so this is it the start of my blog.
In a about three weeks time maybe less I go out to Thailand to shoot a no-budget digital feature and I feel pretty scared.

my producer justine just called so I feel better she's going to try and get some money form film london.
So what is it that we're doing?

I was a doctor then I left medicine after practising for about 2 years to go to film school.
then I made some shorts. they won awards and were on TV and one of my shorts won a BAFTA which got lots of attention from production companies.

that kicked off about 5 years of kafka developing films with film four (who went under), the film council, little bird... man loads of people and lots of writing which at the last minute people would find a reason not to actually make. 'it's not something we can commit to right now' is a phrase i heard a lot.

Anyway dec 26 2004 im at my mums house (she's thai) in phuket. Im woken by a tremor about 8am and go to wake my mum up. she always sleeps through earthquakes..Year before in lombok she slept through a 3.6 and then the daily subsequent aftershocks. We chatted about about the possibility of tsunami and figured the quake was so small it wouldnt make a wave. error of calculation number 1.

9.30 am its a gorgeous day and i say man i should really go for a swim. but im reading this buddhism book by loong por sumedho and he's talking about 'should' energy. ie not coming for a place of too much should energy. So I say to my mum 'man there's too much should energy in the whole swimm idea'... and i have breakfas and a cup of tea instead. then the sea goes out and it looks weird somethings wrong. it starts to act like a river instead of the sea. instead of the sound being crescendo-decrescendo its all crescendo.

'mum' i shout. and we start to pack and get the dogs and go to higher ground. our house is laready on high ground. I never saw the big wave. people on the beach below said they did. our beach is at a slight angle to it. maybe we were protected or maybe we were already packing and having showers (we've revised our evacuation procedure)

so we went to find really high ground and then the whole tsunami picture began to unfold. We were on a hill for hours terrified trying to figure out if we were safe waiting for the next wave which the radio kept saying was on its way and could be 40ft high. we didnt know if we were high enough. Numbers of casualties started to roll in. famillies in swimwear came walking up from a beach which had been hit. everything was confused.

That night we evacuated to phuket town. I wanted to leave. We didnt know how many more waves there would be.I was scared. my mum said she felt drawn to stay and help. I thought of my boyfriend and the children we might never have.

As we were talking the TV showed a plane being boarded by an emergency medical team. amongst them I caught a glimpse of the tiny little old lady doctor ajahn Wilmon who I had done several electives with as a student. she was coming in and i was thinking of legging it out. we called her and she said she was due in to patong hospital at 3am or soemthing that i should sleep and see her in the hospital the next day.

The next day I went to patong hospital and my mum went to volounteer at the city hall. Thus began a week of chaos and intense work which ended up with us setting up the International Victim Co-ordination centre working with amazing people. I also ended up with a dose of traumatization from working as liason with mortuaries and mass mortuaries and I returned to the UK for trauma counselling which was amazing and very releasing.

Anyway from that process my karma was linked with a whole bunch of aid workers and NGO's. I continued with tsunami work designing a website tsunamitree.com which will go live in november after a re-design under the new name of disastertree.com.

I returned to continue writing the script i had been working on. the tube gave me panic attacks so i would have one on the way to work and one on the way back which was quite tiring but i liked the structure of going into the little bird office and the chicks who worked there were very nice. at night i would have vivid dreams you might call them nightmares but they weren't nightmares becaues they were real images it was just i guess that during the tsunami nightmare visuals was actually normal. any way i didnt sleep and i had these strong startle reflexes so i i heard a loud noise i would jump out of my skin. it was all pretty knackering but the trauma

counselling helped as did lots of tai chi, shiatsu from an amazing woman called portia, some inner work at a place called concord and loads of acupuncture (daily when i first got back)

my writing deadlines slipped and eventually they fired me off the project, I never quite understood why first the producer said that he felt that I wasn't committed enough. Then he said I had written the film so that it was a higher budget unsuitable for a first time director so he would take it out to named directors.

I found it confusing but then in the year after the tsunami I have to say I was very easily confused.

anyway in may were in phuket testing out the website prototype on-the-ground with NGO's and heard a call for volounteers up north in the flash floods.

My partner chris, rob a tsunamitree colleague and his partner sandra left phuket and went up to meet my mum (who runs childline thailand and has been working non-stop on tsunami recovery) in uttaradit.

we did some survey and database planning then joined a Tsunami Volounteer Centre crew who were digging houses out of the mud and rebuilding. Illya smirnoff who also runs childline volounteered with us.

Itr was an amazing experience and there are some pistures.

So I thought why not make a film actually set out here and shoot it dogme style with a documentary size unit, cast who are great improvisers and do some shit outside the box. the kind of shit that would never survive a development process with working title o the film council (that's not a dis on them they just have a certain way of working)

so here we are going to get out and shoot and this blog is gonna be the diary of that.

sorry this entry was so much background...

peace and love tinge xx