From Battlefield to Big Screen: Journey of a Veteran Filmmaker.

It’s fair to say that my route from Royal Air Force life into the world of film has been far from conventional. Indeed I often look back on it and wonder how on earth it happened at all.

Dougie Brimson - Filmmaker, Screenwriter, Veteran and Co-Founder Creative Forces UK CIC

For after my discharge in 1994, a series of events led me into full-time employment as one of those characters you see in the background on both big and small screens. A fascinating job which gave new meaning to the expression, ‘no two days are the same’!

Yet whilst providing a fascinating insight into how movies and TV shows get made, it was a stroke of good fortune, or more specifically a light-bulb moment, which led me in an entirely different creative direction.

A career as an author!

Thankfully, this went quite well and the movie world faded into the background until, in 2003, an offer to write a film fell into my lap. Not just any film, but a Hollywood funded film called Green Street. The rest as they say, is history.

Or rather, it should have been because like many things, COVID changed everything. Like most industries, film and television ground to a halt but like many writers, the epidemic didn’t really impact me at all. I was after all, used to spending serious amounts of time in relative solitude writing both books and scripts.

After the first 18 months or so, I’d written a number of screenplays but found I had no outlet for them. And so I created one in the guise of my own production company, Red Bus Movies. However, I quickly realised that whilst it’s one thing to write a scene about a load of football fans misbehaving, the journey from page to screen is a long and often arduous one. Involving as it does, many people in numerous highly specialised roles.

In essence, it’s akin to a military style operation and the more I thought about this, the more an idea began to take hold.

During my time in the film and TV world, I’d met many veterans who had transitioned into the creative world, primarily doing pretty much exactly the same jobs they’d done whilst in uniform. Yet almost to a man, and woman, they’d found their new career by accident. So it struck me that what was needed was something that bridged that gap and opened up the industry to those leaving the service as well as those veterans who, like me when I’d left, had failed to find a working home.

The problem was that seeing what people actually do isn’t the same as actually knowing how they do it and since by this time I was running my own company, I was hiring people to do jobs I didn’t fully understand. In effect, I was very effectively blagging it.

Then, in 2022, another stroke of fortune led me to the BFBS Academy who, as it happened, were at the time recruiting students onto their very first Production Managers course.

A 6 month full time programme designed not only to educate service leavers and veterans about how the industry works and the opportunities available, but provide hands on experience of doing many of those jobs for which ‘we’ are perfectly suited. It was exactly what I needed and so I applied and somehow, was accepted.

As it turned out, not only did it exceed my requirements, but with the final course exercise involving making an actual short movie, it provided me with the opportunity to fulfil an ambition I’d long secretly harboured. I was able to direct a film; as it happened, I ended up doing three. The first was a documentary about a veteran who’d survived being machine gunned in the jungles of Burma, the second was a drama written by one of my fellow students and the third was another drama, this time one I’d written myself.

It was a fantastic experience and one I’d wholeheartedly recommend. It’s certainly given me a greater admiration for feature film directors but more importantly, an appreciation for every other cog in the creative machine.

For whilst the actors may get all the plaudits, it’s the location managers, the production accountants, the armourers, the set builders, security staff and drivers who make it all possible. Which is of course, what Creative Forces UK is all about.

But, and it’s a big but, not a single movie or television show is possible without someone having an idea and writing it down. Be it for a multi-million dollar Hollywood franchise or a short movie about a group of guys getting drunk whilst playing cards in a tent on exercise.

Which is of course, where the Creative Forces UK Film Festival comes in. Not only to encourage people to have those ideas, but to provide them with the confidence to actually turn them into reality as well as the outlet to get them in front of an audience.

I, obviously, understand how nerve wracking even the idea of doing something like this can be but seriously, as I have said many times, if I can do it, anyone can! And who know’s, picking up your IPhone may well prove to be life changing. It was for me!

11 August 2026 - Dougie Brimson