Budget Isn’t Everything – Vimeo Award Winner Gabriel Bisset-Smith
Winning the Vimeo Award was amazing. I couldn’t make it to the ceremony but some friends of mine from New York went. I was at a party in London when they texted me the news and didn’t believe them at all. It wasn’t till the next day that I realised they weren’t joking. Since winning, over three hundred thousand people have watched the film on Vimeo and it has made thousands watch my other films. I also won the Grand Jury Prize at the disposable film festival, directed a couple of music videos and receive weekly requests from film festivals around the world to screen my work.
The film came about after my friend and co-director on this piece Graham Turner, who is a fantastic photographer, made this film of one of our nights out using only photographs (you can see it herehttp://vimeo.com/2954955) and that’s what gave me the initial idea. We couldn’t afford great filming equipment but he was a great stills photographer with a great stills camera so I just started from there. I was going through a pretty bad breakup at the time and doing a fair amount of Facebook stalking so the story wrote itself.
Now I currently have a couple feature films in development. I’m writing and directing a new play. I’m part of a comedy double act called Guilt and Shame and we’re rehearsing our new show for next year’s Edinburgh festival. I have also just directed a short written by a new writer named Stuart Curran who won a completion I hosted on a website called Circalit in which he had to write a film in response to Thrush. It was my first time directing someone else’s work which is quite nerve racking but exciting.
My advice for anyone entering the Narrative category this year is remember that story really is everything. I know this is obvious but I didn’t realise how little high production values and budget matter until I won. Thrush was made for literally nothing and with a crew of two.
