The last week involved a few lovely screening/social events. Here’s the first.
On Tuesday was The Great Animation Challenge at the Lighthouse, Wolverhampton, which started off with brilliant round up of animations from last year’s Flip Festival. My personal favourite was about a man who’s slipped coordinates in 3D space and is trying to fix it by being hit by asteroids. I can’t tell you the name of it yet as I don’t know… (Skhizein, directed by Jeremy Clapin) I also missed the first half of it. Maybe that added to the feeling of just watching a snippet of someone’s life, rather than going through the whole process of setting up the character. I quite enjoy watching films half way through or without the sound on. You have to piece together a story which is probably no where near as interesting as it seems because it’s turned into a puzzle, everything they do suddenly becomes potentially important.
After that bit of reflection, came the screening and announcement of the winner of the Animation Challenge itself. The prize rightly went to Joe Lea’s interpretation of Underwater Fax of Death, which thanks to other people’s attraction to the song means I’m still singing that song in my head 4 days later. Afterwards, I got to catch up with some familiar faces and chat to some new ones… which was nice.
P.S. I’ll find out the name of that animation and see what I can link to.
We went to the Birmingham Filmmakers Meet Up and it was very productive.
Organised by FilmDash winner, Rill Marchant, there’s finally a time and place for people wanting to get involved in film to chat to each other!
The Meet Ups are a great way for anyone interested in all aspects of film making to come along and meet people who can help them realise their plans. Great films rely on the combination of people’s different talents and until now there hasn’t been a platform for those people to mingle comfortably in one place.
The Facebook Group has 50+ members at the moment, so comparitively the turn out was shockingly low. However the meetup still served more than it’s purpose. Hannah(?) from Team MMUG came along, who, being a lawyer-come-aspiring-filmmaker showed the sort diversity that B’ham Filmmakers combined. And, whilst, Rill explained that she wanted to provide technical services, we’re predominately ideas people. We could have started film right there and then! Instead, we got down to how we could make this thing grow.
A proper blog is obviously the first step, concentrating on exposing opportunities and bringing people together from different disciplines of filmmaking. From then we’d need some set goals and ask the appropriae people for their support. Animation Forum West Midlands has hit the nail on the head, and it would be great to eventually have a network that’s as effective, possibly even working with them – they’ve broken a lot of ground already after all.
On Tuesday was The Great Animation Challenge at the Lighthouse, Wolverhampton, which started off with brilliant round up of animations from last year’s Flip Festival. My personal favourite was about a man who’s slipped coordinates in 3D space and is trying to fix it by being hit by asteroids. I can’t tell you the name of it yet as I don’t know… (Skhizein, directed by Jeremy Clapin) I also missed the first half of it. Maybe that added to the feeling of just watching a snippet of someone’s life, rather than going through the whole process of setting up the character. I quite enjoy watching films half way through or without the sound on. You have to piece together a story which is probably no where near as interesting as it seems because it’s turned into a puzzle, everything they do suddenly becomes potentially important.
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