Hi Everyone,

It’s that time of the month again when our leaderboard goes from 250 films to just 10, 5 picked by you and 5 picked by us. The top 3 at midnight on the 31st of May will be sent to Larry Charles for judging. We thought we’d leave it up to the filmmakers to tell you about their films, so here’s what they had to say:

Modern Life is Rubbish by Daniel Gill

‘Modern Life Is Rubbish’ originally started as a short play, and then we trimmed it down into a short film. We made the short in two days in a mate flat and then started getting a great response from the festival programers. It seems everyone can relate to a break up, and everyone loves some kind of music. The film started to gain momentum and began to get selected for numerous film festivals across the world..even winning awards! Bafta screening..a Producer approached me and asked, “Have you ever thought of making it into a feature”, myself and the writer Philip Gawthorne, of course did not..but within a month we’d received development funding and were sitting in my flat..throwing ideas around. Phil took a few months to write the script, and his agent submitted the screenplay for the prodigious Brit List (top 35 screenplays voted by the British Film Industry). Unbelievably we got on the list! Within a few months we had a cool Producer attached, and a Casting Director. We are now securing the lead cast..before raising the rest of the funds..and look to shoot in the Autumn! Short films are the way forward!!!

Dead Bird by Trevor Hardy

I have been animating for the past 13 years. I run and own a small stop frame studio down by the sea in, West Sussex. ‘Foolhardy Films’ produces top class ‘Stop-frame’ animation, everything from brightly coloured plasticine farm animals to dancing baked beans. Clients include Nickelodeon’s Nick Jr. I created a bunch of short 1 minute wonders for Nick Jr, a little show called ‘Watermill Farm’ all about plasticine farm animals. I am married and have a little 8 year old boy called ‘Jazz’. He was the voice of Peter in my short film, ‘Dead Bird’. He is a real natural and took to voice acting very easily.

I create all my films myself, this is not a choice thing, it’s just that I usually work with a budget of ….all, so it’s a case of having to be a one man band, but I think that sometimes can work as an advantage, you don’t have to say “can I do this” to anyone and my studio is at the bottom of my garden, so rush hour is fine for me. He He.

Anyway, thanks for showing an interest in me and my work and I am really proud to have ‘Dead Bird’ involved with Shooting people.

On Another Note by Emma Dove

On Another Note features Sarah Kenchington, a Scotland-based sculptor, musician and performer who uses bits of junk to make her own bizarre mechanical instruments. Delving into this charmingly quirky little world, strange sounds and intricate creations both perplex and fascinate in equal measure.

The documentary was made as an Honours dissertation project, and is the first fully-fledged documentary to be produced by all members of the crew, so we’re a little bit overwhelmed (and a big bit excited) to have made it in to the Film of the Month final! The fact that many people will have the opportunity to see our little film is very exciting for us, and we’re looking forward to hearing what others have to say about it – any and all constructive criticism would be much appreciated.

The film was produced over the course of 3 months, with literally no budget. Luckily we were working with a truly fascinating person, in a fabulous little community, so the film became a joy to produce. The crew even became temporary members of the community during our 3-day shoot, living in our very own caravan! (We didn’t want to leave…)

Hats off to the University of Stirling for all of their help and support throughout production – needless to say, we couldn’t have done it without them.

I hope you enjoy the film as much as we enjoyed making it.

Sexy Tuesday by Paul Gowers

Sexy Tuesdays was made for the 48 Hour London Film Project. A competition in which filmmakers are given 48 hours to make a film between 4 and 7 minutes long. You turn up at a given venue on a Friday night to be given a character, a prop and a line of dialogue and then each team draws a genre out of a hat. In our case, comedy. You then leave the venue and pretty much panic like crazy. For a director used to control it’s a scary situation. You’re not able to do any prep work on the script so really are starting from nothing. I was lucky I had some great crew and cast willing to work on the film for nothing (you’re not allowed to pay anyone). The film was shot in a blistering and exhilarating 7 hours and edited in a blurry eyed 15 hour period in which we also added the music and did a rough grade and mix.
My greatest fear was that I’d have to spend all my time prefixing every conversation about the film with the excuse that it was made it in just 48 hours. But I really believe it stands up as a piece of work in its own right.
At the risk of sounding cheesy it made me feel proud to work in this industry, in which so many talented people are prepared to give up their weekend in the hope of creating something half decent. Hopefully we did that. The film won Best film and the Audience Award. The cut you will hopefully watch has had one small edit made and been re graded but otherwise is the same film we presented for the competition. I hope you like it.

Salsa Guy by Gus Alvarez

SALSA GUY was the first collaboration between the writer Paul Nash and myself. We’ve since worked together on several short films and also a couple of feature projects. The original inspiration for SALSA GUY was a local oddball Paul had observed in Ipswich, where he grew up. This balding, middle-aged man with a pony-tail and a taste for garish shirts kept appearing at various gigs and whatever the music – world, country, blues or ska – this guy would be dancing salsa to it! That image stuck with him and developed into the character of Nigel AKA ‘Salsa Guy’.
When I first read the script, I thought it was very funny yet tragic at the same time. I could see the potential to do interesting things in terms of how we filmed it, the energy of the dance scenes versus the drab daytime routine; the blend of fantasy and reality; transitions between past and present. In rehearsals, I encouraged the lead actor (Robert Gill) to think of Salsa Guy as an alter ego, in the same way that Clark Kent became Superman or Bruce Wayne became Batman, Nigel Maplin became Salsa Guy!

The film was a real labour of love to make, but also a lot of fun and we were blessed to work with such an amazing team, who allowed themselves to be dragged around just about every Salsa club in London! Special praise must go to the DoP Neill Phillips for his excellent lighting and shooting skills and also to our lead actor Robert Gill who delivered a barnstorming performance, full of emotion and physicality, that really gave the film a lot of soul. I’m really pleased audiences seem to respond to SALSA GUY so positively and I’m glad to share the film with my fellow Shooters. I hope you enjoy it!

Toothless by Steven Dorrington

Toothless follows the Tooth Fairy as she forced into unethical methods of tooth collection in search of a better life. I wanted to tell a story that was both humorous and moral so I choose to a well-known character that most audiences already have preconceptions of and placed her in a world and situation that contradicts and challenges those presumptions. This gave us a huge scope for a comedy and a complex character to build a story around.

A key factor in deciding to make this film was the budget. Using the mockumentary genre and setting the story in a council house and various domestic settings allowed us to keep costs low and create a realistic world for the Tooth Fairy to inhabit. The film was shot on a mixture of formats in including Mini DV, DSLR and super 8 to create the mishmash of looks that are commonly found in documentary filmmaking.

From first coming up with the idea to completing post-production it was around 2 years and I’m very proud of the final product and the cast crew that made it happen. I hope you enjoy watching it!

Shoes by Dermot Canterbury

I got an email entitled ‘Comedy short seeks director’ from someone called Alexis Strum with the sign off ‘Here’s my website should you wish to check if I am a mental.’ I did. She was. But she’d also written a funny script about a really nasty waitress with what became my new favourite insult. I was in. She had me at ‘Cockfist’.

Alexis put together a brilliant cast including the fantastic Steve Furst, and an equally great crew, many of whom are fellow shooters. We shot in the middle of December in a cafe in Chingford. It was a long day with a challenging schedule dictated by short daylight hours, artist availability and the owner, Hassan. Our relentlessly cheerful editor Jamie Munn did a great job crafting the film and pulling in favours to dub and colour it.

No-budget film-making always results in compromise, and there’s stuff I wish we’d done differently (there always is), but I hope people like our ambitiously silly, sweetly-nasty story of the world’s worst waitress.

Le Sequel: The Filmmaker by Jason Croot

Le Sequel: The Filmmaker’ is a 100% improvised cut down film of Le Fear: II Le Sequel. We wanted to create something that gave an insight into the failure’s of twenty two time filmmaker Carlos Revalos whose film endeavours are nothing but disastrous, and everything he does turns to s***t . You can only feel sorry for Carlos this time around though, when he meets a bigger fool than himself. Efi Woomonbongo, a corrupt film producer who offers Carlos the world, but instead gives him peanuts or rather the empty shells. ‘LeSequel: The Filmmaker’ shows interviews from the worst filmmaker in the world and the worst film producer, the film intercuts with footage from “Le fear” and produces a recipe for a disaster.
Filmmaking means a great deal to me having worked both in front of and behind the camera for years. Being able to create a light hearted film about a creation of a film, with a strong production team and editor with crew that worked so hard and cast that were able to improvise so skilfully was a joy and we are very grateful to those who have put time and hard work into making it happen. I hope people enjoy watching the film, we would like to thank everybody who has supported and voted for us so far we really appreciate it.
Best wishes
Jay

 Extranjero by Daniel Lumb + Crinan Campbell

Extranjero evolved from various other shorter and longer scripts we had been throwing around for a while. We had become stuck on a sort of sketch, the image of a man in a 90s shellsuit floating above a street. That was our starting point, everything evolved naturally around that visual.

We’ve had various people asking us about the political undertone to the film. We really didn’t set out out to make a kind of statement piece. We just settled on this as a kind of aesthetic, the image has loose thought. We were interested in faceless, nameless immigrant culture especially in london. The sorts of people that drive your cab or clean your hotel room, many of which are highly educated and from wartorn backgrounds –  arriving and surviving in and around their underpaid menial jobs.  We just liked the simple metaphor of physically elevating such a person to a point that everybody could see him.

Keen to make Extranjero feel big as possible, we shot guerrilla in public places that would cost a mortgage to do officially, like Piccadilly circus and London Underground, and weirdly barely got any hassle. We did then have to get retrospective permits, after we realised that lots of festivals ask for them..

The biggest outlay on the film were probably train tickets and food. I think we totalled up a budget of around £100?

From the outset, we had planned the film to be no more than 3 minutes, and for there to be no bagginess, but as things went on we had to set our sights more at the 5 minute mark, but keeping it as tight as possible. We spent a long time in the edit, really trying to fine tune and not labour anything.

Once you’ve put your time, money, favours etc into something and fought to get it done, one of the more annoying things is you’ve then got to try to find someone who will show it, but as we’re learning, it’s all worth it.

Cheers

DAN + CRINAN

 

Jericho – Liam Gavin

Jericho came about as a collaboration with the Irish production company Samson films (who made Once). They were keen me as a writer and had liked the previous short I had made and wanted to develop me as a director and thought I needed another short. The best way forward they thought was to make a short from one of the feature film ideas I had milling around in my head. That idea was Jericho.

The initial script was written quite fast but we developed it very painstakingly and what’s onscreen now is quite different from the first draft. I’ve tried on many occasions to articulate what I was trying to write but if I’m honest I don’t really know. I try to write from my world view.

I come from a background as a storyboard artist and I decided that it should be as pictorial storytelling at it’s purest with very few words. Indeed there are only about sixty words in the film. I wanted to see if I could bring emotion and human feeling without having people describe what’s happening to themselves or the world around them.

Being a film maker is in many ways an immensely hard choice to live out. Not only is it hard to get stuff made it’s also hard to get it seen and to get it recognised. The festival circuit is expensive and can be a bit fickle. Shooting People is a great platform for Jericho to be seen by other film makers, film fans. Your peers.  It would be fantastic to do well in this months Shooters. So do vote for Jericho!