Building on the world established in the original, Seattle True Independent Film Festival-selected short Tantamount To Treason has been a background project for Andrew Hall and his production team since the film’s debut in 2012. The original ten-page screenplay spawned an expansive concept for a web series of three 15-minute episodes, spanning continents and history as it explored the web of lies and difficult truths of the three main characters. Involvement and discussions with the cast, Richard Lott, Dom Nolan and Chris Winter, and DP-editor Ashley Hughes, have been ongoing while each pursues their own endeavours around the world in recent years.

Taking that screenplay, drafted shortly after the completion of the student short, the team are pleased to be working now with a reworked, redeveloped and largely rewritten plotline covering three longer episodes, proposals to re-shoot the original film – now treated as a pilot into the series – and a much wider array of characters. With the involvement of Radcliffe Camera Pictures for initial development in the New Year, original cast members Richard Lott and Dom Nolan are meeting writer Andrew Hall later this month for the first table reading of the screenplay, an essential part of the writing process in refining dialogue and the tone of each scene. Joining the team by video link from Australia is actor Chris Winter, a complexity appropriate to his character in the series: a shadowy foreign intelligence director.

It has yet to be confirmed whether the crew will remain similar to the original production, with discussions slated for January on whether Andrew would return to direct the project, the possible appointment of a London co-producer, and an expansion on the cinematography team to enable the production to shoot with multiple cameras. This latter development would offer a major boost to the scripting, which is set in a world littered with the visual language of Bourne director Paul Greengrass, and the style of Jon Cassar’s work on 24. Watch this space.