Our NEW SHOOTS live event programme continues online and in July horror Guru’s Prano Bailey-Bond and Jen Sheridan joined us for a truly killer masterclass. Both directors are supportive members of the SP community, and both have made a screamingly bold entrance with two of the best debut indie horrors of the year. If you’ve missed it, you can catch up with the Q&A here. They shared expert advice on developing a first feature, working on a shoestring budget, capturing…

SP’s career development short film competition, New Shoots: Filmmakers, is open for submissions four times a year (January, April, July and October.) Guest judges have included the wonderful Sarah Gavron (Director: Rocks, Suffragette), Philip Ilson (Director of London Short Film Festival) and Johnnie Burn (Sound Designer: Ammonite, The Favourite, Under the Skin). The winner of each round takes home a heap of amazing prizes; including Industry Mentorship from BFI Network, Animate Projects or LONO Studio, state of the art Audio…

As this rollercoaster of a year is coming to an end we wanted to look back on some of the amazing work and shooters’ achievements that came out of 2020.

2019 has been an amazing year for the SP community. As Xmas beckons, we wanted to share some highlights, member news, cool shorts you can watch and scripts you can peruse. HIGHLIGHTS 2019 Our quarterly live event, NEW SHOOTS, is your chance to discover the best of independent British filmmakers and their films, to ask your questions directly to a variety of creative teams, and to support those filmmakers by attending their opening weekends. This year, we heard from an…

Shooting People has had a cracking first half of the year and we wanted to raise a glass to our amazing community and all their achievements.  So far this year we’ve held three sold out NEW SHOOTS events. In January we welcomed writer, director and SP member Shola Amoo to speak about his incredible career and his Sundance-premiering feature film ‘The Last Tree.’ In April, BAFTA winning director Toby Macdonald and writer Freddy Syborn revealed how they made the leap…

Whether you’re a writer, director, producer or an actor, you’re certainly sitting on a passion project you’d love to create or portray. Something very personal, something that keeps on returning in your wildest dreams waiting to be realised.  Building this concept or story up, constantly changing, improving and waiting for the right time to share with the world is an art in itself. The more passionate we are about something, the easier it is to be disappointed, having built up…

So, why are directors and producers such a bunch of assholes?

As The 62nd BFI London Film Festival enters full swing, our SHORT CUTS venue partner Rich Mix London invites you to enjoy the glitz, glamour and great stories of one of the world’s most wide-reaching film festivals. But the fun won’t stop with the end of LFF, because Rich Mix has a whole season of festivals that will take you right through November. Next up will be Film Africa 2018, opening on Friday 2 November. With up to 10 days of screenings, Q&As, debate, live music…

Cecilia Frugiuele (left) and Desiree Akhavan (right) Photo: Jeong Park As a networking organisation for indie filmmakers, we’re always fascinated by how creative collaborations are formed and how these relationships work. One partnership in particular that’s intrigued us is the one between producer/writer Cecilia Frugiuele and director/writer Desiree Akhavan, the powerhouse team behind indie hit Appropriate Behaviour (2014) and the soon to be released The Miseducation of Cameron Post (2018), which won the much-lauded Grand Jury Prize at this year’s…

Two SP members, Rebecca Boey and Joseph Brett, of Jackdaw Films completed their webseries Jade Dragon last year completely out of their own pocket. In this blog post, they explain how they achieved it and offer tips for any aspiring filmmakers looking to do the same. Over to Rebecca and Joseph… We made our 19-episode comedy Jade Dragon, set in a Chinese takeaway, on zero budget. That’s not to say it didn’t cost us anything. Of course it did. It cost us…