48hr Film Challenge

I’ve been asked to be involved with the 48hr Film Challenge over in Jersey at the Branchage Film Festival. I’ll run the idea past you just in case you’ve not come across this before…

*In teams you arrive at 11am to the designated meeting place.
*One member from each team will pick from a hat a genre and a title.
*You go off and write, shoot, edit, finalise and bring your film back 48 hours later.

That’s pretty much it to be honest. You hardly sleep, run around like a blue arsed fly, eat shockingly shoddy food stuffs and what’s more we’re doing it in Jersey. A pretty place. The event itself is sponsored by Vauxhall and all the films will be screened after a drive-in showing of The Wizard of Oz. On a big fuck-off screen. I’m getting quite excited now. I love working in a collaborative nature and my Lovely Boss has put me in touch (and vice versa) with a fantastic director called Gaelle Denis who makes extremely pretty things like this:

… and this…

… And who has also requested that I join her team. So along with one male actor of 35, a female actor of 24, an editor and designer, Gaelle herself and moi we are competing in this crazy task. I managed to talk to Gaelle in between her leaving from one job in Berlin at the airport before she flies back here; she’s French and I have a cold, hilarity ensued.

What’s more is that the rather nice people at Vauxhall offered to loan a new shiny car for the entire festival to one team. What’s more is that I secured it! After many phonecalls, faxes, emails and anything else this brilliant opportunity has thrown my way so far it’s done and dusted. I’m not entirely sure what I’m definitely getting but I think it’ll look something like this…

The festival looks a cracking piece of marvellous things. I entered one of the Blaines’ shorts films into it last year and they both went and had mountains of fun. Whilst out there Chris mentored several filmmakers over in the Branchage Bootcamp and out of that sprung Laura Brocken’s film, “Tell” (posted below) which is what I’ve been pushing into festivals the last couple of months.

The Blaines are no strangers to this filmmaking format. They’ve competed in the Berlin challenge which resulted in them making a comedy musical spy thriller called, “Anything Goes”. Then they flitted to Paris where they made an action horror called, “Pour Un Temps” and their other foray (my personal favourite) was their comedy, “Making Juice” which was here in London. For more info check out Johnnie Oddball’s pages.

We’re all going to be camping on one site and the idea is that because all the teams have been personally asked we can all help each other out if needs be. To be brutally honest I cannot wait to be freezing my gibbly bits off standing in a field at 3am, I mean it. It’s going to be the first time that I’ve actually been involved with a short film and after learning about it all, writing short films as a degree and promoting others I think it’s about time I got my hands dirty in the most intense way ever.