NOCTURNIS: Trade Mark Pending…

There is a strange moment when something you've been building privately begins to exist outside of you.

Yesterday, mine cost £265.

For a while, I sat staring at a button labelled “Pay for and submit application”, experiencing the peculiar combination of excitement and mild nausea that seems to accompany every meaningful step I've taken with Nocturnis Films.

Then I pressed it.

NOCTURNIS is now the subject of a UK trade mark application.

That sentence probably sounds considerably more impressive than the reality. There was no champagne. No dramatic soundtrack. No lawyer sliding a beautifully embossed document across an expensive mahogany desk.

There was me, my laptop, and a government website.

And yet, when the confirmation appeared on screen, my stomach fluttered.

Because somewhere along the way, NOCTURNIS stopped being simply the name of something I was writing.

It became the name over the door.

When a story becomes something more

NOCTURNIS began in fiction.

I won't unpack exactly what it means within that fiction — there are some doors in the crypt I'm keeping firmly locked for now — but the world around it has continued to grow.

One screenplay became something larger. Other stories appeared. Connections formed between them. Then came ideas for short films, publishing, physical pieces and ways of letting an audience experience that world beyond the screen.

Eventually, I realised I wasn't only developing a project anymore.

I was building something.

And that created a slightly terrifying question:

At what point do you start treating the thing you're hoping to build as though it might actually exist?

Apparently, my answer was yesterday.

A name worth protecting

Applying for a trade mark doesn't mean I own a registered trade mark.

The application still has to be examined. There may be questions. There may be objections. There is a process ahead, and for now the correct phrase is very firmly pending.

But submitting it mattered to me anyway.

There is something unexpectedly vulnerable about deciding that an idea you've carried around privately is worth putting money behind. It's very easy to imagine what you might make one day. It's considerably more frightening to start behaving as though you're actually going to make it.

Websites can be redesigned. Business cards can be reprinted. Screenplays can be rewritten for the forty-seventh time because apparently this time you've finally fixed Act Two.

Some decisions feel different.

This was one of them.

So, what happens now?

Mostly?

I wait.

Which, as anyone working in film or television will know, is excellent preparation for a career in film and television.

In the meantime, there are scripts to write, a short film to develop, things to make, mistakes to make, and an increasingly suspicious number of ideas demanding their own folders.

NOCTURNIS isn't a registered trade mark.

Not yet.

For now, there is simply an application, a number, and a name I've decided is worth protecting.

Somehow, that feels like quite a lot.