YORK-BASED film maker Dave Thorp has completed a 30-minute thriller about fracking, called 2 Miles Under - and is hoping to show it at international festivals.

Dave, of Fulford Road, who wrote and directed the low budget film, said he usually shot documentaries, but the more he researched fracking the more he realised it had all the ingredients for a thriller.

“Although we started writing the film over a year ago, much of our ‘fictitious’ film has proved to be true,” he said. “It really is a case of life imitating art.”

He said the film was initially funded by a Kickstarter campaign and attracted support from as far away as the USA, but the talent, both in front of and behind the camera, was local.

“We filmed some of the protest scenes at an abandoned airfield with nearly 100 extras, and used models and CGI to replicate a typical drilling installation,” he said.

“We were fortunate to have a brilliant and talented cast from the Yorkshire area, and the camera crew worked miracles with our limited resources.” He said fracking proved a ‘hot topic,’ as he encountered threats and intimidation, and a great deal of suspicion and reluctance to get involved. “We needed a parish church to shoot some scenes, and we were willing and able to pay good money – but on several occasions as soon as they learned the film featured ‘fracking’ we were shunned,” he said.

“Shooting a ‘fictitious’ drama gave us more expressive freedom to say what we wanted to say, and to be more confrontational.”

He said that when he encountered threats, he simply went back to the script and incorporated the weird new twists into the story.

Dave, who has previously made films in support of campaigns by The Press to expose the dangers of York’s rivers and of joy riding, told earlier this year how much of the fracking film was shot in Askham Richard, near York,which represented “everything we could lose across the UK if fracking is allowed to go ahead.”