Consequences (2022)
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Consequences follows Tommy and his friends as they spend the day bullying, intimidating and generally making life miserable for anyone unlucky enough to cross their path. But actions have consequences, and by the end of the day, their little reign of terror starts catching up with them in ways they definitely weren’t expecting.
The film actually began life in 2014 as The Bully, the pilot episode for a planned anthology web series called Fatal Fables. Years later, I went back to the finished film, cut more than six minutes, tightened the pacing, and reworked it into Consequences. That new version was submitted to the Horror-on-Sea Film Festival and was selected, which was a nice bit of evidence that sometimes the best thing you can do for an old film is to stop being sentimental and start cutting. |
From The Bully to Consequences
The Bully was the first completely original film we made as an amateur group. The plan, rather optimistically, was to make 13 short episodes for a web series in the vein of The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits and Tales of the Unexpected, then release one every fortnight while we carried on making the much more ambitious Hitman: Vengeance. I genuinely thought we could get the lot done in about three months.
The name Fatal Fables was chosen by a vote from a list of possibilities. Unfortunately, once everyone had voted for “Fables”, I realised I now had to put some sort of moral into each story. That hadn’t really been the plan; I mostly just wanted to make dark little tales with a twist. In the end, seven stories were written, and only three were filmed before the original group began to fall apart.
When I came back to The Bully years later, I had only the finished film to work with, not the original footage. In addition to tightening the edit, I changed most of the film to black and white, then brought the colour back when Tommy reaches Hell. It’s effectively a reverse Wizard of Oz: the ordinary world loses its colour, then the supernatural one gets it back.
The name Fatal Fables was chosen by a vote from a list of possibilities. Unfortunately, once everyone had voted for “Fables”, I realised I now had to put some sort of moral into each story. That hadn’t really been the plan; I mostly just wanted to make dark little tales with a twist. In the end, seven stories were written, and only three were filmed before the original group began to fall apart.
When I came back to The Bully years later, I had only the finished film to work with, not the original footage. In addition to tightening the edit, I changed most of the film to black and white, then brought the colour back when Tommy reaches Hell. It’s effectively a reverse Wizard of Oz: the ordinary world loses its colour, then the supernatural one gets it back.
The Bully (2014)
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This is the original 2014 version of the film, made before I went back years later and rebuilt it as Consequences.
It’s rougher, longer and very obviously from an earlier stage in my filmmaking, but I’ve kept it here because it shows where the later version came from and, more importantly, what changed. |