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The Opening, the sumptuous new film from Owen Tooth, will be coming to film festivals all over the world in 2007. For further details visit www.toothpix.co.uk .

What do you do when you are trapped? Trapped inside your own head because you have lost your voice.

The Watchmaker wants to tinker inside and find the cogs and screws, take you apart and put you back together.

The Blacksmith wants to use his hammer to beat out your screams.

The Opening is about madness and fear; the claustrophobic terror that comes from within and turns every helping hand into an enemy.

Owen Tooth has created a fantastical new mythology based around his own brushes with madness and his love of nature.

Starring the visceral Rupert Procter, lost alongside a cast of misfits including Elaine Davidson, officially the world's most pierced person with over 4500 piercings. The film also includes Emma Simcock-Tooth's first performance.

Filmed largely on the grounds of Elvaston Castle, Derbyshire (location for the imfamous 1969 film 'Women in Love') The Opening made the most of beautifully mouldering decrepit sets and stunning scenery. The rooms had been untouched for decades, crumbling away, inches deep in dust, the ashes of the past. Elvaston Castle is a popular haunt of mediums and psychics as it has had a very long and colourful history and many violent ends have been met there.

Elvaston Castle as it stands today was created by the 3rd Earl of Harrington and his beloved wife Maria nearly 200 years ago - they wanted to create a gothic fantasy to celebrate their love.

The Opening is especially poignant as even as filming was taking place, arrangements were being made to bulldoze the grounds to make way for private golf courses and the like, turning historic Elvaston into some ghastly soulless executive hotel. We like to think we brought the place to life one more time.

The Opening 2007. Running time 12min53sec

Cast: Rupert Procter - Clinic. Jon Glentoran - Blacksmith. Elaine Davidson - Watchmaker. Olivia Barnard-Firth - speaking lady. Emma Simcock-Tooth - silent lady.

Crew: Owen Tooth - writer, director, cinematographer, editor. Emma Williams - producer. David beard - music. Grant Bridgeman - sound. Paul Allen - gaffer.

Emma's involvement with The Opening

Although The Opening is very much Owen Tooth's own creation, Emma was involved in almost every aspect of the film from acting to props, costumes, concepts, coaching actors, ambulance driving, set scouting, storyboards, driving while filming from the windows of her car, stills photography, graphic design, casting and the eagle-eyed will notice her portrait of the director in the film!

Owen and Emma are very much a husband and wife team, both contributing greatly to eachothers work. Many months before The Opening began conception Emma imagined a surreal short film - maybe only one minute long - where she and her friend Olivia Barnard-Firth would don their favourite costumes and sit in sumptuous surroundings, playing oijia board or drinking tea - much as they perhaps would in their normal lives, but theatrically heightened with beautiful harpsichord and opera music playing - just a little set piece. And her dear friend Elaine Davidson, couldn't she be involved too?

Owen had odd visions and ideas floating about too; a man on a cross burning, a blacksmith - and eventually in a car drive back from a film festival in Nottingham they began to talk, and the seeds of The Opening were sown. Owen wove all these ideas into a modern but timeless fairytale and when out on a walk in the summer of 2005 they happened across the "tractor graveyard" on the grounds of Elvaston Castle The Opening was truly on its way.

As spring was fast approaching in 2006 it was decided that although funding hadn't been obtained filming must go ahead before they lost the mists and dead leaves of winter. And this is a truly amazing thing - that the sumptuous visual feast that is The Opening was created on a shoestring and with the goodwill of talented friends and the ghosts of Elvaston Castle. That is a tribute to Owen's unique and incredible talents as a creator and a director/ cinematographer.

As they were so lucky with sets it was largely a case of removing anything that had arrived there in the past 20 years, anything plastic or modern-looking, doing a bit of set dressing like adding 30 crucifixes from Emma's collection to the Blacksmith's shop - mostly trying not to disturb the unique beauty that time had bestowed. Elaine Davidson was so happy with her Watchmaker's shop set that she wanted to move right in!

Emma's character sketches for Clinic, Blacksmith and Watchmaker were made flesh as Emma put her special costume-aging skills to good use - she is especially proud of Clinic's shirt. The jet-encrusted black bustle-dress Emma wears in her scene is actually her Wedding dress, from the hand of dear friend and costume creator extraordinaire, Olivia "The Wicked Lady" Barnard-Firth sitting beside her in the scene. Emma made her own headdress and of course Olivia made her own entire gown. The scene is actually filmed in Olivia's dining room!

The Opening is a very personal film. As well as fantasy there is an awful lot of reality in it.

Emma created the above paintings (Clinic I and Clinic II respectively) in response to the beautiful decay of the sets in the film and the fragility of the main character, the bizarrely-named Clinic.

"As the posibilites at Elvaston Castle unfolded themselves to us I started to see beautiful 'moments' in the rooms; for example, a corner where the bricks were crumbling, rusted cans untouched for decades, inches of dust. This is when I was inspired to paint the portraits. It was a case then, once the image of what I wanted had crystallised in my head, of waiting till we started filming then as we wrapped on a scene I would just stop the actors, and say 'can you just crouch down there for a minute' or whatever, move the lights around etc and have a brief photoshoot for reference pictures. It was the textures above all which inspired the paintings"