Hi Everyone,

You may have seen already that Film of the Month has undergone a transformation. The biggest change is that we now have 2 rounds. The top 5 films voted by members in the first round have now be joined by 5 ‘Wildcards’ picked by SP Staff and Friends. The best thing about having a Final Round is that we can really shout about these 10 films, and give the filmmakers a platform to promote themselves. You can give each film 1-5 stars depending on how much you like it, all the films are great so please be generous and remember only the top 3 at midnight on the 29th will be shown to Mark Cousins.

In no particular order here’s what the filmmakers had to say about the competition:

Shitty White Wine - Fred Rowson

Bon Appetit is three short films about everyday eating; breakfast, lunch and dinner. It’s a combination of Middle Class Cannibalism and Feces eating. After working as a waitress during my student days i realized how horrifying disturbing the ritual of eating was and decided to embody this into a film.  The film was made on a budget of £500 and all the effects where cooked up in my kitchen. It is the second film I have made and has been screened at Fright Fest, London Short Film Festival and Birds Eye View Film Festival. I had a tremendous amount of fun making making film though i don’t beleave my bath tub has ever recovered the experience.

Love Locks- Liberty Smith

Love Locks came about through a process of curiosity, like, I suppose a lot of films do – it all began with a tiny article in the Metro. It caught my eye – such an overt public expression of love, and a celebration of relationships that seemed so full of hope – and I wanted to document that. It doesn’t seem to happen very often. Being in the Shooting People’s Film of The Month competition is a wonderful and fun event to be part of. You end up watching lots of short films, linking up with other filmmakers and learning a lot about the process along the way – from storytelling to learning how you can use social media to promote yourself and your work. I have been lucky enough to have won a Film of The Month competition for a previous film, Behind The Light – judged by Nick Cave. It meant that my film was seen by a much wider audience than it would have otherwise – and I received a lot of great feedback which was confidence-building for a beginner filmmaker!

Roses Are Pink – Otto Schlindwein  

Rose are pink…  required a little serendipity. I was thinking about a festival brief  - women competing in male driven environments, while at the same time developing an installation with an all transgender cast. So when Gia Darling and Allanah Starr were making an appearance at a London nightclub I decided to go along, thinking they’d be good collaborators for either project. So with camera in hand I introduced myself, pitched to Gia and she agreed to be shot there and then and to do an interview the next day. Without agents, emails or phone calls, I ‘d started shooting! Considering she didn’t know me from Adam and had just got off a plane from LA, this was very gracious, and even though I intruded on her visit for a lengthy interview and cutaways, she remained charming and good natured. She talked openly and at length about her transition, media representation, relationships and work, all with a great sense of humour. Roses are pink…  is 5 minutes in Gia’s company; a simple profile touching on different aspects of her life. She is one of the then few transsexual celebrities to have had a mainstream media presence while also maintaining a high profile career in the adult industry as both producer and performer. Her bombshell looks and lively personality belie both her business sense and the hardships of transition. Shooting People’s  Film of the Month Competition is a great forum where new voices can be heard and discoveries delivered to our screens, and its a real delight to be slotted among this round and allow Roses are Pink… a new opportunity to reach an audience of Shooters and beyond.  Its all quite out of the blue and rather nice :]

The Furred Man -Paul Williams

The idea for ‘The Furred Man’ came out of horror’s inability to handle consequence. I’ll always remember the scene in ‘Fright Night’ where the werewolf is staked by a banister, turns back into human form, and with his dying breath he croaks ‘thank you’. All is good with the world – the werewolf is dead. But wait, now you have a dead, naked teenager in your house with a banister covered in your fingerprints sticking out of his chest. What are you going to tell the police? Will they believe your ‘he was a werewolf a minute ago’ story? This idea of consequence was the starting point for ‘The Furred Man’ and it then spun out into a cautionary tale about the dangers of camping.
It is amazing to be picked as one of the wildcards for Film of the Month as I’ve been part of Shooting People for years and without the collaboration of other shooters my films would never have been made – including ‘The Furred Man’. We’ve had an amazing festival run and to be put in the running for Film of the Month just as we’ve uploaded the short online is the icing on a very furry cake.

The Kiss – Ben Hyland

The Kiss is predominantly a silent film. I wanted to tell a story that conveyed a message without using character dialogue throughout. I wanted to make something tender and heartfelt that left the audience feeling good at the end and also feeling they had watched something different and original. Being a wildcard in the SP Film of the Month means a great deal to me. Just having the opportunity to showcase my work and also to be able to showcase the great talent that made the film possible. As a filmmaker all I ever want is for people to watch the films that I make.

Holding the Line - Patrick Wells

In June 2011, I spent three weeks living on the front line with the Martyr’s Brigade, a group of Libyan rebel fighters defending their besieged home city of Misrata. ‘Holding the Line’ is the result, an intimate portrait of citizen soldiers at war.
The film documents the horror, boredom and weirdness of life on the front line and explores the differences between the men’s preconceptions of war and the realities they have experienced.
To get the young fighters to open up about the realities of becoming killers, about fear, loss and death, I shot the film on my own and lived on the frontline with them until they trusted me enough to talk freely and critically. As a filmmaker I did not have to file stories each day, and as a result I could put in the time with my subjects and hope to get more than the usual shots of rebels waving their guns in the air and doing what they felt was expected of them in front of the camera.

We Were Wanderers On a Prehistoric Earth – James W Griffiths

A few months ago I made a film called Splitscreen: A Love Story for a Nokia film competition. At a complete surprise it became a hit online and was seen by over two million people via social networks and blogs (I owe a lot to people like Mark Zuckerberg!) One of the people who saw it was someone at Tourism Malaysia who asked me to make a film for them. They gave me an incredibly open brief: Make a film about the nature of Malaysia.
We jumped at the opportunity with a very simple idea, shoot lots of great footage and edit it to music and a poetic voiceover. I recruited Christopher Moon, the same DoP behind Splitscreen and armed with a Canon 1D Mark IV we shot anything and everything that looked interesting with just one rule: shoot only nature, no people and nothing man made. I edited it together (which was very easy with the fantastic cinematography by Chris) and handed it over to Mauricio d’Orey to design the sound track. We didn’t record any useable sound when we were there so every sound you hear is Mauricio’s handywork. Then we passed the cut to Lennert Busch who came back with a brilliant piece of music, totally different to the temp track and much better to anything I imagined.
For the voice over I wanted a text that was both poetic and descriptive of the jungle. Heart of Darkness was perfect. I have of course taken the words out of their original context but I think they work brilliantly in this form. The timeless quality of Terry Burns voice really works well with the words. Something for my fellow filmmakers to note when using other works like this is to find out if it is still within copyright, Heart of Darkness is in the public domain because the author died more hat 70 years ago. I hope you like it, I’ve put together a brief ‘making of’ for those interested: www.vimeo.com/35970046 Thanks for watching!

Knock Knock - Chris Sherrif

Plagium - Brady Hood

Katie is a young girl besotted with fairy-tales and stuck with the childhood belief that real life is just as wondrous. Katie is spending the day with her father as he takes her on an adventure to see the film adaptation of her favourite story. Not only is she excited about seeing the film, but also about visiting her Granny‘s afterwards, because she loves it when Granny reads to her. Katie’s day will take a different turn, because, as she will come to learn, the real world can also be a very wicked place.

Ronnie Mackintosh wrote Plagium; a man that I have the utmost respect for, and who also wrote my first film Small Gifts. He presented me with this script and I instantly fell in love with it. I knew I had to direct this as it connected with me on a number of levels. I was brought up by a nana that was besotted with fairy-tales and spent every weekend reciting them to my small, willing ears. As soon as I saw the potential to create a film that referenced fairy tales and in turn my childhood memories I just had to be involved.  I loved the flow of the story and was very much attracted to the idea of playing with an audience’s perceptions. I feel that the time in which one allows the audience into pivotal information and the way in which one manipulates that creates the strongest element of story telling, therefore, to play with these conventions for this film was not only great fun but also a massive learning curve for myself. I had a great team around me and this was the result of what we all worked so hard for.

I need to take this opportunity to say thank you to all of you for making this lovely little film and I hope you reap any benefits given because it is thoroughly deserved.