Kindboy films is the film and TV production company behind the hit film ‘SOBER’.
Kindboy films are Matthew Cooper, Dean Smith and Tom Gibbons.
About – Sober the new comedy film.
Sober is a new comedy feature film due for release in APRIL 2025 – free to view on YouTube.
Sober stars and is co-written by Dean Smith (Waterloo Road/ Last Tango in Halifax) and Tom Gibbons (Funny Cow/ The Archers).
The film was directed and co-written by Matthew Cooper (Eastenders / Emmerdale / Hollyoaks).
The film was made entirely independently and shot on location in Leeds in 2023.
The Plot of Sober:
On the day his first child is born, Dan (Dean Smith) decides to have a swift pint with his best friend Ant (Tom Gibbons) before he goes to the hospital to see girlfriend and son. Halfway down the pint, all hell breaks loose, and Dan and Ant are thrown into a comedy adventure that involves beers, clowns, gangsters, Marcelo Bielsa, sister-in-laws on the war path, icebergs, double dishwashers, and an imaginary Jockey handing out tips on a no chance horse called Dancer.
Wetting the baby’s head will never be the same again.
Some blogposts about Sober (and the making of it) are below.
The Idea For Sober (2023) – By Dean Smith
If you’ve read Tom Gibbons blog on Dylan Ogden then you’ll know that we met Mat back in 2006 making
that web series. We had loads of fun and vowed to work together again immediately! So
obviously, and with much haste, 16 years later we got around to it.
After the never ending lockdowns, various cancelled or postponed jobs, and many fucking zoom
quizzes of 2020 and 2021, Tom was given an opportunity to put on a play at the studio of Ilkley
Playhouse in October 2021. Whatever he wanted. Free space. Sell tickets. Tell us a story.
Desperate for creative ventures he tentatively and cooly said ‘YES PLEASE! NOW PLEASE!
WHEN IS IT? HOW LONG FOR? YES PLEASE!’. And so we set about rehearsing and staging a
play Tom was a huge fan of. Letter To Buddha by Sarah Nelson.
We had a wicked time creating and playing and being back on stage. We invited loads of mates,
about 6 people from Ilkley came, bless them, and we stuck it all over social media. The play went
really well, we were immensely proud of it. We even managed to get some great reviews but
probably most importantly for this story – Matthew Cooper (Sober Director) Esquire had seen one of my posts
about it. And so, with his wife Ali on the Saturday night, came along and watch.
One standing ovation (hold for applause…) later we are stood in the bar at the theatre and Mat is
cooking up an idea. He has a script he wrote back in the late 90s that got optioned by Universal
but it never got made. If we spent some time rewriting and collaborating on a slightly new angle it
might just work. Mat had loved seeing that, 16 years after the series we’d starred in together,
myself and Tom still had great chemistry and was bowled over that we had stayed good mates for
this long. He thought that if we could capture some of that on screen, that the story of Sober
would work really well. And might be a good platform for the two of us as actors, for Mat as a
writer/director and for the three of us as filmmakers.
So early in 2022 we got together in, of course, Mats van. Drove to, of course, a nature reserve
somewhere just outside Leeds. And, of course, wrote the greatest movie of all time (that has been
written on national trust property). Well we didn’t write all of it. We got ideas down and discussed
character and what kind of story it was going to be. Mat went away and adapted Sober (1998) in
to what would become Sober (2023).
A few drafts back and forth and by the start of 2023 we were ready to start casting and planning the shoot.
A chance meeting that started in an audition room at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in 2006, with
16 year old Tom and I auditioning for a random writer, Mat, had become a production company, a
locked shooting script, a very talented cast (present company absofuckinglutely included) and a
studio and locations booked for April 2023’s shoot.
Ambitious, funny, touching and quintessentially ‘Leeds’. We thought – ‘We might just have
something here’…
Tom Gibbons talks Dylan Ogden – Sober behind the scenes
In 2005 I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to audition for the ITV Television
Workshop, having been well established in Nottingham for many years (think Jack O’Connell
and Samantha Morton) and having built a sizeable reputation within the industry this was a
great opportunity and one I will always be grateful for at the age of 15.
Having successfully navigated my way through the first round of auditions I went on to meet
Dean Smith (my Sober co-star) at the recall, one doesn’t simply forget hair that curly.
Through luck, and potentially a small amount of talent, we were both fortunate enough to get a place in the original Leeds group.
Roughly a year went by of weekly Friday classes at the then West Yorkshire Playhouse and
various productions with the workshop. Dean and I had built up a rapport on and off stage
at this point. Bonding over how bad Leeds United were (are), The first couple of Artic
Monkeys albums and our unwavering ability to put make up on, dress up and pretend to be
somebody else.
This is when Matt Cooper (Sober director) came into our lives in the form of a group audition for an online
series he had written, ‘Dylan Ogden’, directed by Ian Bevitt and produced by Martyn Smith.
This was my first real audition process, made so much easier being there with a group of
friends from the workshop who I had come to love and respect, that coupled with the
relaxed style and passion for the job of Matt, Ian and Martyn. We did a lot of improvisation
work based around the characters. Dean auditioning as Dylan and me as the notorious
Quinny, who will always have a special place in my heart.
I think that through working together weekly at the workshop, that during the improvs in
the audition me and Dean had a strong dynamic and played off each others strengths well,
luckily this came across to Matt and the guys who cast us as the two leads, a phone call I will
never forget.
The hard work started straight away with roughly 10 episodes of scripts to learn in roughly
three days. All absolutely worth it and incredibly easy to learn because of Matt’s beautifully
put together and fluid writing style. One of my favourite parts of the day was the Taxi ride
into Harrogate with Dean, cute I know. 10 episodes shot over four days with a wonderful
cast and crew, open to experimenting and trying new things on set I could not have wished
for a better first job.
Unfortunately the show was probably a little ahead of its time with web series not really
being ‘a thing’ at that point. No Netflix, no iplayer, you get the idea. Nobody was watching
things regularly online this was one of the first of its kind. MySpace initially wanted to buy it
and then didn’t want to buy it. Then Facebook turned up and MySpace became as relevant
Liz Truss.
There was talk of a second series but that didn’t come to fruition, possibly because of the
first series never really finding a home. But the important thing that remained was the
connections and relationship made with Matt, Ian and Martyn. With Ian having cast both
me and Dean in TV shows over the years.
But who would’ve thought 16 years later myself, Dean and Matt would be back on a set
together, collaborating on an exciting project and potentially the greatest film ever made…
(in Leeds… in 9 days… on a budget of 40p and a packet of pork scratchings).
Tom Gibbons
How Sober got delivered – part one of two – by Matthew Cooper Sober director.
This is a very long story and anyone reading who is interested in a career in scriptwriting or filmmaking in the UK might not like a lot of what they read here.
I wrote the original draft of Sober – the movie in 1998. Yes, 1998. Its only just got made in 2023 – when me and the two lead actors self- financed it.
At the time I wrote the script, I was in my early twenties and had already some success as a scriptwriter (even though I was incredibly young). I’d had a short film made and shown on CH4 – the short film starred Ewan McGregor in an early role and was directed by a chap called Justin Chadwick – who would go on to direct some big-ish Hollywood costume dramas and Idris Elba in The Long Walk to Freedom.
The short film (you can see it here) was made as part of a big competition – sponsored by Lloyds Bank – and it got loads of publicity and the full weight of CH4 and Lloyds Bank behind it. The entire process was made into a documentary (which you can watch here), and I got a very quick education about TV and film (some of these lessons still resonate today).
I’d also sold a screenplay to the now quite rightfully disgraced Miramax when they appeared in the UK in the 1990s.
Despite all this early success, there wasn’t a great deal of money in scriptwriting (Miramax paid me £5k for the option on my feature film script) I’d left school at 16 and worked in retail for three years – when I came to write Sober I was working as a picker and despatch guy at the Burton’s Warehouse in Leeds on Hudson Road.
Sober – the movie
Picking and packing clothes for the (now sadly disappeared) Burton’s group was a very physical job, which is great when you’re 21, and I worked alongside some great people – many young, about my age. The job back then was paid weekly! And I always seemed to have some cash in my pocket. I loved working there – and used the three days off we got a week to continue to write scripts. I look back on my two years working at Burton’s fondly.
Sober was one the scripts I wrote while working at Burtons– and it was based partially on a true story – someone I knows wife’s gave birth – and he went for a pint before visiting the hospital – one pint turned to ten and when he finally visited his wife and son – he was very, very drunk.
I took that basic story – and built a feature film script out of it.
The initial idea was to shoot the script myself – do something like Kevin Smith did with Clerks. Even back then in 1998 – I didn’t really want to be a screenwriter I wanted to direct. I thought writing scripts was a way to get into directing.
I entered the finished script (written over six months – and revised over two or three drafts) into UK screenwriting competition – called the Oscar Moore Script Prize.
Oscar Moore was a Guardian journalist and a film fan, when he died a group of friends set up a bursary to help UK scriptwriters get films made – the first year of the competition the genre was ‘Comedy’ and I entered Sober.
The script won the prize – and I was told that judges Duncan Kenworthy (Four Weddings and a Funeral) and Andrew Macdonald (Trainspotting) liked the script enough they would consider making it.
Sober – comedy film set in Leeds
I approached my pal Justin Chadwick and let him read the script – at the time Justin was directing EastEnders, but was considered a young up coming filmmaker to watch. Justin got together two producers with excellent track records and we approached Duncan and Andrew – who set up a meeting and agreed to option the script with a view to making it on video – and on a low budget – which funnily enough was my plan when I first wrote the script BUT – Duncan and Andrew’s idea of a low budget was half a million quid – provided by their backers Universal Pictures (I was planning to shoot it for five grand).
During this time, I landed my first literary agent – and very quickly I found myself writing episode after episode of the Yorkshire TV soap opera Emmerdale.
Writing Emmerdale was wonderful experience – I was the youngest writer they’d ever had – and the money was phenomenal.
Sober the film, rumbled on in the background – Universal dropped the project (too risky) and the script was shopped around every UK producer and production company we could think of – until, it all just fizzled out.
I did various rewrites and rejigs over the years of the same story (even a novel version appeared briefly – written by myself and I’m no novelist).
But – my TV script writing career went from strength to strength – with Sober – as my calling card script opening doors everywhere – I ended up on Family Affairs for Ch5 (anther soap opera which eventually was cancelled) as well as rocking up at EastEnders at the time Alfie and Kat where winning the hearts of the nation (I did a year on Eastenders and mostly wrote Kat and Alfie stuff). I finally landed on Hollyoaks in 2006 / 2007 – just in time to revamp the show (and triple its viewing figures).
Sober remained loved but unmade. And as the years progressed so did other attempts to get a feature film script made:
My own unmade feature film scripts to date are many – over the past two decades I’ve written ten or so original and still unmade feature film scripts (that isn’t counting projects producers have paid me to write) and with each new original script I often, went through a similar process to Sober – initial interest – some actually getting quite close to production- before (just like Sober) everything falls apart.
Over the years I’ve worked as an uncredited writer and script consultant on various feature films on both sides of the Atlantic, and as a script writer for hire – and some of these projects have got made – but in most instances – the finance to get these films made was provided by the family of the director (having a rich mum or dad is the only way to get a film made in the UK – Guy Richie – Chris Nolan – Jon Baird – their parents provided the budgets for their first films). Unlike Guy Richie, my dad wasn’t richer than the Royal Family – so I came unstuck.
The UK film industry – is very busy – but that’s the production arm. Making US studio films in our studios and our countryside and cities – thanks to tax cuts to US producers – the UK film industry gives tax cuts totalling £500m per year to the Americans – while spend on the UK film business is less than £80m per year (divided between usually around 60 legit films – giving them TV level budgets of £2m each in most cases) One recent Avengers film shot in the UK – received more in tax breaks than the ENTIRE UK film business did for the whole year.
We used to have CH4 and BBC films making really good indigenous films back in the 80s and 90s – but like the great BBC drama department that came before it – all that money, and all that talent and ambition has gone from the UK film business – all we make now are low budget TV movies. We haven’t had a proper functioning indigenous film business for decades now.
And that’s where I found myself – bored of working in the trenches of UK TV – and unable to get a film made in a UK film business that didn’t really exist anymore.
And then something happened. It was called WEB 2.0. It was technology. And it was going to change EVERYTHING….
How ‘Sober the movie’ got delivered – part two of two – by Matthew Cooper ‘Sober’ director.
This continues from the first blogpost which is here – if you want to read part one…
So…
Web 2.0 arrived in the UK in around 2006/2007 – remember before that time there was no Facebook or YouTube – I was working as a scriptwriter and storyline writer on Hollyoaks at this time – I remember looking at MySpace and thinking – this will be big (lol) but when YouTube arrived – I knew (somewhere in my head) that the game was changing.
I helped to take Hollyoaks from half a million viewers to 3 million viewers per episode – when I wrote Emmerdale we got around 12 million viewers per ep – when I was on Eastenders they could get 15 million viewers at time. Coronation Street was king of the TV soaps most of the time – again – getting 15/16/17 million viewers (and ITV getting all the revenue from advertisers who paid premium for those ad slots).
That was 2006/2007 – before web 2.0 arrived.
The current viewing figures for the soaps are now (in 2023)
· Coronation Street (still top) gets 6 million viewers on average
· Emmerdale gets 5 million
· Eastenders gets 4 million
· Hollyoaks gets 725,000 viewers
The advertising sell for these slots will have become much cheaper (to the extent that CH4 is nearly going bust because the sale of ads on their channel has fallen through the floor).
And these figures are all pretty generous – Hollyoaks can get below 500k and both EastEnders and Emmerdale can get very low viewing figs too (around 3 million). Corrie can get half its 6 million at times as well.
The viewers have gone somewhere else – and in 2006/7 it seemed a no-brainer to me that viewers eyes would be grabbed by YouTube or MySpace – ITV and BBC for years had run down its children’s TV offering – kids where already going on games and online rather than watching TV (without proper kids TV in the schedules for years prior to this kids never really got in the habit of watching TV the way my generation did) – alongside MySpace was a children’s social network called Bebo – getting millions of sign ups.
Then, around this time came the smart phone – a phone that could be used to call or text – or watch YouTube / surf the net – or log onto MySpace.
By the time I left Hollyoaks in 2007 – I was reading more books about the web that I was about almost anything else – I was sure that learning about this stuff could be applied to my scriptwriting and filmmaking at some point.
It was around this time that I was approached by hot-shot soap director Ian Bevitt (Emmerdale / Corrie and Inside Number9 these days) and renowned producer Martyn Smith (Dragon’s Den and the Apprentice) to create a teen soap for an online audience.
I’ve written before about the process of creating the series Dylan Ogden (you can read about it here on my own scriptwriting website). Writing Dylan Ogden combined my scriptwriting career with my interests in what was then called ‘new media’.
Sober the movie
Dylan Ogden was where I first met the super talented Dean Smith and Tom Gibbons – even in their early teens it was clear they were funny and intelligent young actors.
Dylan Ogden was too early – it was MySpace – when a few years later it could have been Facebook.
But over the years since – I have kept in touch and watched with pride as Dean and Tom’s careers blossomed as actors.
So, I was again at a bit of a crossroads (no soap pun intended) – I was kind of tired of TV – and now had an interest and passion for doing something online – using digital tools (I just didn’t know what it was).
In between scriptwriting gigs I took a job working for a charity in Leeds, it was only meant to be for a year or two. But the charity suddenly started a social media team – this will have been 2009 – and I got a job working in that social media team – and I ended up working at the charity in digital / online communications and marketing and social media for ten years (2008 – to around 2019). Also, during this period – I started a website selling my services as a scriptwriter (I no longer had an agent – as I’d lost all interesting in writing existing shows – which UK scriptwriters need to do to pay the bills – original commission are rare – and usually go only to the top few writers in the business – nobody else gets a look in).
The website selling my scriptwriting services benefitted from all I’d learned working for the charity – I used SEO techniques and SEM techniques and the website started to rank very well on search engines for all kinds of scriptwriting queries – and low and behold – by 2014 I was getting tons and tons of scriptwriting work (from producers and directors all over the world).
This work could be commissions for original scripts or…
- Book adaptations
- Script reports and analysis
- Rewrite jobs -on all sorts of films and TV
- Storyline writing and consultancy for TV producers.
- Plain old script reading reports for new writers
So much work came in at times I started to sell it to other scriptwriters.
By 2019, I’d paid off my mortgage and had purchased a pile of digital editing PCs and camcorders and digital cameras – I had enough to make a film I thought – not just enough to kit to make a film – but enough knowledge of how the web worked to sell and distribute a film myself.
There’s a lot of talk about ‘Gatekeepers’ in film and TV – what Gatekeepers are really, are people with the access to finance who decide what gets made with the funds they have.
Gatekeepers might mean Hollywood producers and studios execs (who have to be convinced your project will make money and be a good investment).
They might be agents – who if you don’t have a good agent – your stuff won’t even get in front of anyone who can make a decision (and believe me there are lots of bad / useless agents out there – so even if you have an agent – it doesn’t mean they can get your stuff read or get you in a room with someone who can make a decision on your script – bad agents are worse than no agent at all in many ways.)
Heads of broadcast networks are gatekeepers – they decide what original drama or comedy ends up getting made by their network – and they, like to stack the odds as much as possible – known writers – known actors – known producers and directors – if you’re not known at a tabloid newspaper level (like Jimmy McGovern or Russell T Davies or Sally Wainwright for example) – you’re not getting in the door.
Sober the comedy film
Funding bodies – BFI – Creative England – local screen agencies too – these places dole out Lottery cash to fund films – there’s been a lot of bad publicity about the BFI – and historically the screen agencies were rumoured to be corrupt and what money they did give out often went to friends or family of people who worked within the organisations – things have improved in my experience of the screen agencies (who lost most of their funding after the dreaded Brexit calamity)– but the BFI itself is NOT FIT FOR PURPOSE and if anything is getting worse – and needs closing down asap please.
So, with my website and scriptwriting work – I seemed to have bypassed needing an agent – and I even got work from Hollywood (by passing not just gatekeepers there – but being based in the North of England I managed to bypass an entire continent and time zone).
So, I wanted to direct (or course) but seriously– from the very start of my career and before – my main aim was to direct stuff. I started making films on Super 8mm cine film when I was a teenager – Here’s one below a Leeds set gangster film called Point Blank which I wrote and directed when I was 16 years old!
At 16 – I didn’t want to be a scriptwriter I wanted to direct – and read that script writing was a good way in (that might be correct in America – its not at all in the UK).
Anyway – I was confident that with online tools now available and the cheapness of good digital video equipment and editing and postproduction solution that I could now make a film on the cheap and release it (and sell it) online.
Making a low budget movie is pretty hard – but I also decided to do it without a script – and that the actors would improvise the whole thing. Mad ideas. Then guess what?
Covid 19 happened.
By the time the pandemic had ended (and I lost 4 relatives and some friends to Covid – a very sad time indeed). I had shot four zero budget horror movies and released three of them online – and I’d done pretty well with DVD sales as well.
The three films I’d released online – were really very brilliant learning experiments. And what I had learned was that – I could do everything pretty much myself – production and postproduction (I was even DOP on all four horror films – something I did again on Sober – only on Sober I had to be a proper lighting cameraman for the first time).
One of the first time’s my wife and I went out – as the pandemic came to an ‘end’ (not sure it’s over just yet) was to see Dean Smith and Tom Gibbons in a two man play. As I sat I watched the lads – I decided it was time to make SOBER – but would Dean and Tom be interested in making a zero budget film?
Turns out they were – they helped rewrite the script (from the 1998 version) and they cast it, co-produced and did everything – all along the whole process – side by side with me. Tom even operated the boom mic in many scenes he wasn’t in.
Sober the film shot in Leeds
Its July 2023 – the film is nearly finished – and should be out – later this year or early next. And I think it’s the best thing I’ve ever done.
- It was done without gatekeepers
- It was done without access to funding
- It was made on a zero budget – and it looks good enough to go in the cinema
- We have options one to how we distribute it – ourselves or via a distribution house
This was all done – because the world has moved on from when I wrote the script in 1998 – digital – web 2.0 – social media – the whole landscape has changed – as well as the tech needed to make films.
The world has spun on its axis as far as filmmaking is concerned.
What hasn’t changed?
Good writing is crucial and good actors are crucial. Whatever the future holds new tech or an AI won’t be able to replace my script – or Dean and Tom’s performances and the very human chemistry they have.
So, the film will finally be delivered soon, to a world that’s changed a lot since I wrote the first draft in 1998 – but what hasn’t changed? People, and human relationships – which is what the script was really always about – our humanity – it will ALWAYS be a constant in ever changing times – what it means to be here, now and alive.
See part two for the continuing tale…