Straight8

Thursday night brought me to the Cineworld, Shaftesbury Avenue, for the annual Straight8 night through the Raindance Film Festival. I was there to show support for my mate Nick Scott, whose film “The Other Half” was one of the top ten. As regular readers may know, Clive Sick Puppy and I also submitted a short, which got nowhere in the rankings. We’re quietly proud of it though, and I’ve had some very positive comments back about how it turned out.

The evening was great fun, with the general high quality of material I’ve come to expect from Straight8 fully on display. Intersetingly, the film that seemed most mentioned was a charming bit of whimsy called “Little Cumulus,” about a cloud that is stranded on earth, and only finds it’s way back into the sky with the aid of a hot air balloon. Not bad, considering for the most part it was footage of a guy wandering around dressed in a job lot of cotton wool…

Masses of technical problems on the night though, which surprised me no end. The first couple of films had to be shown twice, due to either being monochrome or mute, which is frankly not on. I know the quality of projection is evaporating in this country at a high rate (at a recent screening of 3.10 To Yuma I had to inform the projectionist he’d left a 1.85 mask in the gate of the projector – reeeeally long, thin pictures!) but it can’t be that hard to hit play on a tape deck, surely.

Here’s Nick’s making of The Other Half, explaining how he achieved the most technically difficult effect ever achieved under the Straight8 rules…

although The Sick Puppies went through their own personal hell in making “The Gourmand”…