At last! A brand new short film from Richard Dadd and Dan Fryer: The Outer Circle.

This one has had an unusually long gestation.

In 2016, we began work on a TV pilot for a proposed series called The Mixed Bag, which was to be a showcase of comedy, music, new writing and short film focused on the West Midlands. Among the many things sketched out for future episodes, I proposed a dramatised short story about a man who spends his days stuck on the Number 11 bus, unable to make progress in his life as he goes round and round forever.

But it soon became clear the pilot wasn’t going to lead to a series, so I started thinking about recycling the story as a short film.

Our plan was to keep the production as small and basic as possible. We shot on location in Birmingham, with Dan acting as a one-man film crew, while Richard and local actress Catrin Huitson provided things for him to point a camera at.

The excellent music was then composed and performed by Natasha Davies, a local musician Richard discovered playing at The Spotted Dog pub in Digbeth.

Getting the edit completed has taken far longer than we ideally would’ve liked – largely owing to Dan being such a massive Julian these days – but we got there in the end.