Behind the scenes of Mark Anthony-Games
34-year-old Mark Anthony-Games of Human Voice Productions is a script writer, director, actor, and a hotbed of incredible experiences. His short films cover everything from homelessness to heartbreak.
Mark has written and directed nine films, each line influenced by his own life. He has also starred as a lead actor in eleven films, a stage production, and a feature film – something any budding writer would be lucky to achieve in a lifetime, but Mark has done all this in just nine months.
Mark goes by the name Human Voice not out of vanity, he’s not claiming to be a voice or authority, he simply wants to share his experiences with others, and hopes to help a soul or two in the process. He felt that using Human Voice made him feel safe, whereas allowing people to know his real name meant that he could be found, and therefore ridiculed.
Originally from Eastbourne, Mark is currently living in Worcester where he shot his first film Love Left Town, filmed in just an hour and a half with three actors.
Struggling to accept his talent, it was a way for Mark to test the waters, “it’s an easy subject to relate to, the whole broken heart in love, and that love that haunts you. You may have broken up but you still see them everywhere you go.”
Often writing in the form of poetry and prose, it was through the making of Love Left Town that Mark fell in love with film, “when I saw it acted out it was just really, really humbling. It was more powerful than I realised it could be.” Mark has since written a number of more hard-hitting films, his creativity going from strength to strength.
One such film is Human Waste, a monologue of a homeless man speaking about the ignorance of society and the struggles of drug addiction, he has also battled the difficult topic of domestic abuse in his newest release Silent War, a powerful short film about the struggles suffered by woman in abusive relationships.
Mark began writing as a coping mechanism for the abuse he suffered as a child.
He recalls a time when he was just three or four, “I just started writing lines – it didn’t even make sense, most of it was gibberish, but I remember it felt really good. Then when I was about ten or eleven, I started writing proper lines. I had a little space on the wall where there was a bit of moonlight coming through the curtains, so I’d whack a piece of paper up there and then just write random lines to get my aggression and my feelings that I didn’t understand out, and I realised that it made me feel a lot better.”
He began writing structured poetry at the age of 13, and poetry and prose became Mark’s way of dealing with his issues. However, his troubled past became too hard to cope with, and heartbreakingly, at the age of 17, he attempted to take his own life. “I was sat on the Beachy Head with a bottle of Jack Daniels and a load of tablets, thinking okay, if I get drunk and take tablets it’ll be easier to jump – it wasn’t. But I had an epiphany that night, why had I tried to end my life when I hadn’t even tried to live it yet.”
He remembers a prose he wrote that night called Waiting for the Ships to Come Home, which was about how he had lived his entire life to try and please others and be accepted by society.
In time, Mark found peace by travelling, after leaving Eastbourne with 50 pounds and living homeless in London for a few weeks, he found employment in a hotel in the Scottish highlands.
He saved up, and went to discover the world. “It’s only by stepping outside of my comfort zone that I learned that society is not what were told it is. There are so many other fascinating aspects, cultures, beliefs and philosophies out there if you go and explore it.” Mark’s discovery of other societies allowed him to formulate an opinion about what was wrong with our own, “we are presented with a truth in our society and we have the choice to believe it or go and explore it for ourselves. And once I started to go and explore it for myself, I saw that society wasn’t what I was told it had to be and that there was another way.”
It’s this experience that influences his writing, and that helped him to accept that the abuse he suffered as a child was not his fault. “I started to thank life for letting me be abused, because it taught me so much about a life that I never would have otherwise seen.” Mark has a truly beautiful outlook on life, and his willingness to accept the hardships that he has faced in life is inspirational, in Mark’s own words, he explains: “Without the darkness that surrounds them, the Stars could not shine. I give praise and thanks to the darkness for helping me to see the light”.
Mark believes the most important thing to remember when writing is to write from your own truth, writing should have individuality, and a personal story.
Having long been in fear that his films would receive ridicule, Mark is still overwhelmed with his sudden success. He talks about his experience of uploading his first vlog “I spent about five and a half hours – from 11 o’clock at night to the early hours of the morning walking backwards and forwards, almost pressing load, going away, coming back, having a few beers, coming back, then finally I went bugger it – clicked upload and it was there.”
At the time of uploading his first vlog, Mark was studying Sports Science at Worcester University, but after securing a job as a Sports Coach, and with the help of new friends, Mark found the confidence to pursue his love of writing and changed his course to joint honours Drama and Screenwriting, “I’m in a very blessed situation that if I find that it’s not going to go anywhere then I have sports as a back-up.”
Looking back on his previous life, he believes that his biggest problem when growing up was the feeling of being isolated, the need to be accepted by society and the fear of being rejected.
He strongly feels that others must not suffer the same fate, and that people must begin to stand up and make a change “There’ll always be people there to knock you back down because it’s gives them a fake scene of power, so you need to ignore that and rise above it. You must overcome these things that happen – I have had some terrible emails, but I’ve also had some amazing emails. Unless people have the faith to stand up and say their truth, then were not going to get anywhere as a society.”
Mark doesn’t know what may happen in the future – but one thing is for sure, he’ll never give up what he loves. “Even if I end up being absolutely broke and living in a squat the rest of my life, but I’m making films and sharing words to ten people, then I’ll be equally happy doing that as I would making Hollywood blockbusters because it’s what I want to do – it’s what I’ve always wanted to do.”
To watch Mark’s short films and vlogs, visit his site ‘Human Voice Productions’
http://humanvoiceproductions.weebly.com/
And his YouTube Channel
Author: Copeland
