2008's Virgin Media Shorts winners, Phil and Olly, won with a film called 'Black Hole'(?url? http://virginmediashorts.co.uk/past-winners/the-black-hole/?/url?), which has since gone on to be included in this year's Cannes festivities. They've had quite a year since winning the Virgin Media Shorts competition (judged, amongst others, by Kevin Spacey) and if you'd like to ask them a question about their journey - i'm offering you that chance!
Have a read of the following message from Olly and Phil (VMS winners) documenting what they've been up to this past year and if you've got a question for the two of them post it to this thread - I'll then collect up all your questions and pass them on to Olly and Phil to respond to before posting them back here for your reading convenience! -You might be interested to know how they've spent their ?30,000, what help The UK Film Council and Virgin Media have provided, what lessons they've learned - anything! I look forward to recieving your questions!
Since winning last years Virgin Media Shorts Competition, we have been busy working on our next film. Supported by the UK Film Council and Virgin Media we have been developing numerous ideas and discussing the best type of film to try and achieve second time round. The Black Hole was pretty much a silent movie so this time we really wanted to tackle some dialogue.
Initially we spent some time just thinking about what kind of films we actually enjoy and the kind of movies we would eventually want to make as features. Its harder than you think to try and decipher all the influences, themes and interests that inform the work you do, but eventually we knew it would have to involve something surreal and dark that allows deeper character / relationship exploration with a slightly twisted sense of humour in it.
After preliminarily drafting seven different ideas as short, single paragraph synopses, we slimmed the list down to three that everyone liked and from there spent a few more weeks in a coffee shop hammering out the finer points, eventually settling on one. It?s hard to develop several ideas at once, as you become deeply involved in every detail of the plot and characters in order to keep the action believable and the story watertight.
We found we naturally began to gravitate towards one film in particular and have let that become the focus of our attention over the last couple of weeks. We have written the first draft of our script and will be picking through it with the Film Council and Virgin over the next week or so. Getting other peoples point of view is an important part of the process, especially as we have never written dialogue before.
Although ?30k is a lot of money, we still need to have a tight rein on the purse strings as crew, cast and location costs can mount up pretty quickly and we need to be clever about maximising the production value. . 1 location, only a couple of characters, that kind of thing ? we find that setting limits on what you are working with often forces you to focus more on the quality of what?s on screen as opposed to how much.
We never really imagined The Black Hole would do so well, or notch up quite so many hits on youtube - it was our first ever film attempt and it was all done so quickly. It?s great this time to know we have time and money sorted, so the focus is really on the writing. It?s a great opportunity so thank you to all of you who voted for us, we hope you?ll enjoy our next offering.
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Matt
(working on behalf of Virgin Media Shorts - ?url?www.virginmediashorts.co.uk?/url?)
