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…
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