Out of this world star is poised for red carpet selfies at Matlock film premiere

A spaceship will be the star of the red carpet at the first public showing of Masked Conspiracy on August 5 at the town’s Imperial Rooms.

The prop created especially for the film will provide an out-of-this-world selfie experience for visitors attending the premiere.

Producer and actor Jacob Poole, 25, said: “The spaceship is the size of a small bedside table – about one metre by one metre. When you see it in the film it will not look like the small spaceship on the red carpet. We filmed it on a spinning chair in a dark room with smoke machines.”

Masked Conspiracy has been self-funded by cast and crew members, all of whom have links to Matlock either through schools they went to or friends they have made. Three of the four actors – Jacob, Callum Gascoyne and Joe Lansley – were students at Highfields School while James “Jim Jam” Mullins from Leamington Spa met Jacob at university.

Jacob said: “After two years in the making, we are extremely excited to share our hard work with not only our friends and family, but the wider Matlock community. Hence why we chose to premiere the film here.”

Masked Conspiracy is the first feature film to be helmed by award-winning director Alasdair Gretton who co-wrote the script with his dad. Jacob, 25, said: “I suggested a few dialogue tweaks and a few general ideas. I was more of a producer, finding sets, making sure we had all the right things on the day we were filming.

"I know the topography of Matlock off by heart, where all the abandoned factories are that you can film and abandoned caravan homes that haven’t been demolished. We filmed a whole set in a friend’s garage near Chesterfield and did a little bit of filming in Manchester.”

He describes the 45-minute film as a gallows comedy with mildly violent scenes in which an eccentric man and his friend think they have found an alien and set out to capture it. Jacob said: “I play a disgruntled soldier who gets caught up in the high jinks.”

Masked Conspiracy centres around the idea that multiple people can perceive the same situation differently. It reflects the modern state of social media consumption and the spread of misinformation through a simple sentence exposed online.

Jacob said: “The film is great. We hope to enter it into festivals that will accept it without charging too much.”

Alasdair has directed a series of successful shorts, winning two awards for The Cook, The Egg and The Hitman at at Newcastle Student Film Festival 2019. He has also won Red Script Film Competition for the best short horror script as well as coming in the first 13% of screenplays for the BBC comedy script room competition in 2020. Alasdair grew up in Matlock and is now a paralegal living in Manchester. Jacob said: “You go into his house and it’s just full of box sets of every director you can think of. He is the one who has seen everything and has an encyclopaedic knowledge of films.”

Jacob, who lives in Gloucestershire, has worked with homeless people for the last two years and will be taking up a course in policy change at York University. He studied creative writing at Leicester University after leaving school.*Tickets to see Masked Conspiracy cost £5 on the door. The 45-minute film starts at 7pm, with visitors welcome on the red carpet from 6.30pm.