to paint a strange picture of how evil persists, how suffering can be stopped, and how delusion can sometimes can be an act of kindness or an act of violence.
