A fantastic 18 months for Focus productions

The last 18 months have been our busiest and most successful ever.

With two Royal Television Society Awards and a BAFTA nomination for our worldwide hit documentary, The Boy with the Incredible Brain ( or Brainman as it’s known internationally). One critic called it “the most incredible film I have ever seen on television”. Our distributors Channel 4 International have sold this film to over 40 countries and its hard to avoid seeing it if you ever fly BA or Virgin and many other airlines.

The subject of the film, the mind boggling savant Daniel Tammet, has published a best-selling book, Born on a Blue Day, which describes much of the making of this film, which has to date been re-printed five times, it was No.1 on the Amazon best-sellers list and no 9 in the Sunday Times list. The film continues to attract huge audiences all over the world and we receive requests fvor copies nearly every day, many from universities, schools and colleges.
Brainman has been a hard act to follow, but we had another massive success with our second savant film The Real Rainman which looked at the life and remarkable abilities of Kim Peek, whose story inspired the part played by Dustin Hoffman in the movie Rainman. Commissioned by Five, Discovery Science Channel and the History Channel, this film became the most requested film at Cannes earlier this year for our distributor C4i.
After Real Rainman we began production on Painting The Mind, a one hour documentary for Channel 4 which looks at the origins of art and creativity in the brain, featuring two artists who became passionate painters following a stroke, it also featured the extraordinary child savant artist Ping Lian and the amazing memory artist Franco Magnani.
We completed production of our long-awaited film on the musical savant genius Derek Paraviccini. The film called The Musical Genius, (for Five and Discovery Health) directed by Ben Gooder unravels the mind of Derek who is both blind and severely learning impaired – yet can play anything at all on the piano. Derek is studied by a glittering array of top scientists including Professor Linda Pring , Professor John Sloboda and Professor Simon Baron Cohen who carry out some most revealing experiments – and a few clues are revealed. – yet no one can really understand the root of his uncanny ability.

In the climax of the film Derek meets up with another blind musical savant the 11 year old Rex Clack in Los Angeles- where they play together in front of 10,000 people. Congratulations to the brilliant Dr Adam Ockelford, who taught Derek to play the piano, for recently selling Derek’s story to Random House publishing.
Our Dispatches Investigation ( The Drug Trial that Went Wrong for Channel 4) was completed in September 2006 – it looked into the drug trial which left 6 men seriously ill, produced and directed by Karen Edwards with Alison Ramsay as AP. For this production we had exclusive access to Ryan Wilson, the man most seriously injured by the experimental monoclonal antibody drug TG1412 – his fingers and toes were turned black by gangrene a side effect of the drug – and he has had to have these amputated. Brian Deer’s investigation for this film received widespread press coverage and was nominated for a Royal Television Society Journalism Award in February 2007.
We have had some great new staff at Focus including Leanne Hemings as our wonderful new production manager, Billy Wright the very talented UWE graduate who was last year’s graduate trainee is now going travelling having worked on 3 of our latest TV films and our University of Bristol DVD. We welcome back the amazingly gifted gentle giant Josh Biggs as in-house cameraman and editor and we welcome the highly talented Naomi Harvey as our new Head of Development.
We currently have three major series under development and as soon as we have definite news about these new productions we will make them public here on this website. In the meantime, we always welcome good ideas – see CONTACT to send us your ideas.
Martin Weitz, Executive Producer, Focus Productions

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