Nominated for an award!!

[sammo]

Heya all,

We've just found out that a short film of ours is up for an award at the Student Screen Test Festival based in Brizzle!

www.screentestfest.org.uk/

Our film Ignorance was shot on a HD camera (a Sony...something, I highly recommend it) all in one shot on the first take. We're going to be screened as part of 'The Lock In' (....!?) on Friday night, which sounds like a laugh.

Has anyone else heard/entered this festival this year or in the past?

We hadn't heard from the festival for ages, it turns out our confirmation email got bounced back, but when we gave them a call they said that we're not only in the festival but nomiated for a technical achievement award. We're pretty thrilled, especially as we thought nothing would come of it!

[Dazza]

Well done great news. Is the film around on Youtube or anywhere?

[sammo]

Unfortunately not on You Tube or anything yet, we've entered it into to several film festivals both here and the US.

We'll definitely get it uploaded when we can.

[RydCook]

Excellent! Well done mate!

[halfpint]

Congrats mate, best of luck.

Get it uploaded already!

[sammo]

Hey all,

The National Student Film Festival couldn't be more of a disappointment!

Admittedly we didn't win our award, but to be honest it was quite a long shot, and the film which did win rightly deserved it. They made their film look like some sort of big blockbuster, I admired their production values - well done to them.

But the audience were incredibly rude during the screening of our film, there was laughing and jeering - not because the film was awful (or at least I suspect) but because it features a man in drag undressing, fully exposing himself to the audience during his last performance as his female counterpart. It was initially intended to be a expose into the idea of gender representations on screen, but the immature members of the audience ruined the experience for us - not only insulting our own hard work, but the performance from the actor who really puts everything into his performance - I can't believe how rude some people are.

It was even as if these were the sort of people who may not have liked the film and we could've had an interesting conversation about it afterwards - these were people in their 20's and 30's saying things like 'did you see that guys cock in that film?' etc.

Whats worse is, alot of the other films we saw over the weekend, were incomprehensible Blair Witch, Ring, Texas Chainsaw, The Grudge rip offs - all abusing he night vision feature on the camera with a backwards playing soundtrack - gah!

Sorry for the rant, I feel like I needed to vent my frustration!

We will upload the film online, we have permission from our actor to screen it into festivals, but he wants to put it into his showreel before we post it onto our website - sorry for the delay. We'll let you know of any further festival screenings however. Also we have a MySpace page at www.myspace.com/ignorancefilm

We'd love to hear of what you lot on the forum think, thanks for all of the support

[Tom]

Aha! Welcome to the cold hard world of the festival run. It's a brutal game eh?

What a bunch of muppets to jeer at the screen. I guess, at the end of the day though, that's what it's all about. Until you're allowed to vet the people coming into your movie, you're always going to a get a few monkeys in there. But no two screenings are ever the same, so just see it as an experience.

And the horror movie is the staple of festivals for two reasons: 1 - they're cheap to make and your mates can be in it. And 2 - people are allowed to shout and jeer at the screen.

Shame about the missed win, but don't let that put you off screening it at another fest.

Tom.

[sammo]

Thanks Icharus,

We definitely will keep entering it into festivals - and have a few other films now which we'd like to send off as well.

I think we've got The LA Short Film Festival and Sardinia Film Festival on the cards in the near future, and we've also entered it into Soho Rushes, Edinburgh, Super Shorts UK...and keeping our ear to the ground for more.

Does anyone have any recommendations?

[Tom]

DNA Film Festival, Toronto, Canada. Good lads. And my film festival But I won't use the board to pimp that.

[sammo]

Thanks for the recommendations, I'll have a look into that Canadian festival...Oh, whoops I've typed in a series of random letters and ended up at the Bootleg Film Festival

Cheers Tom, I'll have a look and keep you updated.

[Tom]

Ha ha. Well good luck with the festival run. And I had 15 rejections from fests before just one said yes. It helped that we won at it, but you know, that's the way these things go...

Tom.