Film Dash

As a judge of Film Dash, I was hugely excited to watch the films that resulted from the 48 hour film challenge. Perhaps as interesting as the finished product is the journey that the filmmakers themselves went on as they made their films. Here’s just one of those stories, from filmmaker Ian Ravenscroft, who with only a few no-budget sketches under his belt, set out with Dice Productions to tell their story.

With no camera, sound equipment or lighting, and our only actor delayed on his way back from Cheltenham, I sat awaiting the brief for Film Dash: Digital Galore!, Birmingham’s latest 48-hour film competition, wondering what I’d let myself in for.

My cohort Louis arrived after a brisk run through Birmingham just as organiser Chris Unitt was kicking off proceedings. Soon, each team had a line of dialogue to include in their 5min film and a film title to reference in any way we could. Before we knew it we were outside, walking on auto-pilot, brain-storming as we went.

“I don’t believe the world has been in such a terrible mess since the flood,” I said, repeated our line in hope of some inspiration. “The Cruel Sea,” Louis chanted, hoping the same. It was at this point I realised how much of a challenge we had taken on.

Despite the stuttering start, we were soon cooking on gas. With a last-minute favour of a camera from @Warblefly productions and our actor and writing partner Tom back in the picture, we collected our thoughts and picked an idea off the crammed whiteboard.

“A young couple move into a flat only to meet their crazed and sexually-confused landlord” someone suggested. “Why not?” we thought, “we’ll get the line in, no problem.” By 9:30pm we had the whole thing written on two sides of a big sheet of paper, possibly our biggest achievement of the weekend.

Having set up our limited gear, typed up the script, recruited a much-needed female to the cast and planned each scene, we set out on Saturday morning for the shoot. Tom seemed to relish the job of playing such an odd character and everything seemed to go pretty smoothly and everyone was having fun, so by 3pm we had the first batch of editing to do. Then we shot the night scenes and retired to the pub to unwind after a hectic day.

On arriving back to base we found, as expected, that there was way too much footage. The only option was an all-night editing session to cut back the cinematic undergrowth. Louis and I broke the back of the editing overnight, checking our plot progression and using every shortcut we knew. After three hours sleep, a re-shoot of the final scene and some hasty sound editing we were finished in every sense.

Although there were bits we could have fine-tuned with more time and expertise, we were happy with our ambitious effort (for us, in the time) and could overlook the odd bad cut for how it had come together.

We felt we covered the brief well, and with a few nods to Hitchcock we felt we had forged links with the screening of ‘Into the Light’, a celebration of Birmingham born film producer, Sir Michael Balcon, which the winning film would be shown before the following Sunday.

Not that winning should be on any of the teams’ minds. Film Dash was a great laugh to take part in and taught us a lot about our own abilities. If it was intended to inspire new filmmakers like ourselves it certainly worked, we’re already planning more film projects and eagerly awaiting the next Dash!

The winner of Film Dash will be announced Sunday 26th October.