There and Back Again

For the past few years, SciFi London has run a 48 Hour Film Challenge where teams are given a film title, prop and line of dialogue in which they must use in making a film in 48 hours, from start to finish.

This year, Simon Jones, my Spiffing Review co-host, and Chris Puttock created the team “Ambiguous Visions” to take part in the challenge.   Most of the usual collaborators (me, Chris B, Nigel, Pete & Liz, Tom, Slava and the always fantastic Bill McSweeney on music) joined up and we were given the task of creating “The Orphan Factory”, having to incorporate three identical mobile phones as props and include the line “The French Lady and a Family Portrait Lead Me Here”.  Hmm, tough one eh?

Simon has been blogging about the film making process which are well worth a read.

For me this was the first time in ages I wasn’t an organiser and more of a doer and being able to use my creative story side – I know I’m not the greatest at writing dialogue, but concepts and stories are something I think I can do very well.  It was great to work alongside Chris Burdett on writing the script – normally I’ll give him a brief and he beavers away on the script on his own.

I also really involved doing sound, which on the face of it is nothing more than holding a stick, but the trick is knowing where to hold it is actually quite important!  It was great being able to hear what it was all sounding like at recording, and for the first time on one of our film projects I felt a lot more involved.

The team worked really well together, no tempers flared, everyone got on all the time which is surprising given the timescales and the lack of sleep involved (although for those of us who have run LARP events in the past this was really quite easy to cope with).

Anyway, I’m really please with the way the film turned out, so it’s now over to you for a chance to have a look at “The Orphan Factory”