By Gillian Ellison

Last updated 15:54, Wednesday, 23 April 2008

A FORMER Copeland man is now a producer for a BAFTA award-winning film company.

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STAR OF ROME: Actor Ray Stevenson is in Kieran’s film

Kieran Parker, 37, and his partner Arabella Page-Croft run the Glasgow-based film production company Black Camel Pictures.

Their first feature film Outpost was filmed in Scotland on a budget of £1.2m. It has been bought by Sony Pictures, sold out worldwide and had its US DVD release in March.

It and is now hitting UK cinema screens across the country on May 16.

Kieran, is originally from Low Moresby and went to Harecroft Hall School.

His love for film started as a child watching war films with his dad with his interest continuing through art college where he met Steve Barker, the film's director.

After leaving university, Kieran worked his way up for a tea boy and runner on productions before turning his hand to producing with Arabella.

He said: “The theatrical release of Outpost is incredible for us.” It is hoped it will be screened in well over 100 cinemas nationwide.

Kieran is heading to Cannes next month to continue looking for exciting scripts and bigger budgets which will offer more scope for film-making.

As a producer, Kieran said he “absolutely loves” the film business, living and breathing it. “It would be way too much like hard work not to love it,” he said. To be successful in the film industry you need “tenacity and good scripts”.

He and Arabella have two young children together and re-mortgaged their house to fund the film. “Arabella was in actually in labour when I was making the Cannes deal,” he said. A sure sign, he laughed, of the family's commitment to film-making!

The couple met six years ago on the set of a short film.

Outpost is said to be one of the most exciting and most talked about films to come out of Scotland in recent years.

Before it was even completed buyers were lining up to offer but in the end Sony offered a significant sum after only seeing a few minutes footage.

Working in collaboration with writer/director Steve Barker they managed to utilise their tiny budget to maximum effect and create an Eastern European set, gore filled, action horror film.

It was all filmed at Dalbeattie Munitions Factory, in a forest in Dumfriesshire and the Glasgow Film City.

They also recently won the BAFTA Scotland New Talent award for Best New Producers in March.

The couple are already partnering with the Outpost team for director Steve Barker’s next feature film Blood Makes Noise, a vampire-cop revenge thriller.

Other future projects also include Outpost scribe Rae Brunton writing Ebony and Noodle - a Mexican desert set supernatural horror for them; Breathe, an action-packed chase movie set across a mountain wilderness and The Devil’s Staircase, a chilling urban backpacker horror adapted from Helen Fitzgerald’s novel.

Outpost has a top cast including Ray Stevenson (The Punisher, War Zone, HBO’s Rome), Julian Wadham (The Madness of King George) and Richard Brake (Batman Begins, Hannibal Rising).

It is said to be a darkly atmospheric and vicious supernatural horror that follows a group of world weary mercenaries lain siege by a ghostly legion of undead Nazis.