With the BAFTAs around the corner on February 8th, SP have been looking who in the community could potentially snatch up awards in each category. To no surprise at all, members are dotted all over the nomination list all across the filmmaking spectrum.

Outstanding Debut by British Writer, Director or Producer.

Andrew de Lotbiniere is up for this award as Producer of ‘Kajaki: The True Story.‘A suspenseful recreation of a horrific event that took place during the Afghan war; the film follows a small unit of soldiers. One of the patrol sets off a land mine, causing devastating effects, initiating a desperate rescue mission.

Best Editing

Jinx Godfrey has been nominated for this award for his work on ‘The Theory Of Everything‘ – The life of Stephen Hawking through university, his discovery of ALS and an insight into his life with Jane Wilde. 

Best Documentary

There is no stopping these three who have been shortlisted for the Oscar’s Documentary Category and won a BIFA award:

Virunga – Orlando van Einsiedel – Oscar Shortlisted.

20,000 Days on Earth – Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard – BIFA Directional Debut Award.
CITIZENFOUR – Britdoc UK distribution headed by member Luke Moody – Oscar Shortlisted.

Best British Short Film

Oscar Sharp, Tiernan Hanby & Campbell Beaton wrote, directed and produced The Karman Line – a story about a mother who gets a rare condition and gradually starts to rise in the air.This magical/surrealistic tale also won Best British Short at BIFA.

Emotional Fusebox – produced and directed by members Michael Berliner and Rachael Turnnard is also up for this award.

Best British Short Animation

Monkey Love Experiments‘ – Directors and Writers Ainslie Henderson and Will Anderson are the only members in the animation category.

There you have it, some fierce competition at BAFTA this year – and some major achievements by SP members. Some interesting people to be inspired by and keep in mind for future collaborations. You never know what might be around the corner…

 

This is not a small world. If it were then we would accost all the people we’ve never met with the phrase “I don’t know who you are and I’ve never thought about you, what an amazingly big world it is”. We don’t do this because the world is big and we’d get nothing done.

10 years ago Chris Blaine, Adam Brown and I screened a short film in our mobile cinema called “The Orange Tree” by Simon Kent. It remains one of my all time favourites and is built around a lovely performance by Justin Edwards as a lonely man whose life is changed when he buys a small fruit tree.

At one point he’s eating a microwaved lasagne meal and casually does a thoughtful reflexive hand gesture as he chews. It’s an odd thing to fixate on but all three of us separately remarked upon it as a beautiful piece of observation. It’s a throwaway gesture but somehow really speaks of his loneliness and need to share.

I’ve noticed it’s a gesture I’ve often copied when eating on my own, something I was reminded of as I found my fingers flexing whilst I stood at London Bridge tube station eating a donut on the last Saturday before Christmas. I hadn’t thought about Simon’s film for some time and suddenly this tiny gem came back to me and despite the raging shoving torrent of christmas shoppers and the ache of my cracked rib I realised I was extraordinarily happy.

Minutes later, heading for the exit at Bond Street, I noticed that stood in front of me on the escalator was the actor Justin Edwards. He had headphones on it seemed rude and confusing to disturb him with this small but delightful piece of coincidence. So I thought I’d disturb you with it instead.

This is not a small world and that’s what makes brief random moments like this all the more delightful. More importantly, retelling this story reminds me that whatever you are creating, however short your film, however small your audience, however shoved to the back of a drawer the notes are, never under estimate the power of your art to echo into the lives of strangers and bring joy to people you don’t see.

The Orange Tree from The Blatant Creation of Art on Vimeo.

At Jameson First Shot, three filmmakers will have the awesome opportunity to have their scripts turned into short films by Kevin Spacey’s Trigger Street Productions, and to direct Oscar winner Adrien Brody in the lead role.

The winning shorts will also be premiered in LA with the team in attendance. We think it’s a great opportunity – and we’re helping Jameson First Shot to find UK filmmakers to use the competition as a great step on the ladder in their careers.

London Short Film Festival are helping to recruit filmmakers too, and the ever knowledgeable Philip Ilson has shared his thoughts on the importance of short films and taking advantage of all the opportunities that come your way, by hook or by crook!

“Every person that has made a film in the history of film ever has made a short film. The first ever films were shorts (before the standard approximately 90 to 100 minutes became the norm in Hollywood and internationally from the twenties onwards). We are bombarded with shorts continuously, from adverts to promos to on-line virals, and short artist film works are exhibited in gallery spaces the world over. And then there is the more traditional accepted idea of a short film: A short drama that plays at film festivals and gets new talent noticed by the accepted film industry. In the general scheme of things, within the cinematic medium, shorts are incredibly important. Without them, the filmmakers that make it into our cinemas and onto our TVs and laptops, wouldn’t exist. But with this saturation of the moving image, on all these different platforms, how does talent get noticed? Of course, we hope that the good talent can rise to the top, but even talented filmmakers have to put themselves out there, or they will get lost.

The Jameson First Shot film competition recognises this, and can really help talented filmmakers come through and get noticed. It was set up by Kevin Spacey in partnership with Dana Brunetti of Trigger Street Productions with the knowledge that for the wealth of filmmaking talent there is out there, getting a first shot in the industry is notoriously difficult. And it’s important for filmmakers to want to develop; I meet so many who are very driven, with their eyes and hearts set on BAFTAs and other awards, and on a respected festival circuit. I also enjoy meeting the ones who don’t have that traditional career vision, but are making excellent work. Maybe they are filmmakers who have a different outlook, looking more towards gallery work, or maybe they are filmmakers who just enjoy doing it for themselves. Sometimes this work can be the more creatively interesting, as there’s no remit in place to play the game. Sometimes, these filmmakers can be the ones that do break through; I feel that filmmakers like David Lynch and Jonathan Glazer, and groundbreaking European filmmakers from Godard to Tarkovsy, from Antonioni to the Dardenne Brothers, have always thought about their work rather than how they are going to get ahead in the industry. And of course, these are the filmmakers who have become part of the cinematic canon of film history, who broke the mould, whom we constantly go back to and study.

This isn’t to say that every short filmmaker is a potential Godard, but for me, I get very excited by those filmmakers who are pushing the envelope, which is really hard at a time in history when ‘everything has been done’. When programming for LSFF, I am always amazed at how many times I do get blown away by a new short, particularly when I’m watching thousands of short films a year. What excites me is giving those filmmakers a chance to screen at a reputable Festival in a reputable cinema venue, especially if it’s filmmaker who hasn’t played the circuit, who seems to have come from nowhere. At Jameson First Shot, this idea can be developed to actually offer such filmmakers a chance to go to that next level, to make something high profile with a reputable production company and filmmaking team. Jameson First Shot is a way to bypass the more traditional routes of career development that relies on the slog of making contacts and networking yourself into the ground.

At Jameson First Shot, three winners will have an opportunity to have their scripts turned into short films and to direct Adrien Brody in the lead role. The winning shorts will be premiered in LA with the team in attendance. Full details can be found at jamesonfirstshot.com

-Philip Ilson, Creative Director, London Short Film Festival

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!