why 'optimist'?...
"The point of living and of being an optimist is to be foolish enough to believe the best is yet to come."
Peter Ustinov "An optimist is the human personification of spring." Susan J Bissonette "For myself I am an optimist - it does not seem to be much use being anything else." Winston Churchill Sebastian Michael: "Obviously ‘optimist’ characterises me and to some extent what I do (or, you might say, the attempt alone of doing it...). But the name is in fact directly inspired by the Turin Brakes: in the two or three months leading up to getting started, I happened to keep listening to their ‘Optimist Album’ with the result that when it came to choosing a name for my company I thought: this just about sums it up." ...and why 'creations'?
"Optimist isn’t primarily about production, it’s about creating work and enabling work to be created. So we may be involved in projects which we don’t produce ourselves, and on some occasions we may be coproducers, or initiators of a project.
We don’t want to limit ourselves in the types of media we work in and what platforms we use: the ‘landscape’ is continually evolving, also on a personal level: I started out as a writer, then became involved with video creation (which more often than not covers the whole process from idea to final output on a viewable format), then I started to direct and produce digital film, and I’ve always been active in theatre, mostly as a writer, but also as a producer, as a director and as a performer. I do not perceive the boundaries between disciplines, such as they were, as meaningful and so it does not make sense to be restricted by them." |
the story so far
Back in 2004, the sudden availability of a camera, a location and a leading actress prompted Sebastian Michael to seize the day and realise a long-harboured desire to branch out from mainly writing for (and performing on) the stage into film making...
also visit
sebastianmichael.com
for everything there is to know about Optimist Creations founder Sebastian Michael |
Our first project was a half hour short, Twenty-Six Takes on Life Without Allen, which screened at festivals in Chicago, Los Angeles, Padua, Lisbon and London. This was followed in 2006 by The Study of Bunkers & Mounds in a Temperate Climate (Relatively Speaking), which was “highly commended” at the TCM classic shorts competition and screened in the official selection of the Locarno International Film Festival the following year.
Next came Daisy's Last Stand, which was written and directed by Gary Grant and produced by Sebastian Michael, and won the London ‘Best of Boroughs’ Audience Award 2009. Our first feature film The Hour of Living was shot in Switzerland, Cornwall, London and Budapest in October 2010 on HD and completed postproduction in February 2012. It received its Swiss premiere in June, where it was nominated for the Basel Film Prize 2012 in the 'Best Feature' category, and has so far been shown at festivals also in Italy, New York and Australia. Our follow-up feature Soho, Night 9X9 is about to go into pre-production. While in the early stages we focused on film and video, in 2008 we widened our scope to theatre with a rehearsed reading of Top Story at the ICA London. This was followed by a coproduction with Arcola Theatre and the premiere there of Elder Latimer is in Love in September 2009.
Spring 2010 saw a rehearsed reading of Baur Au Lac, and this was followed by a four-week run of Top Story at The Old Vic Tunnels in January 2013. In August 2014, we premiered The Sonneteer at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and we're now looking into the possibilities of giving this a London run. Optimist is also the imprint under which Sebastian's novel Angel, the playtexts of Elder Latimer is in Love and Top Story and the screenplay of The Hour of Living have been published. If you want to know more about us, feel free to drop us a line; or if you just want to be kept in the loop about what’s happening, and take advantage of special early booking offers, please join our email list here.
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