Short and Snappy

Who cares about student films? Definitely the small teams of senior school pupils who wrote, filmed and edited six short films for the drama competition this autumn term.

by NATHAN RODNEY-JONES

he films had to be of three

Tminutes or less and explore the concept “who cares?” The school has a long history of film making with old Exonian Matthew Goode becoming an awardwinning film actor, whose notable roles include Sidney Stark in The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society and Hugh Alexander in The Imitation Game. The approach to the brief varied markedly between entries; the winning film, aptly named “Gold and Virtue” - a play on words on the school’s motto, explores police corruption, an issue especially pertinent today with the context of the murder of George Floyd. It was filmed in black and white and used jazz background music to create the film’s noir forties vibe. It was filmed entirely on the school site, giving familiar landmarks a new role in the story.

On the other hand, the winner of the people’s choice award was a hilarious animation by Lower Sixth pupils called “Nobody cares” that is about exactly that: the lack of anyone caring about a young boy’s fear of the notorious “serial scrapist”. It is a fun watch that had our tutor group in stitches.

“Who cares?” took a more serious angle, looking at the theme of mental health awareness and how it can often be those who you least expect that need the most help. The choice to film in and outside the sixth form common room really added a sense of reality as this is a space used by many of us every day.

MR BROUGH WRITES:

It has been a particularly difficult couple of years for performance and it has required some creative thinking to find ways of continuing to develop performance skills and provide opportunities for artistic and creative expression. The seniors short film competition produced some excellent short films from a number of different genres – from the animation of the Bucci brothers’ film, to the art house ‘cookie sale’ by Raff PiggottGill, to the film noir offering of the eventual winning film by Oliver Irons and Theo Collins. Equally the 60 second short film competition

An alternative approach is found it the simple yet effective narrative of “Cookie Sale” in which a skint teenager arranges a cookie sale in order to raise funds. It was, bar ambient sounds, completely silent and this aided the relaxed nature of the film.

The fifth group came up with the rather dark “Chain of Hate” that explores the seedy world of murder and organised crime. In the film a gang boss is anonymously bribing people at a party to murder each other, then covering his tracks by ordering the killing of the murderers, to avoid paying out. This creates a real sense of mystery as his scheme is slowly revealed to us.

“[Insert Title Here]” is a short film challenging what is art, and what it is worth. It is an arthouse piece about a failing modern artist who is burgled by a socio-political history student struggling to make ends meet, in order to fund his education. The ensuing conversation questions their differing opinions of his “art” and leads the two absolutely nowhere. I had the privilege of writing the script for this piece.

As a participant in this competition, I found that the workshopping of the individuals’ skills and ideas of our team just as rewarding as the final result. This exercise was a great showcase of the professionalism of my fellow pupil film makers in all its variety and our thanks go out to Mr Brough and the panel of judges.

was a popular competition and challenged the pupils with a slightly different challenge – to make a 60 second film made up of 1 second clips. Again, there were some very creative and imaginative approaches, with pupils composing their own scores, and editing together some extremely well framed and imaginative shots and generally really impressing the three members of the judging panel.

However successful the film competitions were (and there will continue to be one film competition every year), we are hoping to get back to a full programme of live theatre performances next year!