Nominations

It is exciting for us to see that some of the films that were nominated for Watersprite will also be celebrated at Screentest, but also that there will also be a wide range of different categories (*) including Best Music Video and Best Experimental.

BEST FILM
BEST MUSIC VIDEO *
BEST DRAMA *
BEST EXPERIMENTAL*
BEST SCORE
BEST COMEDY *
BEST SCRIPT
BEST DOCUMENTARY
BEST THRILLER / HORROR *
BEST ANIMATION
BEST PERFORMANCES (ENSEMBLE)
BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY
BEST PRODUCTION DESIGN
see nominees here

The program can be viewed here.

Special Events

These events and screenings not only allow you to watch other people’s work having come together on the screen but also present you with the opportunity to network with other hard working, passionate student filmmakers, professional filmmakers and organisations. 

more info here

Celebrating the joy of making mistakes, the student crap film club will begin by screening some of the HQ’s early film work that is so bad, it’s funny!

BAFTA NOMINATED SHORT ‘THE VOORMAN PROBLEM’ will be screen and then followed by a Q+A chaired by Will Massa.

BAFTA hosts a roundtable on how to promote and distribute your short film.  This is an interactive workshop and discussion that filmmakers can attend to discuss how to better promote their work.

Special Screening of ‘Hula Girl’. This is a documentary come road movie that follows two friends from Sheffield as they travel across America in search of a woman who posts hula hooping videos online.

This year Screentest’s closing gala will take the form of a pub quiz. Registration is free, cash will be collected at the event.

Bookings

JUST £15 gets you a Weekend Pass with complete access to the whole event, including:

• Exclusive screening of BAFTA nominated short The Voorman Problem (Starring Martin Freeman) including a Q+A with the filmmakers. (Friday 22nd)
• Panel discussions with special guests (to be announced)
• Premiere screening of feature length student-made film Echo Restless(Saturday 23rd)
• And The National Student Film Awards Ceremony (Saturday 23rd)
• Much more to be confirmed and announced
• And the main event: over 100 UK student short films!

BOOK HERE

Getting there

(12) Southbank Student Centre
103 Borough Rd
London
SE1 OAA

Watersprite Film of the Year

Nick Rowland, for Dancing in the Ashes

Fiction Award

Kamila Safan, for Chippendale

Animation Award

Iria Lopez, for Jamon

Documentary Award

Christoph Miera, for Sensed

Directing Award

Andy Fortenbacher, for The Painter and the Wife

Screenplay Award

Iria Lopez and Francesca Gardiner, for Jamon

Cinematography Award

Liran Kapel  and Yael Deke, for Nyosha

Editing Award

Oscar Garth, for Rocket Boys

Acting Award

Ensemble, for Dancing in the Ashes

Production Design Award

Dec Hardy, for Dancing in the Ashes

Soundtrack Award

Yoav Hudin, for Nyosha

Sound Editing Award

Jens Petersen, for Jamon

To be in a with a chance, just answer this simple question:

Q. How do these two images relate to one of our speakers?

Send your answer to competition@watersprite.org and you could end up with a ticket for you and a guest to attend on Sunday 3rd March.

Entries close at 12pm on Friday 1st March and we will announce the winner that afternoon.

Best of luck!

The power of post-production is really magical. We are so lucky to be joined by The Mill’s 3D artists such as Sid Harrington-Odedra. Sid has worked on a range of high profile commercials from Audi A8L’s ‘Advanced State Of Mind’ – a fully stereoscopic spot and online film; to Guinness ‘Music Machine’, Vodafone ‘Raining Watches’ and Wrigley’s ‘5 React Gum’. Most recently, Sid completed work on Kia ‘Installation’ and Lexus RX ‘Evolution’. Other 3D credits include working on the award winning Axe ‘Chocolate Man’ (Gold at Cannes Lions), Brylcreem ‘Effortless’, which was honoured with an APA Diamond and a yellow pencil at the D&AD’s, and the multi award winning Nike ‘The Next Level’ commercial directed by Guy Ritchie.

Book a FREE masterclass here: http://themillwatersprite-eorg.eventbrite.com/

For more information about Matthew Stephenson please visit his blog: http://matthewstep.wordpress.com/

Book his event here:
http://animationwatersprite.eventbrite.com/

Two evenings back I witnessed a piece of art that is only technically classified under the title of ‘film’ because it was an hour and a half of moving picture. But why is moving picture any less exactly this, simply a ‘picture’ than it is a film? Waking Life is a film that truly embodies what I mean when I say that art does not need to be confined to its supposed limits. It is every art form as a collective and it speaks louder and more intelligently than those pieces of art that insist on being categorised.

Waking Life follows a young man on his journey of lucid dreaming, existential angst, and discussing the endless possibilities of human nature, origin and capacities. But what makes this film so special is that in questioning the aptitude of man to switch between the real and imaginary, it provides its audience with endless opportunity to do exactly this. Beside from the stunning soundtrack that plays alongside the moving picture, the film’s use of rotoscoping is what truly invites the audience into a world between the real and imaginary as animation is created by placing a layer of drawing directly over real film footage. The nature of the film’s lack of plot but rather continuous presentation of philosophical conversation between protagonist and various professors, therapists, and pub locals, gives Waking Life a strange realism that when accompanied by animated images that on the one hand are totally void of real life as we see it, and on the other are completely based upon and literally drawn over this real life, brings its audience into a bizarre limbo between the literal and figurative.

Watching this film (or piece of art if I am going to maintain the viewpoint that art need not be categorically restricted), really made me consider how we connect to reality, or rather how we know what reality is, and whether it is possible to use a similar technique to rotoscoping within the theatre. I guess you could say that the theatre itself is a space in which the real and imaginary interplay with a strangeness that nobody really considers anymore. There we have people living in their own realities, entering into a space in which they are about to witness other real people who live in their real world, playing the roles of the imaginary but with their real voices, real facial expressions, real items of clothing. And yet what often makes art so distinctive from the rest of the world is that it isn’t completely in it – art creates its own world that people from another can enter into and live for a while.

Waking Life is the source of inspiration for my next art project in which I hope to examine ideas around the role of the theatre both as a centre for the imagination and as a piece of architecture itself – a piece of artwork existing in the real world regardless of what happens on the stage.

If this has taken your interest, how about joining us at our event ‘John Logan on Screenwriting’? Logan was a successful playwright in Chicago for many years before turning to screenwriting.  Writing original scripts, as well as adapting authors such as Shakespeare, it goes without saying that Logan has a wealth of experience in the industry. Book tickets here

Their main focus at the moment is on the provision of courses for the disadvantaged, an initiative which called Film School in a Box (FSIB), in collaboration with the Raindance organisation. To give you more of an idea about this part of the IFT’s work, take a look at this short video.  The video was taken at a showcase run with a small group of 11-year-olds with learning difficulties from The Link primary school in Croydon and Pursuing Independent Paths, which works to extend independence and choice to adults with learning difficulties.

IFT see the screening experience is an important part of the course because it climaxes the process by which the participants come to realise that they really can do this after all. The chairman of IFT, Neil McCartney, tells us that people who were saying two months earlier, “I can’t possibly make a film,” can now see the results of their work on the big screen. He hopes that if they feel that they can do this, maybe they will be inspired to do other things as well.

The Independent Film Trust is holding a fund-raising event on Tuesday 5th March 2013, from 6.30pm until late. It will be on the fourth-floor bar at Envy Post Production, 46 Foley Street, London, W1W 7TY, United Kingdom. See the map and other details here.

Tickets are £15. There is a cash bar. And a raffle with prizes donated by patrons and others including Sir Alan Parker, Samantha Morton, John Irvin, Elliot Grove, Envy Post Production and the Raindance organisation. And a collection if anyone has any money left over.

If, like us, you can’t wait until March to feast your eyes on the work of all our talented filmmakers, here’s a cheeky taster of what’s to come…

Watching a piece of theatre, it can’t be too different from watching a film, right? Well, yes actually, in the world we live in today. People have come to form separate and fenced off definitions of different forms of art that disallow one to break the conventions of its ‘category’ in order to move into another. You can go and watch a ‘film’; a ‘play’; read a ‘poem’; look at a ‘painting’. But there seems little space to observe art simply as art, without the limits placed on them by their categorising labels. I would like to build a case that knocks down the dividing barriers between different forms of art. I believe that the artist need not confine himself to one medium, material, tool, but can widen his perspective and eliminate the sacrificial definitions that can so often make art suffer.

In writing theatre I take far more influence from my favourite film makers, still artists, and musicians than from playwrights who seem not to be able to escape from the same writing in the same style with the same structure and the same two middle-aged married characters each time they write a ‘new’ play. I want to create something new and interesting, something that though belongs on the stage, isn’t confined to its conventions.

I’ve recently finished writing my second play. It’s called This Is Art and I guess it defines everything I wish to say in this blog. It says ‘no this isn’t ‘a play’ as one thinks of ‘a play’ but is ‘art’ with no limits set by the restrictive definitions of ‘the play’; ‘the film’; ‘the painting’; ‘the poem’. Its everything and anything you want it to be, it’s a play but not in the way you expect a play to be. Too many times have I been told that a play has to have ‘this structure’; ‘this build up of tension here’; ’this amount of laughter’ and ‘this amount of crying’, but I refuse to have these limitations, I’ll write something beautiful and it doesn’t matter if it sticks to the rules or not.

When writing this play in particular I took great inspiration from Jim Jarmusch’s films Coffee and Cigarettes and Night on Earth. Both films ooze what it is that satisfies me in art. They both ignore any idea of plot or form, but create their own, focussing on the power, the hilarity and the excitement of conversation. For me they are cinematic genius and I wanted to bring the sort of experience I get from these films, into the theatre. Coffee and Cigarettes shows you a series of conversations in cafes, hotels, restaurants between people drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes, and Night on Earth follows people’s taxi conversations in 5 countries across the planet – I’m sure they sounds either really cool or tediously boring. I still take the first response, having watched the films more than once. Jarmusch writes a dialogue that speaks to everyone listening beyond and behind the screen. The cinematography of each scene becomes a painting with its distinctive colours, and stunning stillness. And I totally believe that this sort of experience can be felt in the theatre too. Through my plays I would like to change what it means to sit in the theatre. Like Jarmusch, when writing This is Art I attempted to take the power of conversation and the sense of such a vivid reality that it becomes strange, even uncomfortable to watch at times. There’s a naturalism in film that isn’t the same as the ‘naturalism’ in the theatre, but I want to bring it in, and see what happens.

If this has taken your interest, how about joining us at our event ‘John Logan on Screenwriting’? Logan was a successful playwright in Chicago for many years before turning to screenwriting.  Writing original scripts, as well as adapting authors such as Shakespeare, it goes without saying that Logan has a wealth of experience in the industry. Book tickets here