Ooh my head. Bloody Mary’s followed by Guinness is oddly similar to eating a steak with a peppery tomato salsa. Plus a great deal of alcohol.

Never the less last night at the London Short Film Festival screening of the Vauxhall Branchage 48hr Challenge films at the Roxy Bar and Screen, I was in the mood for celebrating. Not because the film Chris and I made, “Truth In The Valley” was the ultimate winner of the generous £1,000 prize, because it wasn’t. We were soundly beaten into second place by the magnificent Gaelle Denis and her film “Morning Mist”. However to be back amongst such a beautiful crowd of passionate, creative people was reason enough to feel like I’d won whatever happened.

To see each other, and each others films once more was a joy. A 48hr Challenge is always a risk and this was made more of one by the fact that most of the participants had to first get themselves to Jersey. These films were quick to make but they were not cheap – by taking part all of us were risking not only our reputation but also our own hard cash. This is one thing for the directors but quite another for cast and crew who don’t have any real sense of what they’re buying into until it’s far too late to back out. No script to read over, no synopsis, not even a vague idea of what will happen until long after the flights are booked. The same is very much true of the sponsors, of which more later.

I raise this point because of the huge and angry debate that is once again crashing over the Shooting People bulletins about working in film for less than the National Minimum Wage. Of course I would expect a commercial project with a budget to strike a fair payment rate in line with accepted industry standards but events like the 48hr Challenge are proof positive that a creative industry needs leeway for the creative aspect to flourish.

We all had a great time in Jersey but for a great many of the participants the event has turned into a personal marker. The freedom of the event gave us all a chance to try something we wouldn’t normally try. It has given people an insight into a new way of working, a different aspect of their performing ability that they hadn’t previously been able to express or just a sharp wake-up call that you can never rest on your laurels. I don’t think we quite changed anyone’s life completely but we certainly all ended up spinning off in new and exciting directions and with a large number of new and exciting potential creative collaborators.

Thanks for this are in no small part due to Vauxhall. As an industry we all tend to be hugely cynical about commercial companies sponsoring our work. As soon as Vauxhall got involved with the 48hr Challenge I think, in some part of our minds, we all expected that we’d need to draw their branding into our films in someway. Perhaps not as crass as having a character turn to camera and shout “C’mon!” but we all expected that in some sense they would want to shape our work in return for the money they were giving the competition.

However, for the second time on this blog a filmmaker called Ben is writing about how beautifully hands-off Vauxhall are once they are committed to an idea. If you’ve not yet read my interview with Ben River’s about his Vauxhall funded film “I Know Where I’m Going” then scroll down the page and have a look because it’s fascinating. It’s also surprising that such a difficult piece of filmmaking was given such full blooded support by a company with no reason to have anything but a purely commercial interest in investing in it.

I’m not just singing the praises of an organisation which has indirectly sponsored my work. Vauxhall have no creative agenda, they exist purely with the commercial aim of selling cars (that, as it goes, I can neither afford nor drive because, I can’t drive). They see a commercial gain in putting money into films that in no way trumpet, discuss or even briefly feature their cars in anyway. This is obviously just a tiny aspect of their business model, a small part of their advertising budget, but clearly it works for them to be associated with helping creative people to create.

I’m not saying that actors should never get paid. I’m certainly not saying that directors should fund their own work and I’m sick of how as a I writer this whole edifice is almost entirely constructed upon the months and years of necessarily unpaid effort that I put into a script before it’s ready to be sold or even read. However I am saying that sometimes working for free on a project that enables you do something different, sometimes sinking a small amount of your cash into a ticket to Jersey so that you can grasp a unique creative challenge, sometimes this financial risk is better business than a stubborn insistence on your legal rights.

To vote in Shooting People’s poll on the National Minimum Wage please click here:
http://shootingpeople.org/poll/minimumwage/

To argue with me in person about this please either come to my talk this afternoon at 4pm at the Curzon or come to Branchage Surgery at the Hospital Club in Covent Garden tomorrow night from six thirty.

Unless you are a complete stranger to this blog (in which case, hallo, have a seat, lovely of you to drop in), you will be well aware that last year my brother and I took part in the Vauxhall Branchage 48hr Filmmaking Challenge.

The five films made in the competition have been available to watch online for the past month or so at Mishorts and you have until tomorrow to watch them and vote for them.

This deadline is looming above us because next Monday night, January 11th, all the films will be shown at the Roxy Bar and Screen in London Bridge and the winner will be announced and forcibly awarded a thousand pounds of actual money.

Mishorts have done a tremendous job of spreading the films into people’s minds and they’ll remain online long after the LSFF has packed up for the year. But, trust me, the joy of the Branchage Challenge was that these films were made by filmmakers and they deserve to be seen in a cinema. Startlingly original, compelling, beautiful, odd and utterly breathless it’s a programme curated by good fortune alone and you won’t regret coming down.

More info here:
http://lsff.bside.com/2010/films/mishortspresentsbranchage48hourroadmoviechallenge_lsff2010

The joy of a 48hr Film Challenge is seeing what people create when placed under constraint. The most perfect example of this is Michael Pearce and Emma Rozanski’s film Occupied. Emma, Michael and their one actor James all met for the first time at the start of the 48hrs. Their only equipment was Emma’s battered laptop and her digital stills camera. Not, I hasten to add, a fancy digital SLR like Chris and I used in our film but a simple, common or garden, digital stills that fits in the palm of your hand and happens to have a movie mode.

I think their film is amazing and the only thing I’d like point out is that it was intended to be screened at the last night of Drive-In at the Branchage Festival. Sadly the last night was cancelled due to high winds and so no audience has ever fully appreciated the film’s sublimely iterative punchline…

Watch and Vote for Occupied by clicking on this picture…

Emma Rozanski is an Australian filmmaker who joined Shooting People earlier this year. As a lot of people do when they first nose round the site, she found my page and saw the bold claim that I’ll watch anything anyone cares to send me. So she sent me a link to her film Whisper Stop. This was easily one of the nicest surprises of the past 160 days of my life and the film clearly showed that she’s got buckets of talent. So I asked her to come to Jersey and take part in the challenge…

However she seemed a bit reluctant to be a director and she mentioned her willingness to work as part of someone else’s team and her laptop and camera (in a way I think I misunderstood) and so I sort of had her down as coming more in this capacity than any other.

Chris and I arrived in Jersey the day before the challenge started and by lunchtime I’d heard from my last confirmed director that due to circumstances beyond his control he was not going to be able to make it. This was a real blow as four teams didn’t quite feel like either a competition or a full programme. Luckily, I hung up the phone, went back into Branchage office and found Chris in conversation with Jersey born filmmaker Michael Pearce.

James Wilkinson, Emma Rozanski and Michael Pearce

We’d met Michael at the festival the previous year when he’d won the Islanders Award with his, frankly jaw droppingly awesome NFTS graduation film Madrugada. Two twists of his arm later and he’d agreed to take part but he had no camera and no editing equipment… no problem, say the Blaines, you can team up with Emma.

Jersey is a small island with a rich and surprisingly talented community but in the lead up to the event we were naturally concerned to do our best to make sure our directors had a good pool of talented actors to work with. We’d invited a whole bunch over and, realising that most people would’t know each other, we’d decided to pick teams at the start of the event. Just as with school football this is fun but does mean that at the end of the day there’s always someone slightly left over and whilst the other teams all ended up with at least two actors Emma and Michael ended up with just James Wilkinson, a young local actor and one of the few men in the room. James was an unknown quantity and I have to admit feeling a tad guilty watching these three strangers set out so seemingly unprepared on this challenge…

I mean, be fair, James looks very unprepared here...

I needn’t have worried. The full challenge, which is something you may not have guessed from watching the other films, was the write, shoot and edit a Road Movie in 48hrs that worked to a specific title and genre and also included some sort of reference to a Jersey Cow. By my checklist only Michael, Emma and James really tick all these boxes, not least because, damn their eyes, they finished three hours early and that includes time to render out a PAL version from the NTSC camera.

Emma and the camera they shot the film with

Emma filming James getting a beating. Off some kids.

I am speechless in my admiration for them. James throws himself into the chaos with a big hearted abandon which is not only hilarious but massively endearing. For a tall guy he is a wonderful puppy dog and it shows delicious cold-heartedness from Michael and Emma that they just saw this as good reason to be utterly merciless to him. I also love the fact that Michael has the balls to Vincent Gallo it up and play his cameo role not as the usual director-geek but as the coolest man on Jersey.

James Wilkinson and Michael Pearce.

As I’ve said before, Chris and I kicked this whole thing off because we wanted to use our posh new camera. We also wanted to do a filmmaking challenge with actual filmmakers and I think the aesthetic quality of many of these films is massively impressive. But I have to say what Michael and Emma achieve with almost nothing is an achievement in the true Jonny Oddball spirit of the original 48hr Challenges. With nothing but what they had in their pockets they’ve made a cracking little film that engages you through inch perfect visual story telling. My hat is off.

May be you need to have been on Jersey to fully appreciate all the jokes here but when a room full of filmmakers saw the coach train pulling into view there was a heartfelt cheer. I think none of us had seen that vehicle touring the streets without thinking “Ooh, I want that in my film” but only one film got it…

Watch and Vote for Michael and Emma’s Occupied here…
http://www.mishorts.com/index.php?page=shop.product_details&category_id=14&flypage=flypage-comp.tpl&product_id=899&option=com_virtuemart&Itemid=13

Fittingly for a film festival on an island closer to France than England, our forth confirmed filmmaker was French born Londoner, Gaelle Denis. She drew the genre “Crime” and the title “Morning Mist” and two (and a bit) days later she and her crack international team of experts had made this…

Click below to watch Morning Mist…

My brother and me first met Gaelle through Cinema Extreme. Her film “After The Rain” was part of the same slate as “Hallo Panda”. One of the eventual frustrations of that programme, one of the inspirations behind the Branchage Challenge, was that the further we progressed the less we saw of the other filmmakers. Our film had been one of three selected from a Nottingham workshop where we met, among others, Miranda Bowen, Simon Ellis and KICKS director Lindy Heymann. It was a brilliant, creative melting pot, exciting and jealousafying all at once. However once the commissions came through we didn’t see the others again until a party following a screening of the finished films in Bristol. It was only here that we actually met Gaelle and that gap seemed like such a waste, especially since I still feel that if she’d had a bit of our thoughts and we a chunk of hers then we’d both have made better films that year.

Talk of in someway working together or, at least, close by, again sparked up when she and we were all selected for Think Shoot Distribute last year. A brilliant scheme which again captured some of that hothouse atmosphere. With time to hang out together it was clear again quite how brilliant Gaelle was; I remember watching Simon Potts when she screened her film “City Paradise”, all the way through and for sometime after all he could do was shake his head and say “Well it’s a masterpiece. A master piece. A masterpiece”, and he’s not far wrong. Consequently when the idea of organising the Branchage 48hr Challenge developed, getting Gaelle to take part was always high on our list of priorities.

Used to working in commercials, Gaelle arrived on the island fully kitted out and mob handed. She brought with her a cast, Lydia Outhwaite and Stephen Hope-Wynn, cinematographer Anne-Marie Lean-Vercoe, editor Fabrice Gerardi, script editor Marina Brackenbury and script writer Katie McCullough. They had more kit than everyone else combined, but of course this just meant more technical problems too. Also their title kinda bound them into a couple of very early starts and a lot of room for confusion…

With such a large team, and a genre that lends itself to twists and complexity, I soon got the impression that things were running away from them. Which story were Steve and Lydia playing? The one their characters think is happening or what is really happening? Is that still what’s really happening?

Steve and Lydia are clearly startled to be in a 48hr Challenge with a script...

Camera Card problems robbed them of crucial shots and suddenly poor Fabrice had the weight of the whole team’s expectations on his shoulders. Could he and Gaelle find a way to make it all make sense after all? It was around this point that I started stretching the entente cordial by giving him hassle to finish the film so we could create a screening master for that night…

But then, like the sun burning through the mist, the end came upon them and the film was finished. And it’s everything I expected from Gaelle. Beautiful, cunning, delicious and delicate, it’s hard to remember that it was made in such a sort space of time.

I remember both Fabrice and Gaelle staring at me with blank incomprehension when I told them how good it was. They were exhausted and so close to the piece they could barely see it. But putting together the screener, Chris and I were the first people outside their team to watch the finished piece. Thanks to Anne-Marie it is jaw droppingly beautiful with a start so bristling with atmosphere and tension you can feel it on your skin. Katie’s script is slick, complicated, twisty and yet, as it should be, very simple. Lydia and Steve are the perfect foils for one another, one big and lumbering, the other flimsy and flexible, the essence of butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. Missing shots? Pah. This film is class class class.

But don’t take my word for it. Gaelle and her team are each asking of you less than a minute per team member. So please click on the link below to watch and vote and don’t forget to return here tomorrow where I shall end my run down of the competitors in the Branchage Vauxhall 48hr Road Movie Challenge by going to the other extreme with Occupied, a film made by three complete strangers with nothing more than a digital stills camera.

Watch and vote for Morning Mist here:
http://www.mishorts.com/index.php?page=shop.product_details&category_id=14&flypage=flypage-comp.tpl&product_id=898&option=com_virtuemart&Itemid=13

Rob Morgan is a filmmaker with a twisted and darkly innovative imagination which goes some small to explain how, when asked to make, in 48hrs, a Western called Overtaken he came up with this…

Click below to watch and vote for Overtaken…

Rob is someone who’s work I had previously admired from afar. There is photographic proof that we were previously in the same room because we were both part of Screen International’s Stars of Tomorrow an increasingly long time in the past. We are also both graduates of Film4 and the Film Council’s now defunct Cinema Extreme scheme, through which Rob made the sublime “Monsters”, one of my favourite films made through the programme.

However we’d never really spoken and so I was especially delighted, and frankly rather honoured, when he agreed to take part in the Vauxhall Branchage 48hr Road Movie Challenge… ah yes, Road Movie Challenge. The other part of the genre that Rob was given was Road Movie. A Western Road Movie. Only Rob can get away with being asked to make a Western Road Movie and create instead an intrinsically filthy film about a heartbroken thing from the sea.

Rob came to Jersey with his Director of Photography Marcus Waterloo an experienced and brilliant man who shot most of this film using a handbuilt periscope camera which records the reflection of the image from a piece of dirty glass, which is how he makes the digital picture quite so edible and dirty. I say “most” because apparently the underwater sequences were shot using an iPhone and a plastic bag…

Getting people of the calibre of Rob and Marcus to take part in the Challenge was one of the most exciting things about the event. Since 2002 Jonny Oddball’s original cannonball-run style concept has been much copied and often repeated and though it does throw up gems, more often than not it just shows how very hard it is to make a truly compelling film in 48hrs (or less). It’s also often been been seen as something than appeals more to first-timers than seasoned pros. Our intention with the Branchage event was always to invite people who we knew would bring something special. For us it was not enough that five films were completed, they had to be good films.

Rachel Kirkland and Juliet Valdez

Before they met I had a feeling that actress Nathalie Pownall and director Alex Jacob would click. I had a similar feeling with Rob and Juliet Valdez. Like Rachel, the other actress in both Rob and Alex’s films, I first saw Juliet in the Edinburgh show that my girlfriend directed this summer. On the surface she’s a delightful and capable actress but bubbling beneath is a delicious lunacy which Rob brings out to the full.

Rob and Juliet. Neither look capable of it do they?

They shot this film without any sense of story, Rob just encouraging Juliet and later Rachel to do whatever odd and beautiful thing happened to come into his mind. His claim that the whole thing didn’t really come together until the last few hours of the edit is almost more hysterically terrifying than the film itself, almost. My only memory is of editing in a nearby tent, the wind buffeting the canvas like we were at sea, and my sleep deprived brain being rocked by Rob’s high pitched scream as he tried in vain to record the voice over without laughing too much…

Dark crazy shit is happening in this tent.

That same wind saved us from a slightly tricky situation. The original plan was that all five finished films would be given a premiere at the Branchage Drive-In before a screening of the Wizard of Oz. Due to the nature of the Wizard of Oz, event organiser Carla had insisted that, as well as being Road Movies that made reference to Jersey Cows, each film had to be strictly PG rated. Rob has pointed out that, not only does he mention Jersey Cows much more than we did in our film, but as far as he is concerned, Overtaken is no more terrifying and hallucinatory than the Wizard of Oz and that nothing really bad is actually on screen. However this films oozes sexy wrongness from every frame and it was a relief to me when the high winds forced the closure of Drive-In and saved us from having to veto this sublimely surreal gem.

Can you tell that I like it? I think so. Give Rob six minutes of your time by following the link below and watching this film which is safe for work but possibly not safe for your soul. And tomorrow things will take on an altogether classier air when we turn to Parisian Princess of perfection Gaelle Denis and her film “Morning Mist”.

Watch and Vote for Overtaken here:
http://www.mishorts.com/index.php?page=shop.product_details&flypage=flypage-comp.tpl&product_id=860&category_id=14&option=com_virtuemart&Itemid=13

When filmmaker Alex Jacob’s arrived in Jersey for the Vauxhal Branchage 48hr Film Challenge he was unlucky enough to draw the genre Fantasy and the unwieldy title Dashes Of Yellow. I thought we had our work cut out with a war movie but if there was genre/title coupling I’d rather not have had this is it…

However Alex and his team rose to the challenge, click on the picture to see their response…

Chris and I came up with idea for the Branchage 48hr Challenge because we wanted to do something with our new camera, the Canon 5d Mk II (that’s right, our film was shot on a souped stills camera). Xanthe agreed that it was just the sort of thing Branchage would enjoy but Phil was worried as to the quality of filmmakers, especially those who could be convinced to come out to Jersey. So it fell to us to invite the directors and most of the actors who would make these films.

A lot of people wimped out, many hesitated until it was impossible, but the first person to get straight back to me with an unwavering “Yes!” was Alex Jacob. This was appropriate because I’d first met Alex at the first Branchage festival the year previously. His first short film “Ruby”, later a Shooting People Film Of The Month, was showing at the festival and he and his lead actress Ellie had come along to see the reaction. More of this here.

We ended up stuck in Jersey airport together and he impressed me as a man who’d taken a considered and clever approach to his career but who was ready for something more (something I’m pleased to say he’s now getting as he starts to direct for proper actual tv). As a result he was one of the first people I asked to take part, so it was nice he was first to say yes.

At the start his team was just him and his friend and camera operator Sean Mackay. However before the competition had even officially kicked off he’d secured the assistance of actresses Nathalie Pownall and Rachel Kirkland and the team was finally complimented by Jersey native, student Patrick Casey.

Alex, Nathalie, Rachel, Sean and Patrick

Realising that our guest directors were unlikely to be able to guarantee their own casts, we’d taken steps to invite a wide and diverse group of actors to take part in the competition too. For directors the challenge is daunting, but at least it feels like your destiny is in your own hands. For actors, asked to fly to an island and work on a film with someone they’ve never met when they don’t know what it is or what role they’ll be playing… it’s bravery on the borderline of insanity. This fact alone though does not quite explain why, out of the 30 or so actors and actresses we invited, it was only women who said yes.

Both Nat and Rachel were from mine and Chris’ guest list and had never met Alex before. Rachel’s main focus is comedy and I’d seen her earlier in the year when she was in the Edinburgh show that my girlfriend directed. There, amongst other things, she was taking the piss out of the role of Puck – a part not dissimilar to her role in “Dashes Of Yellow” as she leads Nat on a magical journey of self discovery.

I first met Nat when I turned out to be too expensive to cut her showreel together. However this did at least give me the chance to watch everything she’d done and I’ve been keen to work with her ever since. She has a great physicality and a natural pixie-ness that suits Alex’s film tremendously. Alex will admit that the process of making “Dashes Of Yellow” was tougher than he’d expected and, as is often the case, the more they filmed the more the story began to slip from their grasp. In the end though I think Nat’s performance holds the piece together and gives it a surprisingly emotional resolution.

All of which shows what can happen when actors trust their director. Thrown together by fate and Blaines, Alex, Nat and Rachel could have been cautious or tentative with each other. Instead by the end of the first day the girls were naked and in the sea. This could have been a disaster on many levels but I think it comes together simply because of the whole hearted approach; the director and his cast throw themselves into this film with an abandon that heartening to watch.

At least that’s my opinion – why don’t you give Alex six minutes of your day to find out what you think by clicking on the link below?

When I first heard that both Nat and Rachel had been running naked into the waves I worried because festival organiser Carla MacKinnon had stipulated that all the films had to be “suitable for a family audience”. However in the end it was Rob Morgan’s film “Overtaken” that she had to ban… and that’s what I’ll be looking at tomorrow…

Vote for Dashes Of Yellow here…
http://www.mishorts.com/index.php?page=shop.product_details&category_id=14&flypage=flypage-comp.tpl&product_id=895&option=com_virtuemart&Itemid=13

At last! Your chance to watch and vote for my work! (I know you’ve been wanting to do this for ages…)

Keen readers will know that at the start of October, Chris and I lead a fearless guerrilla unit into the hills of Jersey and made a short film called “Truth In The Valley” as part of the Vauxhall Branchage 48hr Filmmaking Challenge.

Keener readers and those with their fingers on the pulse will already be aware that all five completed films are now online at MiShorts.com. We made them not as competitors or rivals but as allies and friends, however the online world is harsh and now we’re in bitter competition for a cash prize.

“Truth In The Valley” is available to vote for here:

Whilst I do want to win, I also have to admit to a strange sense of pride for all five films. Each one is 6 minutes long and all were made over the course of 48hrs with titles and genres drawn at random at the start of the competition. Most were also made by filmmakers who’d never been to Jersey before, many using actors they’d only just met.

They range from Alex Jacob’s beguiling “Dashes Of Yellow” (I think the cruellest title draw), Gaelle Denis’ richly atmospheric “Morning Mist”, Rob Morgan’s astonishing “Overtaken”, Emma Rozanski and Michael Pearce’s hilarious “Occupied” and our own largely historically accurate “Truth In The Valley”. All five have something unique and brilliant to offer. Which is why this blog is going to focus on one film a day for the next week, giving you a little background on it’s creators, how they got involved and how they worked.

I have already told a great deal of the behind the scenes story of “Truth In The Valley” on this blog… here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and most of all here and here. However I don’t think I’ve properly expressed my gratitude towards our amazing cast and crew.

We had some much valued support from a couple of locals including Reuben our Nazi trooper but our core team was fellow filmmaker Laura Brocken, old time teammate Alex Mayover and actresses Rebecca Eve and Jessica Fostekew. Alex used to work with Chris but I first met him on the first day of the first ever 48hr Filmmaking Challenge held by Jonny Oddball back in 2002. We’ve been friends ever since and he has worked on all four of the 48hr films that we’ve made, though never before with a beard.

Alex Mayover with beard and industry standard 416 microphone...

Chris mentored Laura as part of the Branchage Bootcamp the year previously and we both fell in love the short film “Tell” which she made with him. “Tell” picked up the prestigious Islander award at the festival this year, one of many it’s won. So she is a real talent in her own right, however on “Truth In The Valley” she was part of our team and was astonishingly willing to take up the vital but unglamorous jobs.

Laura Brocken forgives me for being a ponce.

We met Rebecca earlier in the year when she auditioned for us and later did a series of promotional stills for a film we’re working on. All of which merely whetted our appetite for working with her, so when she admitted she actually came from Jersey we did all we could to encourage her to come home whilst the festival was on. I love the unexpected strength she brings to the role she plays. The vulnerability you expect, but it’s the flashes of steel that really give the performance it’s strength.

Rebecca Eve freezing to the bone...

Jess is an old friend of ours who we’ve been longing to work with properly for years. Her performance is the anchor of the whole film and once we’d fixed the idea in our heads we knew that the whole thing would live or die by the long silent take of her walking across the sand. Jess, like us, is best known for making people laugh. She’s most regularly employed as a stand-up where she is filthy, smart and hysterically funny. Her joke about the names of colours is still one of my favourite things in the entire world. We always knew that there was much more to Jess than silliness, as we hope is true of ourselves. However all three of us were aware that we were entering unfamiliar territory with no time to change our minds… The glowing praise that people have given her for her performance in this film is something I am totally delighted by. She’s very brilliant and I’m very proud of her. This a picture of her with a Nazi:

So there we go, that’s my directorial love-in for the people who made this brilliant brilliant film with me and Chris. You will now either be desperate to see and celebrate its shining wonder or you will want to revel in the schadenfreude of hating it and marking low. Whatever floats your bloat give me six minutes of your life by clicking on the link below and tomorrow I will tell you everything I know about Alex Jacob’s “Dashes Of Yellow”…

“Truth In The Valley” is available to vote for here:
http://www.mishorts.com/index.php?page=shop.product_details&category_id=14&flypage=flypage-comp.tpl&product_id=911&option=com_virtuemart&Itemid=13

No, for once, I’m not just banging about Branchage (though I’m not saying it’s not) but my last post here about the length of shorts has sparked up this question on the Shooting People Filmmaker’s Bulletin…

> Hi What are the 6 top festivels in the opinion of the SP
> readers are the ones that REALLY count and what is THE ideal
> length for a short? Coould we have some views please? Best
> Charlie Salem

And in tomorrow’s bulletin my reply will be this…

The ideal length for a short film is exactly as long as the story needs to be.

The six best film festivals are these…

1 – The one in which you see someone else’s film which suddenly makes you realise what you’ve been doing wrong and inspires you to do better.

2 – The one in which you find someone who loves your work so much they want to help fund your next film.

3 – The one in which you find someone who loves your work so much they want you to work on their next project.

4 – The one where you meet people, directors, writers, actors, producers or industry executives who really get you and suddenly a world of new unpaid possibilities opens up.

5 – The one where you get laid.

6 – The one where you very drunk and have a great time without embarrassing yourself.

Sadly, or happily depending upon your viewpoint, these events have no basis in geography.

Or, to answer the question in another way, somewhere in this world is a director who has just screened a 28 minute film in a tiny festival where, quite by chance, it was seen by a rich old man who has given her a blank cheque and the keys to his wine cellar and she’s currently nursing a hangover in bed with his beautiful daughter who’s amazing screenplay lies waiting to explode her mind on the bedside table.

There’s no right answer in life and you make your own luck.

Hope that’s clear.

As keen readers and those of you able to scroll down to earlier entries will know, last week I took part in the third brilliant Shooting People Branchage Film Surgery at the Hospital Club in Covent Garden. We watched a bunch of increasingly brilliant films and with Phil, Hannah and James, I did my best to think of helpfully critical things to say about them.

A nice upshot of these events are the people you meet at them. In the pub afterwards I met Allan Gichigi who’s cracking short documentary about the illegal Kenyan public transport system can be found here: http://shootingpeople.org/watch/film.php?film_id=78264

I also met a guy called Andrew who has since emailed me to say “…I’m busy in pre-production on a 10ish minute [film] which is to be filmed in January so hopefully by Spring I will have a lovely little film and lots more raring to go. Actually – that was something I meant to ask you on the night; how big a benchmark is 10 minutes do you think? By going over that are you severely restricting the exposure you can get from festivals? I know you and Chris have made shorts of varying lengths, so thought you might have some interesting things to say on the matter.

All the very best,

Andrew”

Being always happy to talk at length about the things I think I wrote him a reply and since it was actually about film I thought it might be of interest to you my dear Shooting reader.

Hallo Andrew!

The significance of the duration of a short film is relatively simple… the shorter something is the easier it is to programme and the less daunting it is to watch.

So as far as programmers, broadcasters, sales agents and distributors go under five minutes is golden because it’s far easier to slip it in to a tight schedule. It means that rather than agonising over whether film A is better than film B, they can just show both. Since their job is entirely about agonising over which films to show anything that helps lessen the load is always welcomed with open arms. This is especially the case where the screen time is expensive.

As far as the audience goes, well, increasingly I’d say that most shorts are watched singularly and online. They are browsing material. They’re not something you settle down in front of at the end of a long day, but something you grab a glance at when you have five minutes and you should be doing something else. The phrase “when you have five minutes” is apt, it’s not so often that people find themselves with ten, or fifteen, or twenty minutes because that’s more like a proper amount of time they could spend doing something else.

Also, and perhaps more importantly, most people are surprisingly polite when it comes to film – or at least they are when they press play. Very few people actively start a film of any length thinking “well if it’s shit I’ll turn it off”. Which is odd because most people probably do turn it off when it is. However on the whole the majority assume that they’re comitting to the full run time. Equally though most people assume that a short film probably isn’t that good. This is partly because most shorts don’t come with the sort of comforting fanfare that features get but mainly because most short films aren’t that good. Most short films are actively awful.

The upshot of which is that if I see a film is five minutes long I think “OK, why not, I can bare five minutes of awfulness”, but when I see it is ten minutes I start to doubt it’s worth pressing play… does it sound interesting? Is there a good image that draws me in? Is there someone in it I recognise? Is the director a friend? Do I actually have to…? By the time it’s hitting fifteen to twenty minutes I pretty much have to be, I don’t know, sat on a chair in front of a room full of strangers who have all turned up to hear my thoughts on it, like a weird and twisted nightmare in which I haven’t done my homework and I now have to give a presentation about it. Which is why I often look so pale during the Surgery.

Obviously if a film is a good, or dare I say it, brilliant, you can get away with it. Over the years I’ve heard a great many prescriptions for how long a short should be but the only one that really stands up is that it should be as long as it deserves to be. As long as the story can sustain. One thing that I have noticed is that there are too many shorts made by people who are aping feature pacing without understanding why this pace is requried. A good example is the last film in last week’s surgery. Much of the best stuff in the film was creating a mood and atmosphere, a sense of the character. Some of the most delicious passages in cinema history are sections where the story appears to stop and you just hang out with the main character and many short film makers attempt to get this atmosphere into their films. However the key thing in the last sentence is ‘appears’ to stop. In any well made film you never ever see or hear anything that isn’t giving the audience something which propels the ideas of the film toward their conclusion. All too often short filmmakers don’t know what their story actually is, as was clearly the case with the last film in the surgery. Consequently the mood and atmosphere that they mirror from a feature film is telling the audience nothing they need to know about this short story. So the film looks lovely, but bores.

All of which is a round the houses way of trying to explain the other maxim about duration in shorts – whatever length your film is, it is too long. Obviously this doesn’t hold true for everybody but it’s a damn good thought to hold onto because in most cases you can shave ten percent of what you think is the perfect length and you’ll end up with a film which is far more enjoyable for audiences.

Doing our best to stop it turning into Strictly Come Filmmaking (a title which suggests entirely the wrong sort of movie), Phil, Hannah, myself and maestro of ceremonies Mullighan will be performing mouth-to-mouth on some arresting short films at The Hospital in Covent Garden tonight from 6.30pm.

Not only will it be full of gems of filmmaking advice it’s also good fun, especially if it’s not your film that’s dying on the slab. So put on your best Branchage brogues and come…