Until She Leaves In 5 minutes we see a conversation, followed by someone’s account of that conversation, and the lead character’s dawning realisation that the ground is opening up beneath him.

It’s part of a longer story of a man whose comfortable existence crumbles when he underestimates the forces of race, gender, and injustice that run through his life.

Funnily enough, I originally conceived this story when I needed a play that was as cheap as possible to stage – four characters, three locations. The transition from theatre to cinema was a key stage in the gestation of the Yaysayer concept.

The full-length story, Game Face, is the second feature film on the Yaysayer slate.

Your Actual Relationship is a case study in VOONing. The brief I set myself was to write a script that could be shot in one day, in one room that was free to use (my living room). For me, the key to making it cinematic was to use the disappearance/reappearance of a character – he arrives out of thin air and vanishes the same way. This is something you can’t achieve as powerfully in a play or a novel. And it’s a pretty poor trick on the radio, which was the medium I’d been working in that year! I ended up producing, directing, and editing myself – realising my aspiration of end-to-end production. Full disclosure: the project relied very heavily on the expertise of Josh White as Director Of Photography. I’m not always going to get that level of talent in key roles until I can scale up the whole operation.

Again, my contacts in the acting world served me very well indeed. I guess I can count that as a strength/opportunity of Yaysayer.

In this set of vlogs, I drop some ideas on what I learned, what I knew, and where I got lucky on this project.