Hello, Thank you for visiting our page!

Fractured Minds is a short film about a woman with dementia who's last wish is to take her own life. As Euthanasia is not legal in the UK, the woman turns to her two sons for help.

Introductions

We are a team of filmmakers from Glasgow, Scotland and we have put together this page for our upcoming short  film 'Fractured Minds.' We have all individually written Biog's below so you can learn about every one of us and what we all do. 

This campaign has been brought together for many reasons. The first is we've never been able to do a festival run before. We all work in other jobs throughout the week, so we make our projects in our free time and they are all self funded. 
With this backing we hope to raise enough to enter at least 30 festivals worldwide. From The UK, to the rest of Europe, Asia, Australia, Canada and America. We are constantly researching our most desired one's so there may be more added along the way. In addition to this we will be offering rewards to those who become one of our backers.  
The second reason is that this film contains an important message that is very close to some of us. Families are torn apart every day, all over the world and our film shows one of the many situations that occur from the effects of Dementia. As such, we will be donating 10% of all money raised to a UK based Dementia charity. We will announce our chosen charity later in the campaign. Finally 90% of the film has been completed. We're asking for help to finish the remainder of the post-production process of 'Fractured Minds' and give us the opportunity to reach as many places as possible. 
The challenges we may face with this campaign are literally the unknowns. We don't have any recognised Cast Members or Crew aboard the project. Having said that our plan is to share as much information about everyone as we can so people can get to know us and our work.
Another challenge we may face is that films with this subject matter have been made before, we know that and we support all of them. We do aim to show that our film is different because we show a metaphorical view of inside the mind of a patient suffering from Dementia, where we see a literal sense of how that characters struggle is viewed to the audience. 
Lastly a bit more about our team. We all work as hard as we can, we work very hard. We all want to be a part of an industry that has a lot of setbacks. Every time we create a project we do it because we love it. It's plain and simple. We will be updating the page throughout the campaign to keep everyone up to speed with our progress. Please feel free to share on any social media platforms or places you see relevant. 
Thank you to everyone for reading through our story. 

THE TEAM

Dave O'Rourke - Director 

David is from Dublin and has lived in Scotland for 8 years. After a fantastic experience starring in the feature film 'Saltwater' with Brendan Gleeson, Dave decided he wanted to be a full time Actor. He starred in many film productions including World War Two drama ‘Churchill’ and several commercials including David Beckham’s Haig Whiskey. With years of experience, Dave decided he would like to try stepping behind the camera. His honest approach and previous on screen experience allows him to translate his vision from mind to screen. He has directed several short films as well as advising students on how to tackle their projects with confidence and charisma.

Director Statement

In May 2018, my filmmaking friends and I, got together to take part in an annual film competition. In most projects, we have worked with the same people every year because everyone in the group is passionate, great fun and they all have their full trust in each other to do the best job possible. To sum up, we were all like a family! This year we decided to work on a film that was different to anything we had worked on before. We wanted to tell a story that many people and many families have gone through. Maria has worked in hospitals with dementia patients for many years and had the experience and input we needed to make this project.  I won't share on here how this project affected us all because that's something special we are lucky and fortunate enough to keep in our own minds but I can tell you that it was the most challenging, emotional and incredible weekend we've ever experienced, and it's brought us all much closer. We want others to learn from this film and to show how tough, complicated and precious life can be.

Kristopher Blair - Producer & plays 'Alex'

Kristopher has been working as an Actor in Glasgow for the past six years. He trained at the University West of Scotland, Unsub Actors and most recently studies online classes with actress Alison Lohman. Kristopher also won Best Newcomer at the UK Screen Acting and Film Academy in Scotland.

Kristopher has taken on many challenging roles including a guest appearance in BBC One’s Armchair Detectives and also playing a villain in Karen Gillan’s directorial debut The Party’s Just Beginning. Previous to Acting, Kristopher also studied filmmaking and has produced and directed several short films including ‘Tracks’ which won Best Original Film at the 2016 Scottish Short Film Festival. When Kristopher is not Acting, he is a Television Researcher and has worked on many television shows including BBC One’s Impossible and ITV’s Big Star’s Little Star.  Kristopher says that Fractured Minds is a project that he is extremely proud of and is so happy that the film is being pushed through IndieGoGo.

Maria Bell - plays 'Dr McKenzie' 

Maria has been nursing for many years and three years ago she decided to follow her life long passion for film and TV. Maria commenced acting training with the UK Screen Acting Academy in Glasgow who taught her a psychological approach to acting which she continued to practice.
Maria has performed on screen dramatic and comedic roles in monologues and duologues and has acted in four short films previous to Fractured Minds.
Maria loves working with fellow actors and the connection made with each actor in each moment, both impacting each other’s performance, she says it's brilliant!
Maria was attracted to join this project for two reasons. The first was the opportunity to work with the actors Kristopher and Stephen and director Dave O’Rourke. The second was the script. A dramatic story of the impact of Dementia on a mother and her two sons was very powerful and moving. 

Stephen Kerr - plays 'Rick'

As an ex-circus performer, Stephen got his first television role in 2015 in the music video for the Glasgow based band, 'Prides', doing what he knew best. This sparked an interest in pursuing acting as a career and putting his performance skills to the test.

Stephen commenced studying at the UK Screen Acting Academy, shortly after, receiving the award for 'Best Actor' in 2016. He has worked in numerous short and feature films since, most notably, multi- award winning 'Mia: A Rapture 2.0 Production' and 'Asset Management', whereby he was also nominated for 'Best Actor'. Stephen's most recent project 'Automata', premiered worldwide at Arrow Video Frightfest last month in Glasgow. His next role is a project for HEX Media called 'For We Are Many.'

Stephen was attracted to this project as the subject matter carried an important and relatable message to the audience. This film explores emotional, yet controversial topics that linger in your mind well after viewing.

Kimberley Timoney - MakeUp & SFX Artist

Growing up with a love of all things crafty and creative, Kimberley began her career path training as an Architect with a dream to affect people’s perceptions and feelings through design. During these years she travelled, developed her photography skills and expanded her creative drive. Kimberley began to see her true creative self was reflected in the design and the art of people through character creation.

Kimberley loves to be creative and enjoy working with a variety of makeup mediums. From commercial to fashion to avant-garde. Expressive makeup application is one of her big passions and giving an actor the visual look to match their character and watching how it can fuel them for their role is incredible, nothing compares to working on set as part of a creative team. Her main passion is working in the film industry and being part of crew of like-minded, creative people. Through her experience she is constantly learning and refining her craft and she has advanced her skills in special effects make up through the teaching of the famous Neil Gorton. 

Kimberley has been working in this industry for two years now and she is very excited about the future of Scottish film as it’s on the rise. She can see a lot more opportunities coming our way and it’s fantastic! 

Stuart Hatch - Director of Photography

Stuart is one of Scotland’s up and coming videographers. Initially he followed his passion and studied photography and worked his way up through the ranks at tilllate magazine and became Scottish Operations Manager, photographing and marketing Scotlands biggest festivals, nightclubs, and events.

Stuart then started a new role as a photographer for BMW and quickly progressed up through the ranks and was given the opportunity to design and equip his own film studio at Europe’s largest privately owned car dealer within their marketing department. He worked here for almost eight years, building up a team of filmmakers creating stunning and more importantly - engaging video.

Stuart then moved to a food and drink marketing specialist where the director, took him under their wing and introduced him to agency life. His knowledge and drive for video became bigger than ever and he’s recently join one of the UK’s leading video marketing agencies.

Stuart is really proud to have worked on Fractured Minds and the team was really chuffed to have him on board. We could feel the power of the script coming through the camera lens and nobody could have done that but him. 

Alistair Biggar - Sound

Alistair started his working life as a BBC Engineer in the sixties, then working for STV Glasgow, firstly as a sound technician, Central Area Duty Engineer, and lastly Technical Support Engineer. After a spell of Management he took early redundancy. Since then he has been making films working with other film-makers and has won the prestigious “Pilgrim Trust Award” in Edinburgh twice with his documentaries “Rouken Glen the Story” and “The Story of the Doulton Fountain” Alistair has been involved over the last five years with dialogue sound recording and has worked on more than 20 film productions, including Good Intentions (2013) and Cleek (2015).  

John McFarlane - Composer

Drawing on over fifteen years’ experience as a performing and recording musician in a broad range of contemporary musical genres, John is quickly emerging as one of Scotland’s most versatile and highly creative composers writing in the world of TV, Film, Games and Advertising. Known for crafting emotional, thrilling and atmospheric landscapes, John is equally skilled in writing for orchestra as he is in the manipulation of synthesisers in wholly electronic scores.

John previously studied at the London College of Music and is currently studying Master of Fine Arts in professional Composition and Orchestration.

He has worked as a Composer on 12 different film productions and has received two Best Original Score Awards.

Mingaile Anderson - Production Assistant

Mingaile has a full time career in a completely unrelated industry - ecology. While she loves what she does on a day to day basis, Mingaile also have a strong passion for movies. Meeting Dave and Kris threw her into a whirlwind of amazing projects, each one of them giving her an opportunity to catch a glimpse into the movie making industry and learn, try, help, and strike new relationships. Fractured minds was one of those incredible projects. But also it was more than that. It started as yet another fun filled filming week, but we had no idea where it would take us. And it surprised, touched us and gave us a heart breaking insight into the effects of dementia. The final cut was met with tears and reassuring hugs amongst the team.

Nathan Shepka - Editor

Nathan has been running a small independent production company since 2013, specialising in short action thrillers. As well as acting, producing, directing and writing the films, he has recently begun to edit both his own fictional works and also commercial projects. Nathan really enjoyed working on Fractured Minds as it was a change of pace for him in terms of the genre and it was great to work on editing other actors' performances and really taking the depth of those into the edit.'

FINAL STATEMENT

Our aim is to raise £1300 to finish Fractured Mind's post-production and to allow our film the best chance possible of a successful festival run. We are also going to donate 10% of all money raised to a UK based Dementia charity. We will announce our chosen charity later in the campaign. 

If we are successful early in our campaign then we will push our funding goal to £2000 in order to reach out to more places. Our main goal is to make this film as best as we can, to give us a voice and to spread the message of the difficulties people face when suffering from Dementia.

Thank you - The FM Team