We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Pete Rogers a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Pete thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Can you talk to us about a project that’s meant a lot to you?

I wrote and directed a short film called Little Brown Bird last year, which has been the most meaningful project I’ve worked on. After years of writing comics, I finally circled back to my first love, screenwriting. The first short film script I wrote got me into the BBC Writer’s Room and was made into a short film called Packaged in 2017. I’ve written a few other shorts since, but not been able to get them off the ground.

The initial idea for this film came from a writing prompt I was given by a friend; I can’t say what that was without spoiling a key part of the story though. It was during lockdown in 2020 that I started to work on the script further. While the TV and film industries were on pause there were some good mentoring programmes available, and I was assigned mentors via BAFTA Cymru and Screenskills. Not only did they help me to develop the script, but they also made me look at my own career differently. I’ve worked in Visual Effects for fourteen years, mainly as a VFX Producer on films and television shows. I’ve always been reticent to utilise any of the contacts I’ve made through my professional career within my own writing journey. My mentors helped me to realise that it was possible to use my network, without it being inappropriate or a conflict of interest. My employer actually saw the benefit of supporting the project as part of my career development and as a positive thing in general. By the end of the mentoring scheme, I had a script that was good enough to take to producers and also the belief that I might be able to direct the film myself, rather than bringing someone else on board.

Producer, Daniel J Harris from Focus Shift Films/Eat Sleep Media believed in the project and just as importantly in me and helped to secure funding from the Isle of Man Arts Council to make the short film. We cast John Rhys Davies (Indiana Jones, Lord of the Rings) and Eliza Butterworth (The Last Kingdom, Town called Malice) in the film and shot it over three days on a working farm in the Isle of Man. We then had the support of the post-house I work for, Gorilla, and people who backed our crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo to get the project completed. It has played at festivals in the UK, Spain, Portugal and Norway, and won several awards. It was nominated for Best Short Drama in this year’s Celtic Media Festival, which brings together the best work from Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Isle of Man, Galicia, Cornwall and Brittany.

Little Brown Bird means a lot to me, it’s a very emotional story about a female farmer and her father who has dementia and people have really connected to the subject matter. It was my directorial debut in my late forties and a truly collaborative process which I thoroughly enjoyed. I also got the chance to oversee something from the initial idea, right through to the final stages of post-production which meant relying on all my experience and trusting my gut. What I learned from the project more than anything else was to believe in myself, to assemble a talented and trusted team, and ultimately to stick to my vision.

Pete, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

Growing up I wrote stories from a young age. One Summer I went to work with my mother, who was a housekeeper. Her employer, Lady Russell noticed I was drawing pictures of monsters and challenged me to write a story about each of them and then to read them to her. That was my first ever writing assignment and I loved being asked to work on something, with a clear brief and deadline.

I wanted to study film or screenwriting at university, but my parents were worried about me not having a career to fall back on, so I did a Business Education degree, which qualified me as a teacher. I then took courses in Screenwriting, Producing and Directing at Raindance in London. It was around this time that I rekindled my childhood love of comics, and I shifted my goals from writing and directing films to writing comics.

Alongside a career in radio, beginning as a Copywriter and working my way up to Regional Creative Director and finally radio station Managing Director, I forged a path writing independent comics. I self-published for a while, and then started to get publishers interested in my work, which led to the graphic novel The Interactives at Markosia with artists Luciano Vecchio and Yel Zamor. I have also edited comics, which I found very rewarding, as I love looking at scripts and finding ways they can be improved.

I left radio to take on a role in a small animation and visual effects studio where I did Business Development and also wrote and directed animated corporate films. Once I moved to a bigger studio, I shifted my attention to the Visual Effects side and began working closely with Producers and Directors as a VFX Producer, overseeing a team of creatives as I had done previously in radio. This also means I get to read a lot of film and TV scripts, which has helped me to learn even more about the craft. It took me a long time, but thanks to spending some time as a VFX Mentor on the Cross Channel Film Lab working closely with new writers and directors, I realised that I should be focussing on my original goals from almost thirty years ago. Following the success of Little Brown Bird, I am working on a number of feature film scripts, with a view to directing them myself.

Whether I am telling my own stories, or working with others to help tell theirs, I want to be involved in projects that have emotional resonance and that move people and make them think. I am a strong believer that you can do this just as well working within genre space as in traditional drama.

Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?

I think the biggest mystery is the work itself. Anyone can indeed have a good idea, but there’s an inherent magic to the creative process.

It shouldn’t be easy. I know that the challenges faced by struggling artists is a bit of a cliche, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true. When I see people promoting AI writing or art it makes me sad and I genuinely believe that the way things are heading will remove an important element of the human condition. Writing a prompt gives you a shortcut to tap into the previous creativity of others, but that’s far too passive and intangible to be of any interest to true creatives.

When working on a creative project you should be battling with yourself, there should be moments of self-loathing when you feel nothing you have written will ever be good enough. You need these lows to help fuel the highs, as there is no better feeling than being trapped in a narrative corner with no way to get out, then having a creative breakthrough that saves the day. That feeling is what it means to truly be alive. The process should be a journey, filled with highs and lows, with dead ends and uncertainty. It’s in the most hopeless moments that you find the best solutions. I believe that in writing, but also in business too and in self development and personal growth.

“Nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty… I have never in my life envied a human being who led an easy life. I have envied a great many people who led difficult lives and led them well.”
― Theodore Roosevelt

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

In some ways fear of death is a driving force in my creative journey. From a young age, I wondered what it be like to no longer exist and how long it would take to be forgotten.

To have books on shelves, films online, articles in magazines, gives us the chance to be immortal and not forgotten once we are no longer around. I’d like my funeral montage to be a good one and having been creative makes me proud that I’ve done something with meaning along the way.

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