Kickstarter

'The Painter and the Thief' is a 25-minute British adventure/drama, shooting in February, being made by a group of experienced student filmmakers for their final project at the University of York. The idea was pitched to heads of the Film and Television department where it was given the green-light and the crew enabled access to a range of high-standard industry equipment, including Flame Premium picture finishing, a D-Command mixing desk, several Sony F3s and the Red Epic (the same camera used in the upcoming Hobbit movie). 

Filming locations will range from various scenic valleys of the Peak District, an American-styled diner and a sprawling art gallery where the climactic heist takes place. The university and crew have provided a considerable amount of money for the project but we still need crowd-funding to get us the rest of the way. £5000 from Kickstarter would be enough to pay for  professional actors, rigs and that all-important catering. 

In return for your pledges there is a whole list of rewards at the side of the page and we will be releasing update videos to show how the money has helped during production.

It is a film about the open road and two people who meet upon it: Milo Thomas, a failed artist recently made homeless due to a recent split with his girlfriend, and Anastasia Mak, a spirited woman turned to thievery and pickpocketing after exile from her family's oil empire. Both are lost and alone and terribly self-involved, but when Milo hitch-hikes a lift in Anna's stolen car they quickly strike up an entertaining and most unusual friendship…

          He likes to paint…                           …she has a penchant for crime. 

          He lacks confidence...                         …and she has too much of it.

Anastasia is so overly sure in herself that she will never change her ways, she has no arc, and so the narrative is driven by how her world-view changes Milo as a person: how he is drawn to her, corrupted, made to steal paintings instead of create them, rejected by the woman romantically and eventually made to see her as the platonic friend she is. 

Consequently, unlike most films, it is not about a man and a woman getting together but about the man getting over his expectations that such a thing needs to happen in the first place, in doing so saving his friendship with his ex and bringing the whole story full circle.

If you're interested in our production then you might want to check out our blog, subscribe to our twitter feed, or scroll down and watch the writer/director's last film, a dark comedy about a man who is fatally allergic to happiness: