Winner Of The Mathew Street Fringe 48 Hour Film Challenge
On Sunday 30th August 2009 the FACT in Liverpool Launched a 48 Hour Film Challenge to promote Matthew Street Fringe Festival. Filmakers had to make their way to the Box in FACT at 9.30am on Sunday 30th August where they would be given a brief which included 4 elements that must be shown in their film. The four elements needed were 1.) At least one scene had to be played out in front of one of the Fringe venues’ chalk murals 2.) The lead character had to wear an “Abandon Normal Devices” badge 3.) The film had to be set at the Mathew Street Fringe Festival 4.) A character had to say the line, “How long have
you/he/she been standing there?” The Filmakers then had 48 hours to script, shoot, edit and return to FACT at 9.30am on Tuesday 1st September with there finished DVD. Judges from FACT, North West Vision & Media, Canvas and Mathew Street Fringe then spent four days deciding who would be the winner. All the films were shown in the Box at FACT on Saturday 5th September and we were announced as the the winner. Watch the winning video below.
We decided to run with the idea of following one of the bands at the Fringe Festival, chilling out before they were going to perform on stage and the lead singer has a few too many to drink. He then ends up falling asleep and starts dreaming he is a toy racoon who comes to life and heads off to the Fringe Festival on a skateboard. He meets up with a skateboard crew who show him a few tricks and then he skates round the Fringe and meets a chalk artist. The racoon then ends up in the Zanzibar watching other bands play out to the crowds. The lead singer then ends up waking up in an alley as himself, realising he has been dreaming, checks the time and runs to the Masque where he makes it in time for his performance on stage.
We had so much fun running round Liverpool shooting our scenes for this short film. We were very suprised how friendly, helpful and accomodating everybody was while we were filming in the middle of Liverpool city centre while a music festival was taking place.
Obvisouly our experience from filming weddings helped us and played a large part in achieving what we did, under pressure, on the fly, with little time.
We decided beforehand that one of us would be director and the
other would be cameraman. We needed to travel light and be able to move around Liverpool city centre without carrying loads of equipment, so we shot the whole film freehand using one camera and a shotgun mic on a boom. We headed off to the Mathew
Then we headed back to the Masque on Seel Street and met up with a band called Alexis Blue who wanted to be involved in our film after we had put the word around ealier that we were after a band to be in our video. These guys were great and followed our instructions and we achieved all the shots on the first take. We took the band to the Chameleon Bar next to FACT where we filmed them chilling out, drinking and having a laugh and then we shot the waking up scene at the bottom of Wood Street. We then went off and filmed around the Fringe with the racoon, where we met Christine the chalk artist and asked her to be apart of our film and also filmed a band in the Zanzibar. The last part of the film involved
Street Fringe Festival where we met D and his skateboard crew and filmed them performing tricks on there skateboards using a wide angle lens. We then went to the outskirts of Liverpool and shot the racoon waking up and heading off to Liverpool city centre on a skateboard.
Alexis Blue performing on stage but we had to wait until 6:30 p.m. to shoot this. We spoke to the sound engineer at the Masque who let us plug into there system so we could get a perfect recording of the band and then we filmed close up shots of the band playing during there set. We decided that the last song they play out should be used in the film so we filmed the whole song knowing we could splice in some close up instrument shots afterwards.
Then it was back to the editing room where we started around 9 p.m. Monday night cutting down all the footage and drinking loads of coffee to keep us awake and put together our film. We refined it a few times and added some FX to produce a fast paced exciting film. We finally finished editing around 7 a.m. Tuesday morning and burnt the film to dvd and then headed back to FACT for 9:30 a.m. to hand it in.
We would like to thank everyone involved who helped us make this short film and we hope to take part in any future film challenges or competitions.