*26/01/11
BLUESCREEN 26/01/11 - Films SCREENED Here you go...
2 films from 2006 - Rescored by the Cube Orchestra....Then..Crumpled up Guy - Su Eliot
Mano a Mano - Simon Downham-Knight
Fir Rouge - Vivi Stamatatos
Feast of Fools - Vivi Stamatatos
Kundama - Street Song - Adam Richards (The Treatment Worx)
Nothing of Value - Janet Brandon
Sesame Street Meet My Feet - Javied Idress
Plus from 2006..
Culture Clash - Sid Sharma
Get Good - Francois
Weston Super Mare - Dan Blore
Night on the Tiles - Nimph Productions
Thanks to everyone who came along and for the films! We managed to screen them all, despite the tech/disc problems! Thanks for bearing with us!
We're back 30th March, hope to get VHS player working and screen some old VHS Bluescreen films!
* 4 Jan 2011
Bristolian Filmmakers who screened @ Bluescreen in 2010:
Matt Walker. Naren Wilks. Alexis Jochman. Michael Pacie. Never Future. Scott Buchanan Barden. Matia Cartledge. Matt Lindsay. Calling The Shots. Jon Nobbs. Alan Mandel. Dan Buzzo. John Cockwell. James Sampson. Pete Steadman. Michael Page. Southsection. Steve P. 2nd Light Bristol. Narraser. Rene. Omar. Rob. Omari. Rene. CTS. Sofia Kouzaris. Maia Willians. Thomas Johnson. Jack Wormell. Gareth Evans. Andy Sowerby. Albert Thomas. Andrew Williams. Adam Butcher. Ben Edwards. Keith Kopp. Alistair Stray. Candice Pepperall. Hirofumi Nakamoto. Oliver Snow. Alasdair Ogilvie. Simon Winkler. Thomas Johnson. Ralph Colmar. Nicholas Keogh. Jessica Voremberg. Maria Lee. Rob & Olly. Jesse Meadows . Sam Roberts. Simon Downham-Knight. Dani Antelo. James Reed. Andrew Hickinbotham. Adam Richards. Nick Black. Kristen Griffin.
NB. Some filmmakers screened more than one film and in some cases more than 3 or 4!
* 4 Jan 2011
Films screened @ Bluescreen in 2010:
Little Face. Collide-O-Scope. Tube. Off White Box. The Blackest Lungs Club. Cardboard Orchestra. Sweet Sixteen. Gunpoint. Hear Say. Terminator Salvation. Sunshine. Koyaanisquati. Stokes Croft Fashion Show. Old Up. Television Its Daylight Robbery. My Favourite Season. F.Y.H Butthorn. Worldwide. Dukes. Bluescreen Advert. Heartsafe. First Responders. Is the BBC 4 Me. Eye C (2). Doin Nuffin. New Shit. Three. Omar & Seleem. Changes. Eye (C) 1. United Colours of Bristol. Music Matters. A Day in the life of a Tribute Band. Hypnotherapy. Meles Meles,deux ex Machina. Salspira. Quiet. Flowers. Looking Sound. Bristol Past & Present. Wanted Dead (The Ivory Trade). Man in the Giant Sentry. Tesco Demo 2010. Just Take up your Tools. Soda. Outward Displays of Inward Neglect. A Man, his Wife and a Piano. Cloud Land. Shaking Heads. Fly Away. Lumps. Witless. 6 Tap Paintings. Think Twice. Best Man. Ear Trumpet. A Film about Blue Bottles. Not titled. One Thing after Another. Boys Toys Part 1. Pedaling Poetry. Copenhagen: A City rewritten.Freedom .com.Mano a Mano.The Little Bee. Bristol Central F.C. St Pauls Carnival Memories. I chose this Road (Ian Perry music video). The Wurzels 'Ruby'. The Distance Between. Flash Harry. My Life. Everbody wants to be a Boss. Nowhere to Run. El Griffini: Portrait of the Genius
* 4 Jan 2011
Bristolian Filmmakers who screened @ Bluescreen in 2009
Andy Sowerby, Anonomous, Ben Dowden, Bex Wade, Brian Jackson, Chris Barnett, Dan Buzzo, David Lander, Gareth Evans, Gavin Maitland (x 2)/Tom Robinson, Gordon Emanuel, Hywel George, Jack & Andy, James Don, Joe Spray, Juan Herrera, Lex Johnson, Marcus Crouch, Marcus Valentine, Nanna L Hansen, Obard, Ollie David, Philip Head (x 3), Ralph Colmar, Sandro Granda, Sean Griffiths, Stathis Tsemberlidis, Strathmore Shaghandles, Tom Bennett, Tom Mansfield. Mark Watson. Sebastian Rabas. The Riandos. Silvia Michielon. Tom Day. Glenn Dince. Juan Herrera. Jack Losh. Phil Day. Ali Cacks. Helen Denave. Mike Paige. Asylum Film. Spentmoney AKA Adam Richardson. Colmar. Dan Gitsham. Gareth Evans. Ezra Byrne. Gavin Maitland. Sam Woodcock. Jon Rowe. Simon Bright. Ben Edwards. Janet Brandon. Tom the Flow. Tom Mansfield. Ben Wilding. Maisie Evans. Jessie Tate. Keith Kopp. Olie Kay. James Sampson. Naren Wilks. Sandro Granda.
* 4 Jan 2011
Films screened @ Bluescreen in 2009
A Portrait of My Grandmother,Atem, Average Journey, Beauty from Ashes, Composition 1, Consequences, Deconstruction, Dub FX - Flow/Dub FX – Step, Feedback Portrait 040209, Felixs Machine, Grand Day Out, How it ends, If you could see far enough you could see the back of your Head, Julia, Kyoto Forest & Rund Gang, No Pox, No Sunday of Rest for the Wicked, Nuevas Esperanza & Buchedd a Horas, On a Monday, Pipes & Tubes, Silver Mountain, Street Performers of Lima, The Brian Jackson Show, The Bristol Sound, The Forgotten Half Mile, The Immortal Hour, The Pink Planet, The Year of Spagetti, Transmission, Tulips, Werewogan Showreel, Whats Bristol got to do with Gaza?, Worst Case scenario. 3 short Films. A Walk in Bristol. Out but not down. Blanc n’Fideo. 94 Pre-cut Thoughts. Dead Journey. Gavin McRichards. The Other Side. Dubbed out in Bristol. Day's Devon mini tour. J'aime Bristol. The making of J'aime Bristol. Glass Alley. The Restriction Trap. 2 hip hop videos. The Bristol Zebra. Composition 2. Spring Time: Behind the scenes. The animals reject their names & things return to their origins. Onomatopeia. Then, Voyager. Who is Robert Mugabe? .Merlinism . Four Corners .Sleep . Stars. Filthy Pleasures. Get up. 16. I Never Knew. Turning Tables. Borderline . Jalopy Peppers. The Troubled Lands. War Games. Clocking Out. Bridge Study. NY Shorts. Life after Tsunami (Intro). Le Box.
* 4 Jan 2011
Films screened @ bluescreen in 2008:
Wobbles. Shepards Delight. A Bosnian Mosaic. ....Madagascar.... & WJ Arnold. Solo en ut Maj'eur Pour Triches Industries. Encore une Histoire de Penes Noele. Isolation.White & Gold. Melody 120. Not Cut Out for Crime. Remembering Where We Have Been. Woo. Brother. Four in Ten. Earthen. To Build a Home. Mr Bones. Demo 2. Sweded Films (x 7). Demo 2. Bottle. Explode 3. A Tale of 2 Galaxies. G.R.O.F.U.N. Curiouser & Curiouser. ....France..... A ....London.... Tale. CP- West. Strensham. Doug Tabbard: Human Curler. Womens Voices. ....Bristol.... Girls. Red Eyed Piper. Deja Vu. Jazz Lesson. Dance Film 3. Un Minti di Cafe. Always Watching. Shambala. Mountains of Snowdonia. Hidden Bloom. Road to Somewhere (May edit). I Hate Caravans. Black to White. The Thin White Line. We are all Winners: Balloons. We are all Winners: Rings. Onomatopoeia. I dont wanna Fall in Love with You. So Much Fun. The ....Bristol.... Zebra. Pistol to me. Children of the Revolution. The Perfect Date. Cusp. Burnt. Cinders. Baby, Mummy, Daddy & Dog. Trench Rats. Did we or Did we not. Composition for Green, Blue & Pink. Multi-Storey. Light & Sound. Bird & Witch. Zombies. Africanized Bees. Hulk of Smaller Proportions. Habitat. The Mound. Space Invasion. Hand Story. Alice. 4 Short Films. Instrumental. Elements: Water (1 of 3). The 92nd Job. Ludwiglight. Quest.
* 25 Nov 2010
Bluescreen FIlms screened in November
Hello Hello!!
Here are the films we screened last night at Bluescreen (24/11/10):
The Cube Orchestra were back and started us off.. then we showed:
James Reed - The Wurzels 'Ruby'
Andrew Hickinbotham - The Distance Between
Adam Richards - Flash Harry
Adam Richards - My Life
Adam Richards - Everbody wants to be a Boss
Nick Black - Nowhere to Run
Kristen Griffin - El Griffini: Portrait of the Genius
Then from the depths of the Bluescreen archives we screened....
James Sampson - Old Up
Jack Wormell - Quiet
Dan Gitson - The Sack
Thanks to all who came along last night and for your films too! A very musically themed evening, with a bit of drama and horror thrown in at the end!
Thanks everyone who has shown a film at Bluescreen in 2010.
We are back January 26th 2011. It will be the 10th year of Bluescreen in 2011, so make sure you come down and celebrate with us! See you next year!
* 17 Nov 2010
Next Bluescreen Nov 24th
BLUESCREEN IN NOVEMBER....
The Cube Cinema, Bristol
Wed 24th /8pm/�3/2 (Filmmakers in for Free, but only one per film)
It's the last Bluescreen of the year, so make sure you come down tonight for your last fix of short film screenings for 2010!
Not been to Bluescreen before?
All you need to do is BRING your films down on the night on DVDs, Mini DVs etc, films should be 20mins or under.
We welcome all Film genres, be they Dramas, Docs, Animations, Music Promos, Experimental, Skate vids... you get the idea.
And the best part is you get to see YOUR films on the Cubes Big Blue Screen, Films on the Cinema screen, as it should be!
Not got a film? Come along anyway and get inspired!
Plus the Cube Orchestra and their rescores and Bluescreen Hi-Fi DJ's in the bar all night.
Bluescreen -Screening films since 2001 and Bristols longest running independent OPEN screen Film event. Come down and find out why...
FFI: [email protected]
* 27 Oct 2010
Films screened at Oct 27ths Bluescreen
Sorry for late post but heres a list of the films screened at the last Bluescreen 27th Oct:
Sam Roberts - Freedom .com
Simon Downham-Knight - Mano a Mano
Scott Barden - The Little Bee
Dani Antelo - Bristol Central F.C.
Dani Antelo - St Pauls Carnival Memories
Sam Roberts - I chose this Road (Ian Perry music video)
Thanks for all who came down and thanks for the films.
Next Bluescreen Nov 24th.
* 29 Sep 2010
FILMS screened at BLUESCREEN-BIKESCREEN 29/09/10
Jessica Voremberg - Not titled
Maria Lee - One Thing after Another
Rob & Olly - Boys Toys Part 1
Ralph Colmar - Pedaling Poetry
Jesse Meadows - Copenhagen: A City rewritten
Plus
Some youtube clips of the Bristol Cycle Festival. Check them out here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SKyNCXCKaM>
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4i2OtfWIk4I>
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FcIUn1KkiU4>
http://vimeo.com/15121089>
And a live performance from Les Velobicis:
http://lesvelobici.blogspot.com/>
And the prize of the Mini-Bike for best film of the evening went to Jesse Meadows!
Congratulations to Jesse!
Thanks to all who came down, helped out or took part in Bluescreen-Bikescreen. And also thanks goes out to the Cycle Festival. Hope it returns next year.
* 30 Sep 2010
Summer Festival Screenings
So we manged to screen the following films:
Filthy Pleasures/Get up (Pinch) - Tom Mansfield
Collide-O-Scope - Naren Wilks
Little Face - Matt Walker
Terminator Salvation - Jon Nobbs & Alan Mandel
Merlinism - Ben Edwards
Old Up - James Sampson
Bristol Fog (Upperkutt) - Spentmoney
Off White Box - Michael Page
Stars - Tom the Flow
Dukes - Southsection
At the following 4 Festivals in 2010:
June -
Glastonbury
August -
Supernormal
Redfest
St Werburghs Art Trail
Thanks for the films we screened, they went down really well. Had really good feedback from all the Cinemas we screened at, wanting to know about the films and filmmakers and bluescreen. Thanks again. And see you at a festival in 2011!
* 7 Jul 2010
Bluescreen 07/07/10
Films screened July 7th at Bluescreen:
Alasdair Ogilvie - Lumps.
Simon Winkler – Witless.
Thomas Johnson - 6 Tap Paintings.
SouthSection - Think Twice .
James Sampson - Best Man.
Ralph Colmar - Ear Trumpet.
Nicholas Keogh - A Film about Blue Bottles.
PLUS Bluescreen 2010 compilation:
Filthy Pleasures/Get up (Pinch) - Tom Mansfield.
Collide-O-Scope - Naren Wilks.
Little Face - Matt Walker.
Terminator Salvation - Jon Nobbs & Alan Mandel.
Merlinism - Ben Edwards.
Old Up - James Sampson.
Bristol Fog (Upperkutt) - Spentmoney.
Off White Box - Michael Page.
Stars - Tom the Flow.
Dukes - Southsection.
Thanks for coming down, a great selection of films and a good way to finish before we take a summer break.
* 9 Jul 2010
Bluescreen 2010 Compilation 1
Filthy Pleasures/Get up (Pinch) - Tom Mansfield
Collide-O-Scope - Naren Wilks
Little Face - Matt Walker
Terminator Salvation - Jon Nobbs & Alan Mandel
Merlinism - Ben Edwards
Old Up - James Sampson
Bristol Fog (Upperkutt) - Spentmoney
Off White Box - Michael Page
Stars - Tom the Flow
Dukes - Southsection
* 26 May 2010
Films screened 26/05 at Bluescreen...
17 (!) Films screened at BLUESCREEN 26/05/10
Maia Willians - Hypnotherapy
Thomas Johnson - Meles Meles, deux ex Machina
Timmy Booth - Salspira
Jack Wormell - Quiet
Gareth Evans - Flowers
Andy Sowerby - Looking Sound
Albert Thomas/Andrew Williams - Bristol Past & Present
Andrew Williams - Wanted Dead (The Ivory Trade)
Adam Butcher - Man in the Giant Sentry
Ben Edwards - Tesco Demo 2010
Ben Edwards - Just Take up your Tools
Keith Kopp - Soda
Alistair Stray - Outward Displays of Inward Neglect
Candice Pepperall - A Man, his Wife and a Piano
Hirofumi Nakamoto - Cloud Land
Maki Hitomi - Shaking Heads
Oliver Snow - Fly Away
A really busy evening and lots of really good films! Thanks to all who came down and made it one of the busiest Bluescreens of the year... so far! See you on July 7th for our next open screening. Also look out for our summer festivals screenings, tbc soon.
* 28 Apr 2010
Aprils Bluescreen: Bluescreen Presents.. 2nd Light Bristol
Films screened 28/04 at Bluescreen Presents: 2nd Light Bristol event:
2nd Light Bristol - Heartsafe
2nd Light Bristol - First Responders
Narraser - Is the BBC 4 Me
Rene - Eye C (2)
? - Doin Nuffin
? - New Shit
Omar - Three
Rob - Omar & Seleem
Omari - Changes
Rene - Eye (C) 1
CTS - United Colours of Bristol
CTS - Music Matters
Sofia Kouzaris - A Day in the life of a Tribute Band
* 31 Mar 2010
Films screened at BLUESCREEN 31/03/10
Films screened at BLUESCREEN 31/03/10
Cube Orchestra first up with x 2 rescores, then...
James Sampson - Old Up
Pete Steadman - Television Its Daylight Robbery
Albert - My Favourite Season
Michael Page - F.Y.H Butthorn
Southsection - Worldwide
Southsection - Dukes
A re-screening of Matt Walkers - Little Face
Steve P - Bluescreen advert
A quietish night but a good selection of films. Thanks to all who came down.
* 24 Feb 2010
Bluescreen Sweded 24/02/10
Films screened at Bluescreen - Sweded 24th Feb
Jon Nobbs - Terminator Salvation
Alan Mandel - Sunshine
Dan Buzzo - Koyaanisquati
John Cockwell - Stokes Croft Fashion Show
Plus a selection of non sweded films from the archive.
Disappointing that we didnt get more films, maybe try this again later in the year.....
Anyway normal service is resumed at the next Bluescreen 31/03/10. See you there!
* 27 Jan 2010
Films screened 27th Jan @ Bluescreen
Cube Orchestra first up rescoring x 2 films, then
Matt Walker - Little Face
Naren Wilks - Collide-O-Scope
Alexis Jochman - Tube
Michael Pacie - Off White Box
The Blackest Lungs Club - Never Future
Scott Buchanan Barden - Cardboard Orchestra
Matia Cartledge - Sweet Sixteen
Matt Lindsay - Gunpoint
Calling The Shots - Hear Say
A very busy evening and a really good diverse selection of films. Thanks to all who brought films down and all who came along.
Sorry for late posting of films. see you again on the 24th with your sweded films!
* 6 Feb 2010
Rotterdam Film Fest 2010/Kino Climates
Just back from the 2010 Rotterdam International Film Festival. A great week, despite the weather! Saw so many films, features, shorts, experimental, foreign language...
Top 2 feature lenth ones were 'Reykjavik - Rotterdam' (An amusing Icelandic gangster flick) and 'Do it again' (One persons mission to reform The Kinks, at any cost! A very funny homage).
Also some great screenings, performance art and some very interesting visual things done with 16mm film (!) at Kino Climates...
This was the main reason i was at the festival, the 4 day Kino Climates part of the festival.
Originally we (Bluescreen) had intended to screen some films there, but were too over subscribed with submissions. In the end i went as part of a delegation from The Cube Cinema, all of us staying at the very nice and many bunk bedded ROOM hostel!
Kino Climates was a summit meeting of 70 representatives of 30-40 Europe wide (and beyond) small cinemas, art houses and labs - exchanging ideas, plans, collaborations, discussions, workshops and evening screenings from all the cinemas involved.
An truly inspiring and exciting few days and just maybe the start of something bigger on the horizon, a network of europe wide small cinemas to kick back against the big multi screened and multi national cinemas!
* 19 Dec 2009
Novembers Bluescreen
Bluescreen 25th Nov - Films we screened....
Cube Orchestra re-scored x 2 shorts
Then
Keith Kopp - The Troubled Lands
Olie Kay - War Games
James Sampson - Clocking Out
Naren Wilks - Bridge Study
Naren Wilks - NY Shorts
Sandro Granda - Life after Tsunami (Intro)
Sandro Granda - Le Box
Sandro Granda - ? (Sorry forgot to write this one down!)
Plus some shorts from the archives...
Culture Clash
Mandog
Grandpa Got Run Over by a Reindeer
Doug Tabard: Human Curler
A really good and busy night, and again a great selection of films. Thank you all who came down.
We're back in January, Februarys Bluescreen will be a sweded event, details to follow soon!! Thanks for for all the films you screened at Bluescreen in 2009, see you in 2010!
* 27 Nov 2009
Octobers Bluescreen
Films screened at Octobers Bluescreen:
A reduced Cube Orchestra rescoring an old b/w film in 8mins!
Then......
Ben Wilding - 16
Chris B - I Never Knew
Maisie Evans - Turning Tables
Jessie Tate – Borderline
Jesse Tate - Jalopy Peppers
Then from the Bluescreen archive we screened 3 films, whose link was that each director was called Tom! Followed by a scary docu to finish with!....
So a very quiet Bluescreen, but a good selection of films nonetheless! Thank you.
* 30 Oct 2009
Septembers Bluescreen
What we screened..
Cube Orchestra first up, then:
Jon Rowe - Then, Voyager
Simon Bright - Who is Robert Mugabe?
Ben Edwards - Merlinism
Janet Brandon - Four Corners
Chris Barnett - Sleep
Tom the Flow - Stars
Tom Mansfield - Filthy Pleasures
Tom Mansfield - Get up
A busy and packed Bluescreen, our first one back after the summer. Thank you to all the filmmakers, orchestra and of course the audience.
* 18 Oct 2009
Bluescreen been on the radio!
Bluescreen were on BCfm 93.2fm on the 6th Oct @ 6.30pm, talking up Bluescreen! Thanks go to Tom, for inviting us on his show - Live and local.
* 7 Sep 2009
Bluescreen @ Shambala Festival 2009
Shambala, without doubt is one of our favourite festivals. We had a ball!
This year we were part of a group of people behing the Minds Eye Cinema Tent, ie. The Cube Cinema plus friends. Bigger than last years tent and amazingly decorated, with a lovely chandelier and straw bales as seating! Well done to all the decor crew!
But in typical Bluescreen fashion, all didnt go to plan! We 'lost' 1 of the 2 DVD packs of Bluescreen films we brought along! The one that was lost had all the recent Bluescreen films! Bugger! So we had to screen 2007/8 compilations. And the missing DVDs? Well they turned up the next day in the van!
The rest of the weekend went off really well, with the Cinema tent packed out every night.
Thanks to all who worked and to the people at Shambala for inviting us back again.
* 24 Jul 2009
Bluescreen vs Shambala Party 24/07/09
BLUESCREEN vs SHAMBALA Party - 24/07/09
25/07/09 Update:
....................
And the 2 winning filmmakers, who got to make this years official Shambala Festival film, were.......
Ralph Colmar and Ezra Byrne! Congratulations to you both!....
Heres a list of the films we screened:....
Ralph Colmar - The ....Bristol.... Zebra....
Dan Gitsham - The Sack....
Gareth Evans - Composition 2....
Ezra Byrne - Springtime - Behind The scenes....
Gavin Maitland - The Animals reject their names & things return to their origins....
Sam Woodcock - Onopatopeia....
Thanks to all of the above filmmakers for submitting their films. Also thanks go to Matilda, who turned up and asked to play a few songs, which she did wonderfully well. And special thanks to the band Miss Cecily, for stepping in at last minute, and playing a cracking set. And lastly thanks to Shambala for providing tickets for the winning filmmakers. ....
---------------------------------------------------
22/07/09
Band confirmed playing is Miss Cecily. See you there!
------------------------------------------------
In conjunction with The Shambala Festival, we're having a party at The Cube Cinema! And those lovely people at Shambala are giving us the opportunity to give 2 lucky filmmakers, whose films wins the audience vote on the night, the chance to make a film at this years festival! ....
Heres the lowdown:....
------------------------------....
Bluescreen vs Shambala....
The Cube Cinema, ....Bristol........
Friday 24th July 2009....
8.00pm £4/£3
Party on with Bluescreen and Shambala in a magical mystery tour of film and music to celebrate the coming of the Shambala Festival 2009 (27th-30th Aug). ....
It all starts with Bluescreen...
Bristol's longest running open screen short film night, in collaboration with Shambala Festival, is offering 2 local (ie Bristol ish) filmmakers (and crew) a chance to win free tickets to make a film at this years Shambala! ....
After the films we'll be warming up for the festival season with D.J. sets from both Bluescreen and Shambala's finest, and a live act specially chosen by Shambala.....
FILMMAKERS:....
Bring along a short film, usual format. No longer than 20 minutes, what ever you want to show on the Cube's big screen. After the screenings the audience will vote for the two winning films. The 2 winners will receive: 4 free festival crew passes each, plus tapes and access all areas at the festival, as well as a chance to make the official Shambala film for the year to be screened at the Shambala Awards Ceremony later in the year!....
Films on first, DJs in the bar all night and the band on after the film screenings.....
Come early for film submission (filmmakers free as usual). Get involved!....
www.shambalafestival.org....
www.myspace.com/cubebluescreen....
**PLEASE NOTE: FILMMAKERS WHO SUBMIT FILMS ON THE 24TH JULY, MUST BE THERE IN PERSON ON THE NIGHT, BE AVAILABLE TO FILM BETWEEN 27-30TH AUGUST AND ALSO ABLE TO GET TO THE FESTIVAL UNDER THERE OWN STEAM. **
* 11 Jul 2009
Bluescreen 17/06/09
A very busy Bluescreen last night, loads of films, loads of people. A very big thanks to the filmmakers and to all who came. Heres what we screened i think!
Cube Orchestra rescoring one of their own films
Silvia Michielon - 94 Pre-cut Thoughts
Tom Day/Glenn Dince - Dead Journey
Tom Day/Glenn Dince - Gavin McRichards
Juan Herrera - The Other Side
Jack Losh - Dubbed out in Bristol
Phil Day - Day's Devon mini tour
Ali Cacks - J'aime Bristol
Helen Denave - The making of J'aime Bristol
Mike Paige - Glass Alley
Asylum Week Film - The Restriction Trap
Spentmoney AKA Adam Richardson - x 2 hip hop videos....
Apologies to Silvia Michielon (The Game they played)and Straun Farquhar (Living Wild), which we tried to screen but had a few tech problems with. Bring along again in Sept, and we'll give it another go.
Ok, our regular Bluescreen night returns in September BUT...
July 24th we are doing something special with Shambala Festival, see below for details. Have a great summer of filmmaking and thanks again for all the films last night.
* 22 Jun 2009
Films for screening at Glastonbury Festival 2009 @ The Groovy Movie Picture House
Films:
Gordon Emanuel - Atem
Tom Mansfield - Felix machines
Ben Dowden - Dub FX1 - Flow/Step/Dance Film 3
Tajinder Dhami - Alpha, Diagnostic, Hospitalised
Hywel George - The life and life of Horace/ Nuevos Esperandos
Andy Sowerby - Tulips
Dylan Radclyffe - Doug Tabbard, Human Curler
Mohammed Ali - Average Journey
SouthSection - Wobbles/Shepherds Delight
Anon - Whats Bristol Got to do with Gaza?
Oliver Purchase - Not cut out for crime
Dan Buzzo - Remembering Where We Have Been
(Total = 90mins)
* 30 May 2009
BLUESCREEN 27/05/09
Films screened at BLUESCREEN 27/05/09
Cube Orchestra rescored x 3 bluescreen films
Mark Watson – 3 short Films & A Walk in Bristol
Sebastian Rabas – Out but not down
The Riandos – Blanc n’Fideo
(Collective – Bristol Je t’aime – Not shown, problem with disc)
* 30 May 2009
BLUESCREEN 29/04/09
Films screened at BLUESCREEN 29/04/09
Dan Buzzo - If you could see far enough you could see the back of your head
Tom Bennett - How it ends
Philip Head - The Pink Planet
Ben Dowden - Dub FX - Flow/Dub FX - Step
Jack & Andy - Werewogan Showreel
Andy Sowerby - Tulips
Gareth Evans - Composition 1
* 13 Apr 2009
BLUESCREEN 25/03/09
Films screened:
Starting with The Cube Orchestra rescoring x 3 films from 2006/7, then..
Brian Jackson - The Brian Jackson Show
Strathmore Shaghandles - Consequences
Joe Spray - The Year of Spagetti
Philip Head - No Sunday of Rest for the Wicked
Tom Mansfield - Felixs Machine
Chris Barnett - Average Journey
Ralph Colmar - The Immortal Hour
Marcus Valentine - Grand Day Out
Gavin Maitland/Tom Robinson - Transmission
Great selection of films tonight! And a Bluescreen first - we screened our first ever Animated Opera! Bit of high culture at bluescreen, cant be bad! And we also had a good showing from filmmakers from The Cube itself, making 3 of tonights 12 films.
A Big Thank You to everyone who screened their films, See you next month for more filmic treats!
Oh yeh, one more thing.. We will be screening films at Shambala Festival in august. If you would like to submit your film for screening, bring it along to a future bluescreen. we may have a competition/winner type thing, not yet decided. thanks.
* 15 Mar 2009
BLUESCREEN 25/02/09
Februarys BLUESCREEN 25/02/09 saw a collaboration with SCREENTEST,for a Student Special Bluescreen. Now in its 5th year, Screentest is the National Student Film Festival, taking place 6-8 March 2009, at Bristol Uni.(http://www.screentestfest.org.uk/).
Heres what we screened:
Gavin Maitland - No Pox
Ollie David - Feedback Portrait 040209
Juan Herrera - On a Monday
Phil Head - Pipes & Tubes
Bex Wade - The Forgotten Half Mile
James Don - The Bristol Sound
Lex Johnson - A Portrait of My Grandmother
Sean Griffiths - Beauty from Ashes
Followed by some shorts from Bristol Uni Film Society
.. until the video projector overheated (!), for the 2nd time on the night! At least we managed to screen all the films that were brought along!
And thanks again to all filmmakers who screened films tonite and to Screentest, good luck with the festival.
Right we're back next month, hopefully with a fully functioning video projector and a returning Cube orchestra!
* 28 Feb 2009
BLUESCREEN - WED JAN 28TH
Films screened:
Cube Orchestra rescored 2 bluescreen films from the archives, then...
Marcus Crouch - Julia
Gordon Emanuel - Atem
Anonomous - Whats Bristol got to do with Gaza?
Nanna L Hansen - Kyoto Forest & Rund Gang
Sandro Granda - Street Performers of Lima
Obard - Worst Case scenario
David Lander - Deconstruction
Stathis Tsemberlidis - Silver Mountain
Hywel George - Nuevas Esperanza & Buchedd a Horas
We screened around 100mins worth of films tonight and what a great selection of films they were! Thank you filmmakers, you made it a great night! We had a problem with a coupla films that wouldn't play, but thanks to the quick thinking filmmakers in question, they managed to nip home and get another copy which worked! Just another typical bluescreen night then!
Dont forget its a Student Special Bluescreen in February. Right we're off to Berlin. See you next month!
* 10 Jan 2009
Novembers Bluescreen
Novembers Bluescreen (26/11/08):
Kicked off with the Cube Orchestra, re-scoring some of Southsections work, then the following:
Jill Bird - 4 Short Films
Alisdair Cairns - Instrumental
Ronan Harvey - Elements: Water (1 of 3)
Ralph Colmar - The 92nd Job & Ludwiglight
Thomas Stellmach - Quest
Thanks for the above films and those that turned out on a cold evening!
Bluescreens back in January, so to all you bluescreeners thanks to ya'all for another great year at bluescreen.
* 31 Dec 2008
Bluescreen Filmmakers in 2008
..Bristol Filmmakers @ bluescreen in 2008:
Muscat. John Francis. Dan Arnold. Clementine Lemattre. Penny Russell. Shelley Davis. Michael Page. Oliver Purches. John Rees. Mark Watson. Tom Swindell. Kathryn Timmons. Marina Ellerington. Stuart Bennett. Duncan Speakman. Sylvia Rimat. Kathryn Jeff. Henry Rolls. Chris Essen. Maria Cuervo. Dan Buzzo. Rick Standing. Philip Davis. Nadia Hillman. Joseph Wallace. Jonathan Amstead. Andy Lucas. Dylan Radcliffe. Blair Mowat. Ben Dowden. Vivi. Small StoryTellers. Naomi Smyth. Ben Price. Reg Brunt. Holly Budge. Ellen Wilkinson. Ciara Mahon. Sam Woodcock. Kid Carpet. Wrongboy. Ralph Colmar. Roger & Ruth Whiter. Shanti Sherson. Lizz Hoskins. Paul Dudbridge. BJ. Philip Head. Holly McIntosh. Jack Wormell. Collective Work. Vicar Jockey. Taran Burns. I Buckley & S McKeown. Nate. Oliver David. Jill Bird. Alisdair Cairns. Ronan Harvey. Thomas Stellmach.
* 30 Nov 2008
Octobers bluescreen
Thanks go out to all the filmmakers who came down to bluescreen last week, and of course the non-filmmakers too! While it was a quiet one in terms of people, the quality of the films certainly made up for it. Hope you enjoyed it, we did! Thanks all!
So heres the films we screened:
The Cube Orchestra - Scoring, Burroughs cut-ups
Vicar Jockey - Zombies
Philip Head - Africanized Bees
Taran Burns - Hulk of Smaller Proportions
I Buckley & S McKeown - Habitat
Nate - The Mound/Space Invasion
Oliver David - Hand Story /Alice
And from the archives:
Doug Tabbard - Human Curler
Marina Ellerington - Mr Bones + another
Details for Spookboy, the music producer who was looking for filmmakers to collaborate with, you can contact him here: http://www.spookboy.co.uk/
Details of the One Foot Forward night (Nov 6) are on the Cube website: http://microplex.cubecinema.com/cubewebsite/. Or if you have any films for One Foot events next year, that you would like to have a live re-score, contact details here: www.onefoot.co.uk
And dont forget folks, Novembers bluescreen is the last of the year (back in January) so your last chance to screen your films here for a while. thanks and see you all next month!
* 1 Nov 2008
Films screened at bluescreen 24/09/08
Stuart Bennett - Cinders
BJ - Trench Rats
Philip Head - Did we or did we not
Holly McIntosh - Composition for Green, Blue & Pink
Jack Wormell - Multi-Storey
Collective Work - Light & Sound
Marina Ellerington - Bird & Witch
Stuart Bennett - Baby, Mummy, Daddy & Dog
Plus from the archives:
Southsection
Tom Swindell - Earthen
Apologies to Taran Burns for not screening Hulk of smaller proportions, bring along another copy next month and we will screen it first up. Cheers to everyone who brought a film along.
* 15 Aug 2008
Films screened at bluescreen 02/06/08
Cube Orchestra kicked off things, rescoring 2 films from the bluescreen archive.
Then..
Kid Carpet/Wrongboy - I dont want to fall in love..
Kid Carpet/Wrongboy - So Much Fun
Ralph Colmar - The Bristol Zebra
Roger & Ruth White - Pistol to Me
Liz Hoskins - Children of the Revolution
Paul Dudbridge - The Perfect Date
Michael Page - Cusp
Shanti Sherson - Burnt
Thanks to the 'Burnt' crew for the snacks! bluescreens taking a few months off. So see you at Shambala or back at the Cube in September. have a good summer!
* 4 Jul 2008
bluescreen films at BFMF 2008 14/06/08
Bluescreen hosted The Bristol Filmmakers Festival 2008 in June, along with Cineformation and The Misfit Collective and you can read a review of it here:
http://www.cineformation.com/2008/07/01/bristol-filmmakers-festival
Films screened:
Muscat - Mountains of Snowdonia
Muscat - Wobbles
Naomi Smyth - Road to Somewhere (May work in progress)
Ben Price - I hate Caravans
Reg Brunt - Black to White
Holly Budge - The Thin White Line
Ellen Wilkinsun - We are all Winners (Balloons)
Ciara Mahon - We are all Winners (Rings)
Sam Barker - Onomatopoeia
Dan Buzzo - Remembering who we have been
Sandro Granda - Ull al detail
Sandro Granda - Sonic Day
thanks to all who came to bluescreen and to the festival in general. hope you had a great time. we
will be doing something similar again next year. watch this space.
* 29 Jun 2008
Facebook
bluescreen now has a facebook group, well technically we had one for a while but forgot to tell anyone!
* 21 Jun 2008
Bristol Filmmakers Festival 14/15th June 2008
The Bristol Filmmakers Festival 2008
On the weekend of 14/15th June, the Bristol Filmmakers Festival 2008 comes to the Watershed and the Arnolfini, an event which gathers together and celebrates the independent film community in the city.
Organised by three local film exhibition and network outfits:
Cineformation, Bluescreen and the Misfit Collective - BFMF2008 screens a variety of the independent film work created in the city, some well-funded, some barely funded and some that come in under a tenner.
The weekend will feature a host of special screenings and provide the chance for independent filmmakers to meet, swap ideas and knowledge.
Festival Programme Schedule
Saturday 14 June
Watershed:
1000-1115; 2008 Programme 1
1145-1300; 2008 Programme 2
1400-1500; Making It in Bristol
1530-1645; Making 90 Seconds of Gold – DepicT!
Arnolfini:
1700-1830; Misfit Collective Trade Fair
2000-2115; Bluescreen Special
2130-2300; 2008 Programme 3
2300-0030; BMFM Party
Sunday 15 June
Watershed:
1300-1430; Blueboard
Arnolfini:
1500-1615; Bristol Rewind - Sweded Classics
1645-1800; UWE/UB Film Showcase
1845-2000; 2008 Programme 4
2030-2200; History of Independent Film in Bristol & Awards
Email: [email protected]
http://www.bristolfilm.co.uk/
* 20 Jun 2008
Films screened at Mays Bluescreen
Main feature: The Small Storytellers - Shambala
then:
Ben Dowden - Jazz Lesson/Dance Film 3
Vivi - Un Minti di Cafe
Blair Mowat - Bristol Girls
Muscat - Red Eyed Piper/Deja Vu/Wobbles
Dan Buzzo - Always Watching
* 30 May 2008
Films screened at 30 Aprils bluescreen
Kicking off the evening, a thank you again to the Cube Orchestra
then...
Jonathan Amstead - A London Tale
Chris Barnett - Womens Voices
Rick Standing - Bottle/Explode 3
Nadia Hillman - G.R.O.F.U.N.
Dylan Radclyffe - Doug Tabbard: Human Curler
Joseph Wallace - Curiouser & curiouser
Philip Davis - A Tale of 2 Galaxies
(and apologies to Mike Page & Andy Lucas for not screening their films due to problems with our laptop, next time guys)
* 23 Apr 2008
Films screened at BLUESCREEN 27/02/2008
John Rees – Woo
Dan Arnold - Brother
Mark Watson - Four in Ten
Tom Swindell -Earthen
Kathryn Timmons - To build a home (plus 1 other)
Marina Ellerington - Mr Bones (plus 1 other)
Plus some from the bluescreen vaults inc:
Battle of Cable Street
& Best of bluescreen 2005
* 1 Mar 2008
Films screened 30/01/2008
Cube Orchestra rescore
&
Penny Russell - Isolation
Shelley Davis - White & Gold
Michael Page - Melody 120
Dan Arnold - Madagascar & WJ Arnold (re-edit)
Oliver Purches - Not cut out for crime
John Francis - A Bosnian Mosaic
Muscat - Wobbles/Shepards Delight
Clementine Lemaitre - Solo en ut maj'eur pour triches industrielles/
Encore une hostoire de pienes noele
Dan Buzzo - Remembering where we have been
* 9 Feb 2008
Bluescreen November, 2007
Bluescreen Blog – 28th November, 2007.
The Cube Orchestra kicked off the night playing beneath two films from, I think, the first ever Bluescreen compilation – 'Again and Again', a dance piece in an abandoned car, and 'Hob Blob', a mixture of Super 8 and animation. In fact, the Orchestra were in reality playing – as they announced at the start – to an imaginary screening of Hitchcock's 'North By Northwest', the percussionist reading out scenes from the script. So you spent an intriguing 20 minutes in several different places at once.
The first new film of the night was 'Green' from Greg Metcalfe, who nipped out from behind the bar at the Cube to watch the movies. Greg wove together a sequence of images from rural and urban landscapes to work with a piece of music from Message to Bears called, obviously, 'Green'. The images were carefully chosen. Stark urban architecture – whether street furniture or landmarks such as the London Eye – cutting dark shapes into grey skies and this was reflected further in the stripped Winter branches as the film moved into the countryside. However, the starkness was soon replaced by timid, and then powerful, fast flowing water, and green landscapes. Simple and effective, with great music.
'Homage à la Mer' was a stark, black and white pen-drawn animation from Daniela Trocker. Simply translated, it suggests a tribute to the sea, but Daniela's sea is a dangerous, challenging place where a swimmer is threatened by first a mermaid, then a giant squid and finally by an obstacle that can't be overcome. The style of animation delivered the underlying tone of hostility and that overwhelming sense of the sea's power.
'Mandogs' from Oliver Purches was a 'sexual politics comedy' in which the director also acted in the film as a dog being taken for a walk by its beautiful owner. Tied up next to another dog outside a newsagents', the two mutts chat about their owners until they are both given a rather nasty surprise. The script was witty, the performances funny but convincing and it used its comedy structure to gently satirise men's reflex understanding that they are always in control of a relationship. Quite a crazy idea that shouldn't have worked but did, with charm and a sense of joy.
Firstborn Creatives, one of Bristol's finest community media companies brought along several pieces of work. The first was called 'Graffiti' and commissioned by Bristol City Council to highlight both the negative as well as the positive aspects of street art. The film drew a clear distinction between the 'selfish' and 'uncreative' nature of tagging – with its anti-social and environmentally disruptive qualities – and the creative potential of graffiti art. The fact that it was commissioned by the Council's Healing the Green team meant that the focus was on the thin line between graffiti as art and graffiti as criminal damage and emphasised – through a couple of artists who were awaiting trial for exercising their talents in the wrong places – that in an urban environment one person's liberating creativity can represent another person's understanding of vandalism.
After the break, Bluescreen regular Muscat screened the first part of his 'Scarfel Pike' piece in which a group of Bristolians brave the elements in the Lake District Underpinned by Muscat's resolutely urban music, the film is interesting for its transposition of city folk into the wildness and bleakness of the countryside of the Lakes. Striding out across the low land, their journey is traced as they move higher and higher into the mist and onto the steep faces of the mountain. On the surface, it's the record of a trip out, but, as with the other section, by the end a sense of wonder at the scenery around slips into the filming. to make the journey up the mountain.
The second offering from Firstborn, 'Postcards from Zimbabwe', was in two parts. Both films – one documentary, one drama – emerged from a scheme that Firstborn director Rob Mitchell was involved in which linked British film-makers with Zimbabwean film-makers and overseen by the Zimbabwe Film Festival Trust. The drama, 'Oh Mama', was a simple, moving and uplifting piece about a young boy who is prevented from rescuing his street football team from ignoble defeat because he is dedicated to looking after his sick Mother. Cutting a deal with the other players, he helps win the game and the team comes to the aid of his mother. The second film, the documentary, followed a young man's exploration of the nature of dance in Zimbabwe and took as its premise the observation that dance is the story of the people. A vibrant, exciting piece of work which underlined how clearly a sense of place informs the identity of art.
Henrik Dahle presented his new work, 'Killing Snails', a DepicT entry that just missed the cut for this year's competition. The film follows the ruminations of an ordinary man with a conscience (played by the more than ordinary local sound recordist hero, Dave Brookfield) who crushes an innocent snail underfoot and sets to thinking how it is that 'we are killers, all of us'. In Henrik's wonderful and unique way, it was both profound and entertaining at the same time. Great idea, executed brilliantly.
'Madagascar and WJ Arnold' was a work in progress brought down to Bluescreen by Dan Arnold, a fascinating and at times moving piece of work which combined Super 8, MiniDV and Dan's own drawings. Part of the film was shot in Madagascar and there were interesting, almost Natural History Unit-style, details of nature as Dan picked up his impressions of a new environment with a deep curiosity. Intercutting the peace of nature with the disruptive buzz of city life, you kept wanting to return to the peace. The film then moved to an exploration of an interior with photographs and then line drawings of an older man, who is revealed as Dan's father, who we then learn died whilst Dan was away in Madagascar. Hopefully, Dan got some useful feedback and I'm looking forward to seeing what emerges in future cuts.
'Black as a Cat' was a short piece from Sam Powell that was filmed to be shown behind a musician playing at Ashton Court. It was a frenetic and zany cat-chase film where a cat-suit clad woman appears and reappears and scares a young man into fleeing through Bristol streets until he finds a way to defend himself. All under a great piece of music.
'Sheepy's Operation' was created by Sabine Lang and Jorda P Ros and featured Sylvia Zidek who screened 'The Transformable Pissing Trousers' at April's Bluescreen. Sylvia took on the identity of a surgeon who visits a house to perform a delicate operation on a soft-toy, Sheepy, whose neck was a little wobbly. The operation – in three parts – is performed with gentle seriousness and there is a definite charm in the way that this tone is retained throughout.
'Visuals Demo 2', from Henry Rolls, closed the night. It was a beautifully edited compilation of images from the summer, what Henry calls 'a little journey into the colourful depths of British wildlife'. The camera swirled around below branches and across the landscape, a fluid and engaging movement which kept a continuous flow and lifted the spirits. An extraordinary fact of its creation is that the whole film was shot on a cameraphone.
Henry's film confirmed that once again, an accidental theme ran through the work submitted during the evening: an exploration of urban landscapes and country detail. Time and again, Bluescreen will gather together a range of films that are linked in ways that you can never predict.
* 31 Dec 2007
Bluescreen Films in 2007
Films screened @ bluescreen in 2007:
Who the Hell is Edward Colston?. Dance, Dance. Me Daya. The Smuggler.Toulouse & the Crystal Ball. The Ghost Girl. The Messenger. Taking the Biscuit. Some Things. News Jamm. Fireworks and Friends. Outlaw. Go! Bristol.. Bud. Guiness. Dirty Sniper. Shepards Delight. Bassjump. Grandpa Got Run Over by a Reindeer. Start, Stop and Start Again. Ice Cube Puppet. Nothing New. A Season into a Day Into 5 mins 11secs. Old Man. Friends. Westmoreland House. Note. Conscripts. Disconnected. Wander. Mo in the Big Smoke. Weird Investigates (Work Porn). I Can' Go to Work, I'm Having an Emotional Breakthrough. Vitality.Tobago Tour 04. The Cloud Film / The Rat. Dismantling the Bubble. Forgotten Inventions: the Regency Pasty Mallet. Beachcombers. Road to Nowhere. Cacophony. Writing on the Wall. Ball. Outlaw. The Transformable Pissing Trousers. Strangers. Factory of Dreams. Mountains of Snowdonia. Strange Encounters. Mo Mingles. The Small Storyteller. The End.Berlin. You Really Came to Hate Me, Didn't You?. The Wall. Beach Burn. Prazdnota - Emptiness. Dead Cinema. 51ºN, 9ºE. Die Zeit. The Worms from Pluto. Paper Bag Lady - Episode 1: The Kite. Pigeon, Signs?, The End. Earthquakeland. The Birth. Dead Cinema. What makes You Feel Alive?. Glassmaster. Frangipani. Forlorn.Mali. Explode . This .Paradise. They Call Home. Billboards. (Anti) BNP Docu. Schizophrenia. Evolution. Wildlife. .Scafell Pike. Sofist. Tying Tone Arms. Beach Burn. Entertainment Through Pain. Character Building. Leute auf Zeichenhette. Joy of 8 Millilitres. The Glastonbury Fraud. No one is Illegal. Arawa's Return. The Big Draw. Suspended Fall. Alpha. Diagnostic. Hospitalised. Vikings. And Maybe But Also. Fate. Killers. Ringing Ani. Green. Homage à la Mer. Mandogs. Graffiti. Scarfel Pike. Postcards from Zimbabwe. Oh Mama. Killing Snails.Madagascar and WJ Arnold. Black as a Cat. Sheepy’s Operation. Visuals Demo 2.
* 31 Dec 2007
Bluescreen Filmmakers in 2007
..Bristol Filmmakers @ bluescreen in 2007:
Alex Johnson. Alice Buckee. Andrew Williams. Bandele. Candice Pepperall. Chuen Hung Tsang. Colin Bassett. Dan Buzzo. David Bain. Elizabeth Bowley. Greg Metcalfe. Henrik G Dahle. Henry Rolls. Howard Warmsley. Ian Southby Jacob Parish. Jacob Whittaker. James Atkins. James Stokes. Jilly Duckworth. John Elsaesser. John Francis. John Minton. Joyce Akrasi. K. Kathy Bray. Mark Watson. Marta Fernandez. Martin Poulter. Michael Schwartz. Michal Czernik. Muscat/Southsection. Nagea Rose. Naomi Smyth. Olly Snow. Pete Thomas. Quincy Andrews. Richard Storer. Rick Standing. Sam Roberts. Sam Woodcock. Simon Daly. Simon Richardson. Steve Brown. Sylvia Zidek. Thomas Dunn. Tom Swindell. Tracy Foster. Vivi Stamatos. Maria Cuervo. Jemma Shipley. George Sander Jackson. Taj Duaui. George Bowler. Patch. Gary ?. Daniella Troller. Sabine Lang. Oliver Purches. Dan Arnold. Rumbi K. First Born Creatives. Sam Powell.
* 2 Dec 2007
October bluescreen
Films screened at Bluescreen 31/10/07
The Cube Orchestra kicked off things and re-soundtracked 2 films from the archives,
and then we screened in the following order:
Maria Cuervo/Gemma Shipley - The Glastonbury Fraud
George Sander Jackson - No one is Illegal
Jacob Whittaker - Arawa's Return/The Big Draw/Suspended Fall
Taj Duaui - Alpha/Diagnostic/Hospitalised
George Bowler - Vikings
Nagea Rose - And Maybe But Also
Patch - Fate
Gary ? - Killers/Ringing Ani
And finished off with a selection of films from the ever burgeoning bluescreen archives!!
* 3 Nov 2007
Septembers' bluescreen
Bluescreen Blog – September - 26.09.07
An expanded 7-piece Orchestra Cube kicked off this first post-summer, and post-Festival tour Bluescreen. They played to two linked short films – 'Bristol Tourist Guide' and 'Highland Tourist Guide'. The Orchestra's improvised musical musings floated above two linked films that were linked in style – fast-motion movement through first city streets and then country lanes, with frequent rhythmic stops for breath and in the first a great deal of superimposition. An interesting insight to emerge visually was that in the city, your movement is always checked - by traffic lights, other cars, pedestrians, etc – whilst the city allows steady fluid movement.
Mark Watson's two films kicked off the main session. 'Billboards' was a documentary charting a protest against the siting of several billboards in the St Werburgh's area of the city. This is a perfect example of where independent film activity can change perception. I'd passed by the sites several times myself but never with the eyes of someone who lives there, never with any understanding of what effect the billboards – some of which have been raised without permission – have on local people and the local community. Bluescreen frequently screens a particular category of material – micro-budget, participatory documentaries – this was a very good example.
Mark's second film, 'BNP' was a completely partial, totally unobjective documentary about the British National Party, using footage from the BNP's own website. Let's be completely partial here and say that it doesn't take much for these goons to look stupid, so Mark just drops little pieces of intertitle guidance just in case we missed anything. At times funny, at other times rather sinister.
Richard Thomas dropped a very short surprise into proceedings from his position in the projection booth. 'Dominoes' was very short and got laughs that lasted as long as the footage. A beach, some Stonehenge shaped large pebbles, a boot and the hope for major collapse. Not everything in life goes perfectly, but the frustration was funny.
'Schizophrenia', from Olly Snow, has been in development for several years and now finally makes it to the screen. It opens with a wonderfully inventive title sequence and moves through several inter-related visual environments – including a garishly shot lounge and a Second Life styled world – with a voice-over of conversations that are apparently scripted but which come across like surreptitious, snatched recordings. These are the schizophrenic voices and the dynamic, surprising images – some computer-animated, some stop-frame animated, some live action – outline a chaotic and unstable world. It is a work of great originality in every frame, great detail. The music is from Headphobe, Ned Clarke who did a fantastic job on the editing. Olly also showed his portfolio reel – a range of artwork that gave an insight into the film.
Muscat was back with three films – products from this extended summer break. 'Evolution' was another Southsection portrait of skaters, this time part of the Vans Test Team event in Bath earlier in the year. Once again, Muscat's laid-back style brought the phenomenal control of the skaters into a magical relief. 'Wildlife' spent time mostly in Muscat's garden, getting all Attenboroughish, but amongst the squirrels and the birds there were a few surprises, most notably a snake in the grass, no really his mate's Boa Constrictor returns, as well as sheep as he cuts to landscapes beyond his back yard. 'Scafell Pike' was another Muscat travelogue, this time to the highest point in England – views, mates, beats and disappearing into the mist.
'Softist' was one of two Joy of 8 films that were screened tonight. Joy of 8 was a scheme in which film-makers were given a Super camera and film and encouraged to film a piece that was edited in-camera. 'Sofist' emerged from the director Richard Storer's dislike of sofas. With a wonderful soundtrack, Richard's well-composed, intriguing images identify some of the more common moments of interaction with this major piece of furniture whilst a voice-over describes both the attraction and distaste that accompanies sofa ownership.
'Tying Tone Arms' was a wonderfully intriguing short from Jacob Whittaker, deeply satisfying and compelling. The detailed procedure of tying a record-player's arm with wire, keeping it in place so that the vinyl skips repeatedly, doesn't sound like an entertaining couple of minutes but it was, with the final image of the tied arm suspended tensely above the wobbling record beneath becoming something rather beautiful.
James Atkins' 'Beach Burn' is a fast-moving, abstract piece shot in Super 8 and tracing the destruction of a piece of domestic furniture. It was an intriguing watch, never resting in one place and the use of Super 8 gave the piece an excellent texture.
Tom Dunn was back at Bluescreen with 'Entertainment Through Pain'. It was directed by Johnathan Osborne and is described by Tom as a 'Drama/doc of the crucifixion of St Peter'. It might have been an overly-ambitious subject to tackle – especially with very basic production - but the strong cinematography and performances brought to mind Derek Jarman's work. It was good to see something shot on 16mm and the very simple images of peace and rest were a convincing metaphor for St Peter's spiritual joy throughout the brutality.
Alice Buckee's first film to be screened at Bluescreen is 'Character Building'. It was a charming film, very simple and intriguing. Several people gave vox-pop interviews about a particular person in their life, commenting on how they knew them and who they are. There are very few links between the stories and perspectives, and although it's unclear if they are talking about same person because of this (in truth they aren't), what emerges is a simple portrait of a multi-faceted character. An exercise, but more entertaining than that sounds. The ending was sad, but that was only one perspective and, as Alice intended the film to be an exploration of how people form an understanding of things, that is the point.
Ian Southby moves away from his normal music production to make a short documentary with Laura Cramer called 'Leute auf Zeichenhette'. It is a short glimpse into the undergrowth in Portland Square during the carnival this year. In the midst of the joy and celebration, there is litter and decay, syringes and waste. Rather like life.
Henrik Dahle's the 'Joy of 8 Millilitres' was the second of the Joy of 8 films screened tonight. Henrik is one of Bristol most distinctive independent film-makers, with films that are instantly recognisable as his. 'Joy of 8 Millilitres' uses a pun to draw away from film-making and onto writing, exploring what can be achieved with 8 millilitres of ink and romping around subjects as apparently disconnected as his Grandmother, the writing of the screenplay we are watching and the ability to create in art what is missing in life. It was funny, energetic and entertaining.
* 2 Oct 2007
June’s Bluescreen
BLUESCREEN BLOG – June 2007
Films screened at bluescreen on 27/06/07
Once again, during this warm June evening, Bluescreen proved that this is the best place in Bristol to see quality film-making on a regular basis. Steve and Chris took a programme of work from the last year to Glastonbury and they will be heading off to various festivals over the next few weeks. If they wanted to take along another quality batch, then this evening's selection is there to draw from.
This time of year at Bluescreen we see several films from graduating students who've studied at the universities and colleges in the area. The first two films of the night – following the Cube Orchestra's exemplary introduction – came from this source. Kathy Bray has just graduated from UWE and she presented 'The Worms from Pluto' and 'Paper Bag Lady - Episode 1: The Kite', It's hard not to be entertained by pink animated worms, actually pink animated worms dancing, in fact pink animated worms dancing in tutus. It was funny and reminded me – and this is definitely a compliment – of 'The Clangers'. 'Paper Bag Lady' was charming, inventive and well written, and could slot right into any children's animation slot. It's clear that Kathy knows the direction she wants to move towards. Delightful stuff.
Alex Johnson followed last month's 'The Wall' with 3 short films – 'Pigeon', 'Signs' (Alex – apologies if I didn't get the title correct for this one), and 'The End'. They were all linked by a clear focus on situations and activity that might pass us by if we didn't have the camera to select the action and keep us attached to what passed in front of us. Pigeons mithering bread on a concrete stairwell, a sole pigeon perched above the signs for The Galleries shopping centre, and the final clear-up by Police as they re-opened Stokes Croft after a fatal accident last month. We are presented with details that, in our hectic lives, we so often overlook.
'Earthquakeland' was an 'imaginative response to the Manchester earthquakes'. It was professionally produced, and mixed documentary interview with a narrative that pulled out several different strands, the former highlighting the immediate personal responses of Mancunians and the latter developing a fictive world that drew out the concerns of many regarding the nature of inner city development. The twin energies of natural and commercial destruction of urban life pulsed back and forth through the film with apposite images and tight editing.
Colin Bassett had hoped to show 'The Birth' alongside 'Dead Cinema' at last month's Bluescreen (the latter was shown again this month). He says that it shouldn't be taken seriously, but his film – created with his brother Mark over 6 hours and edited in camera – looks fantastic and draws on a host of images from works that explore the birth of monsters – 'Alien' and the Golem legend being at the fore. The backdrops gave the film an ancient, almost epic feel.
'What makes You Feel Alive?' from John Minton was commissioned by Blackout Arts and recorded the last days of one of Bristol's most recognisable landmarks, Tollgate House, that stood, until recently, at the end of the M32, greeting people into the city. Before its demolition - which made way to the latest shrine to retail, the new Broadmead complex - Blackout Arts organised the projection of images across three sides of its face and John interwove these images with background and foreground contextualisation from the city itself. John filmed the projections from different vantage points around the city, busy flickerings of light that soon came across like a pulsing urban energy in its own right. The images, such as the God-like architect surveying his creation, were spectacular – matched by an excellent, powerful score – and John's achievement lay in the balance he found between integrating the images of the event and the meaning of the event in the context of the city.
'Glassmaster' from Elizabeth Bowley brought a young woman in an exquisite gold dress into the bourgeois surroundings of a theatre – the Old Vic perhaps? She sauntered through the space, stretched out across the balcony rails and finally came to rest in a pile of furs on the floor of the stalls. This was luxury in a lonely space. There was something elegant but also very sad about the images laid in front of us.
Bristol band 'Leave Land for Water' produce epic and passionate music and they have found their visual match in the animators Chuen Hung Tsang & Chris Hawkes who presented two pieces. The first, 'Frangipani', was an outstanding computer animation about a star that falls to earth, barely escapes the dangers that confront it in this world, and then is rescued. It was packed full of original, dramatic and memorable images and driven forward by the powerful soundtrack. Terrifically moving. 'Forlorn' was equally heart-wrenching. Once again created with computer animation software, the story concerned a man who seemed to have survived apocalyptic destruction and who steps through the wreckage, investigating what is left of his life until his discoveries lead to an epic finale. The score was fabulous and the images settled deeply in the heart and the mind.
Tom Swindell has recently moved to Bristol, having graduated from the Documentary Film course at the International Film School Wales at Newport. He introduced himself to Bristol with a beautifully-shot record of a trip to Africa called 'Mali', choosing two arenas of life to present a picture of the country. The first was the Segou Music Festival, an ecstatic celebration of music, dance and really just a celebration of the joy of life. The second was a trip to a village that is known worldwide for its pottery, with Tom bringing a gift from his own pottery-making father to fellow craftsmen. What distinguished 'Mali' from countless video travelogues was not only Tom's skills as a cinematographer (the excellent composition and colour range especially), but the fact that he managed to achieve a closeness to the people he was filming. It was rare to see someone film from inside rather than outside a new community.
Rick Standing's 'Explode' was a simple idea, executed perfectly. An explosion is looped and repeated but with subtle differences, each loop pulling back a little from the end of the action until you were left with the moment of detonation, a small gasp and stutter. Rick has plans to edit it digitally (the film was a VHS recording from 1995) and it would be worth it. Highly enjoyable and, in a strange way, rather beautiful.
John Elsaesser is becoming the quintessential independent film-maker, returning once more with a fantastically imaginative piece of work called 'This Paradise They Call Home', and proving that some people just won't let the lack of money get in the way of telling a good story. John describes it as a 'Sci-fi environmental warning fantasy', weaving the classical story of Poseidon and Atheni with an epic tale of vengeful Gods and negligent humanity. It made use of a downloadable effects software called 'Wax' which gives the film-maker the opportunity to attempt dramatic images of catastrophe. Fascinating and ambitious work.
This was the last Bluescreen until September. A fantastic night and good high to end the season on.
* 15 Sep 2007
The 2007 Festivals that bluescreen screened films at were...
BLUESCREEN ON THE ROAD 2007
02 Feb 07 -
The R Eject Film Festival @ Rotterdam International Film Festival (7.00-10.00pm)
09 June 07 -
St Werburghs Summer Fair, Bristol (2-3pm & 4-5pm)
22 June 07 -
Glastonbury Festival @ The Groovy Movie Picture House (9-10.30pm).
14 July 07 -
Ashton Court Festival, Bristol - @ The Blackout Tent (All day)
26 July 07 -
ATA, San Francisco, USA - 'The Sparror Screenings'
05 Aug 07 -
The Big Chill, Eastnor Castle @ the Media Mix Tent (7.00- 8.30pm)
11 Aug 07 -
The Bloom Festival, Bath @ the Lost Disco (1.30-3.00am)
18 Aug 07 -
Mutant! I am on the Moon Fest, Bristol (4.00-5.30pm) (didnt happen!)
24-26 Aug 07 -
Shambala Festival, Northamptonshire @ The Blackout Tent
07-09 Sept 07 -
Bestival (via Groovy Movie)
* 15 Sep 2007
May bluescreen
BLUESCREEN BLOG – May 2007
Films screened at bluescreen on 30/05/07
Several film-makers who showed their work tonight were regular returnees, Muscat, Jilly Duckworth, Dan Buzzo, Tom Dunn, and Jacob Parish. That's one of the great things about Bluescreen, the fact that it exists to make screening easily accessible and therefore an intrinsic part of the film-making process itself in Bristol, a place where an audience can be found. It's rare to find film-makers that just make material for themselves, but it's also rare to find a space where all that it takes for a film to find an audience is for you to drop your film in the box at the door.
The Cube Orchestra provide yet another musical opening to the screenings, this time enabling the Moomins to take on a zen-like character with Eastern sounds produced by drum, violin and guitar-like instrument (someone tell me what that was!).
Muscat kicked off the screening again, this time with a new piece and a very different style and subject matter from the work that he's shown recently. 'Mountains of Snowdonia' was a travelogue, a visual diary of a trip up Snowdon with friends. The gentle, steady beats are a reminder of his resolutely urban style but as the shots cut from one sweeping pan to another, it is clear that Muscat is absorbing views that are making a great impression on him.
'Strange Encounters' was created over 22 years ago by Andrew Williams as part of a film-making course. It was shot on VHS and is in the supernatural genre, telling – via a TV interview – one man's frightening story of standing in the Clifton Observatory and being whisked back into Victorian times, where he encounters a mysterious woman in a black dress who lures him to an unfortunate death by falling into the Avon Gorge. There wasn't just the strangeness of the gothic atmosphere - there was also the strangeness of seeing VHS after such a long time and, very impressively, an organ-based score that went from bizarre to extravagantly powerful.
Jilly Duckworth brought along the next instalment of her series featuring Mo, the People's Nun, called 'Mo Mingles.' God should be pleased with this woman. There she is, chatting away with HimHer and standing up for all of those religious smokers out there (lighting it, however, might help) and doing a service for the divine by investigating what changes could be introduced to make us appreciate the DivineGodhead just that little bit more. The answers were instructive – look more like Freddie Mercury, present a regular Godcast – and I hope to God that this woman of the cloth is being listened to. She can also cut a move on the dancefloor.
Jacob Parish brought along 'The Small Storyteller'. He had screened this before at Bluescreen and it's a tribute to the poignancy of the images that they appeared on the screen like old friends. The film is a compilation of Sony Cyber Shot moving images from a year in Jacob's life and it has the immediacy and intimacy of a journal or a diary entry, with images so distinctive that the film has the geography of a dream – random, unsequential, memorable pictures. Friends, landscapes, details of daily life – the sorts of images that you would only pick up if you were within that experience and if you had the eye to recognise them as special, either visually or personally.
It's indicative of the range of work that is brought to Bluescreen that alongside personally-financed guerrilla films shot in the lounge, you can see meticulously produced publicly-funded films. 'The End', directed by K, is a short film produced as part of the Film Council/South West Screen's Digital Shorts programme. It is a narrative that explores several end points – the end of life, the end of hope, and thankfully the end of conviction and fear. Two men meet on a rooftop high above Bristol's Park Row – potential suicide vs. suicide bomber. It's the point of climax for each of the characters, when two desires for death meet head-on. It's stylishly directed with plenty of movement, very well-shot and finely acted.
Dan Buzzo keeps bringing very special short films to Bluescreen. 'Berlin' is a silent, kaleidoscopic burst of images. Shot from the windows of a tube-train through the city, the images are reflected in rows and blossom out to be replaced by the next set and so on and so on. The images open out and come to rest on a station concourse where people move into themselves through the kaleidoscopic effect and disappear. Silent, charming, and beautiful. 'You Really Came to Hate Me, Didn't You' is a found-footage film of separation consisting of two simply presented but strangely moving images whose power derives from their removal from their expected contexts. In the first, the Space Shuttle moves away from the host-plane and off into the atmosphere. In the second, an American fighter jet slowly lifts itself from the ground. The ambient soundtrack lends the images an unexpected power.
Alex Johnson had brought 'The Wall' to April's Bluescreen but technical problems meant that the film couldn't be screened and he brought it along tonight. It belonged very much in April's programme, however, as it paralleled the activity of many of the films last month in documenting the creative reinterpretation of a physical cityscape through the creative activities of a group of street artists. This time it was shot from distance and with a fixed camera, relaying the dramatic repainting of the side of a derelict city centre building. Once again, art transforming the city. This seems to be a favourite Bristol pastime and suggests that wherever there is a Council's neglect of public art, the public will take over.
J Atkins' 'Beach Burn' was an intriguing compilation of Super 8 images. However, technical problems meant that we will have to wait until a future Bluescreen to see the film in its entirety.
Colin Bassett screened 'Dead Cinema', a well-structured documentary that explored the dearth of creativity in Hollywood cinema, laying the blame firmly at the door of the infantilisation of the American industry over the last 20 years and laying the boot – finally someone under the age of 40 is doing it – to that creative magpie, Mr Q Tarantino. To progress his argument, Colin managed to persuade an academic, Mark Bould, to let himself be tied to a chair – a la the intero-torture-gation scene in 'Reservoir Dogs' and put forward his views as to how the American industry got into this mess. I guess he kept his ear as a reward. The points are well made and very convincing. A very sad story.
Michal Czernik describes his film 'Emptiness' as a pseudo-documentary music video clip and details, through often disconnected and repeated images, pictures from a life. The life that is presented is at times harrowing and full of moments of discomfort. There was an Eastern European flavour to the film, which is no surprise as the Director is Czech.
Tom Dunn showed a film that he shot for a director in Germany, a piece called '51ºN, 9ºE'. The film was a well-written narrative exploring Germany after the collapse of the Berlin Wall through the emotional journey of a father who takes his son to his East German birthplace to meet the boy's uncle and in the process come to terms with his past. It was a classic example of the political being explored in the personal.
'Die Ziet' is a 90 second animation brought to Bluescreen by Tracy Foster. She describes it as 'a slightly dark and surreal flight of fancy, as the chiefs of German business daydream about today's news'. What they daydream about is more funny in Tracy's hands than perhaps in the heads of most German industrialists. The manipulation of the news page is an effective and entertaining subversion and it will be interesting to see where Tracy's future East European animation influences take her.
The final film of the evening was from Tom Mansfield, 'A Picture Can Say a Thousand Words'. I won't spoil it by describing too closely what happens, but the film shows how print and pictures can live in harmony. Unfortunately, a damaged disc meant that the soundtrack was missing hopefully he will bring it back for future Bluescreen.
The next Bluescreen is on June 27th and is the last before the event takes its summer break and heads towards the festivals with DVDs in hand. If you want to put your films forward for viewing at the festivals, contact Steve and Chris here.
* 26 Jun 2007 Glastonbury blog
mud, rain and bluescreen!
well we both worked down at the fest, in our other non-bluescreen guises...
bluescreen went on a little later than expected on the friday night @ the Groovy Movie cinema, due to not being able to find a key to a portacabin in the Park area, wherein the bluescreen DVDs lay!
Anyway, thanks Mark and Camilla @Groovy Movie, for taking it all in their stride! We got the films on half an hour late and they were to be shown again over the weekend too. Hooray!
Groovy Movie will now be taking the bluescreen compilations onto other festivals, check here for details: http://groovymovie.psand.org/solarcinema_events07.htm.
Other non-bluescreen highlights:
The Men they Couldnt Hang @ The Acoustic Stage. 1st time i seen them in 20years! and they didnt disappoint. Rousing stuff!
Lily Allen @ Pyramid Stage, with Tery Hall & Lynvil Golding of the Specials, doing a version of 'Gangsters'. Priceless.
Top Venue - (Other than the Groovy Movie Cinema, of course!) was the Flaming Love Palace, in the Circus Fields - Tofu Love Frogs (thurs) and pole dancers (!) and some bonkers band in masks on Sat nite/Sun morn.
CSS and Long Blondes on Other Stage (Sat) & The Stooges rocked bigtime!
The Aliens @ The Park (Fri) - weird eclectic psychedelia (and followed by Spiritualised acoustic set)
Lost Vagueness (Sat) - Dirty Pretty Things secret gig (!)
Cabaret Marquee (Sat) - John Otway throughing himself off a ladder and doing a forward roll! hes just turned 50 too..
Amy Winehouse - Jazz World (Sat). that voice..that beehive..
Fire Show (Sat) - Flames shooting high in the air, could feel the heat half a mile away!
The Who - Pyramid (Sun) - oh it rained but..
Billy Bragg (Sun) - the annual pilgrimage, the voice of the festival, doesnt disappoint & finished with a cover of 'Garageland'
and there were loads of other things too..all a bit hazy now!
have i mentioned the rain yet? or the mud!? well it was hard work and i have leg muscles like steel now! but didnt seem to matter really.
was another really good glast fest.. except for the 3 1/2 hour queue to get out!
* 30 Aug 2008
Bluescreen Festival Film Lists - 2008/07/06/05
Heres the list of bluescreen short film compilations that were screened at festivals over the last few years.
Also listed is the 2008 compilation that was screened at Shambala 22-24th Aug 2008....
Bluescreen spent a fantastic weekend at Shambala in August, screening films with likeminded film screeners from the Cube Cinema. Showing films every night from Dusk to very late! We enjoyed it, hope you did too! Thanks to Shambala for having us!
Thank you for all your wonderful films!
Bluescreen 2008 DVD Compilation
Un Miniti di cafe - Vivi....
And Maybe but Also - Nagea Rose....
SouthSection – (a selection) ....
Marseille - Digital Studio Demo....
Doug Tabbard, Human Curler - Dylan Radcliffe....
Hatchet House of Horror....
Mandogs – Oliver Purches....
Earthen - Tom Swindell....
The Big Draw - Jacob Whittaker....
Womens Voices - Chris Barnett....
Esad - Clementine Lemaitre....
Road to Somewhere - Naomi Smyth ....
Tying Tone Arms - Jacob Whittaker....
Mr Bones - Marina Ellerington....
Green - Gregory Metcalfe....
It Isnt Easy - Jason Havneraas....
....Madagascar.... & WJ Arnold - Dan Arnold....
Alpha - Tajinder Dhami....
Always Watching /Remembering where we have been - Dan Buzzo....
Demo - Henry Rolls....
Hommage a la Mer - Daniela Trocker....
Jazz Lesson and DF 3 - Benjamin Dowden....
Billboards and BNP - Mark Watson....
..............
Bluescreen 2007 DVD Compilation 1 (45mins)....
Kwesi Johnson - Screen Shift test shoot....
Thomas Dunn - I can't go to work today I'm having an emotional breakthrough....
Dan Buzzo – Feeling/Looking ....
Southsection - Snowdonia ....
Noel Goodwin - Ninja ....
Henrick G Dahle - Dismantling the Bubble ....
Vivi - Dos Brutas ....
Tom Cardo-Moreno - Colin and Oscar
Bluescreen 2007 DVD Compilation 2 (45mins)
Tom Swindell - ....Mali....
John Minton - What Makes you feel Alive? ....
Chuen Tsang - Frangidani/Forlorn (2 films)....
Elizabeth Bowley - Glassmaster....
-----------------------------------------------------------
Bluescreen 2005/06 DVD Compilations
Bluescreen Docs (45mins)....
The Ram Inn – Sebastian Nolan/Chris Bradford/James Atkinson
Rusty Road less Travelled – Woody James
Maja – Chris Barnett
Short Sharp Shock – Dee Kalakoti
Old Street – Jacob Parish
Cable Street – Toby Trackman/Yoav Segal
DVD 1 (45mins)....
Culture Clash – Sid Sharma
Get Good – Francois
Weston-Super-Mare.. – Dan Blore
Night on the tiles – Nimph Productions
6 Degrees of Separation – Max Broughton
Body Language – Kwesi Johnson
Untitled – Alex Mckay
29 Fragile Days
DVD 2 (45mins)....
Untitled 2 – Alex Mckay
The Rainbow and Birth - ??
Greenpeace Promo - Chris Boakes
Circle – Laurie Gibbs
Untitled - Charlie Watkins
The Station – Kwesi Johnson
Thin Ice – Esther May ....Campbell....
In the dark – Esther May ....Campbell....
Bert & Ben – Jacob Parish
The Small Storyteller – Jacob Parish
* 2 Jun 2007
April bluescreen
25/04/07
Hopefully, one of the functions of a monthly Bluescreen blog will be to provide a space for the Bluescreen regulars to catch up on what's been in the space when they've been unable to make the event. This month's was a fantastic night. I go to a fair few short film screenings and Bluescreen is consistently the most exciting, inspiring and refreshing film exhibition environment in Bristol.
The evening kicked off differently this month. Two members of the Cube Orchestra – the Microplex's very own resident muso family - accompanied four films that have previously reached the Bluescreen. Looped guitar figures, building slowly on top of each other were joined by piano notes that gradually formed a steady rhythm and provided a very different soundtrack to images that we'd seen before.
The interplay of sound and image lay at the centre of Henry Rolls' 'Cacophony', a film comprising hundreds of cameraphone stills, captured often in sequence at 12 frames per second. The cacophony wasn't aural – James Foster's jazzy drum and bass propelled the images smoothly forward – but visual, as the images charged on top of each other, often with disruptive superimpositions. The camera moved through streets at first, a city rush, with the sky always visible, but then deeper into the city and back out again to different landscapes. Henry's stills camera was a famished eye, devouring rapid visual impressions, but never leaving the viewer feeling overwhelmed or claustrophobic. This was Henry's first major fixed edit; his regular visual activity is Vjing. Very impressive work.
'Writing on the Wall' was a wonderfully engaging documentary from Joyce Akrasi. The subject was the mural work that emerged from the London borough of Wandsworth, mostly in the 1980's but the film is very much about the interface between communities and public space, the way that murals – an ephemeral art that emerges from generations who disappear often before the art does – can capture the political and communal hopes of local people and frequently in the face of forces that power their way ahead, despite and often at the expense of those people. The artists would often include portraits of local people, friends and family, and Joyce was careful to not only provide stark contrasts between the exuberance of the murals and the grey decrepitude of the obsolete industrial buildings that they often fronted, but also to spend time viewing the murals in detail, filling the frame with colour. The mural of the local people at the seaside was extraordinary.
Peter Thomas showed 'Outlaw', a film he screened several months back and one which he recently shot with a friend, Chris Campion with whom he'd collaborated six years ago, on a film called 'Ball'. 'Ball' was an inventive and funny film that could almost be a template for an often derided but usually entertaining genre, the 'we're bored out of our fucking mind and dead skint so let's make a film using every last remaining object in the flat' genre. Featuring a white ball in a bandana (I shit you not), with much of it seen from the ball's perspective, the film was a chase movie as the White Ball hears the Special's classic 'Enjoy Yourself (It's Later Than You Think) and realises that he/she/it should just have a top time around the flat. Involved in feats of daring and physical challenge, the White Ball goes a little too far and disturbs the Second White Ball This Time with Red Stuff Around It and a vicious battle begins. This was a film that fully respected Hollywood Classic Narrative Editing styles as well as highlighting the joy of parachuting with an umbrella.
A fantastically strange, simple and entertaining short from Sylvia Zidek arrived with the title (missing from the screened copy) 'The Transformable Pissing Trousers'. Described, accurately as it happens, by Sylvia as 'a demonstration of the many ways the transformable pissing trousers can be worn', we watched as the film-maker modelled the extremely versatile design triumph that enables women to urinate easily and still be stylish. She said that if we watched closely we could see her attempting to prove it. Frankly, I could see she was trying but I'm not sure she succeeded. It was intriguing, engaging and very funny.
Simon Richardson presented the third narrative film of the night, 'Strangers', featuring a trailer for his friend's film 'Stone'. The film followed the growing and intense obsession of a middle-aged man with a young girl who he was communicating with on a dating website and following through the streets, parks and her home with potentially dangerous intent. Shot on HDV, 'Strangers' managed to be genuinely threatening and provide a surprise ending which still left questions in the air.
Marta Fernandez showed an early cut of 'Factory of Dreams' at a Bluescreen last year when the DVD crashed, much to the disappointment of the audience captivated by its revelation of an extraordinary world. It is a documentary filmed in a factory squatted by circus artists in Barcelona, called La Makabra. For anyone involved in creative production, the world that Marta presents is a virtual utopia, of alternative lifestyles and friendship and experimentation in a capitalist city that, as one of the performers says, has no room for culture. The film at first seems straightforward but as it progresses it is clear that Marta has edited with a very clear structure in mind, one that relates not to theme but to emotion. The performers express their joy at being able to experiment and to learn in a collaborative space, turning their dreams into reality and aware of their extraordinary luck in doing this. This moves into reflections on what the space has done to change and mature them, a realisation made more poignant as they realise that the space is about to be swallowed up to make way for modern offices and luxury apartments. Marta wasn't able to be present to film the apparently violent eviction. Perhaps that was fortunate, because what she included in its place was a sequence of portraits as the artists performed, and worked, and laughed together. It was a glimpse of a utopia and with all such glimpses, terribly inspiring and terribly sad.
Another great bluescreen evening, thank you for your films and see you in May!
* 5 May 2007
Marchs bluescreen
BLUESCREEN 28/03/07
One of the interesting things about Bluescreen is the number of new people who arrive with films – or just to watch – every month. There's often a perception of bring-your-own film nights that the only people who turn up are the film-makers and their mates but that isn't always the case and recently Bluescreen has witnessed return visits motivated by the last programme alone. This month we had one of last month's film-makers assisting in the projection booth, and I don't think she was just looking for her film from February!
'Westmoreland House' kicked off the night's programme. John Francis, in his first film, used simple imagery to present a visual portrait of a building that dominates one of the main routes into Bristol and frequently dominates people's initial perception of the Stokes Croft area. Stopping us in our tracks and taking us away from the traffic and the rush, John's film gives us the chance to properly observe a building which has always seemed to eat away at itself, bit by bit. The use of gentle, sparse acoustic guitar set up an evocative contrast.
'Note' was created by three students – Quincy Andrews, Sam Powell, Fintan Burke - from Cotham Grammar School (sorry, boys, if I got that wrong), and made for an A-Level class. It's a narrative film that traced the progress of a £10 note as it passed from person to person through loss, theft and generosity, highlighting the way we treat others as it made its way. It's not the first film that they've made together – they have a 20 minute piece that may appear at Bluescreen in the coming months – but even at this early stage of their film-making they have a very good sense of narrative and they are all interested in going to film school in the future.
Michael Schwartz describes his 35 second film 'Conscripts' as a 'pisstake' and a comment on Westerns and present day conflict. It was an absurdist piece that gave us a crawling marine, an American officer with his eyes to the skies and a tennis player. Not your everyday combination and the audience loved it.
Sam Woodcock showed 'Disconnection' a film that he made whilst a student at UWE. Another narrative film – not as frequent an occurrence at Bluescreen as you'd expect – this presented the story of a man who has hit rock-bottom and has nowhere to exist except within either fear or nostalgia. Sam has a good eye for the way that the human face can tell a story and the film ambitiously, and successfully, moved in and out of time and place as the main character's imagination took him from the memory of degradation to the memory of hope. It gave the film an up-ending, but the poignancy emerged from the fact that the hope was found in the beginning of the relationship, before everything fell apart.
'Wander' is described by its maker, Greg Metcalfe, as an 'attempt to capture the experience of listening to music while walking in familiar surroundings'. This was certainly present in the piece but what was noticeable to me was the way the camera was deflected from just passing by places and situations and instead spent time observing them. The orange light rising up a night-time lampost, the movement of a leaf in the wind, the changing patterns in a pavement as you walk by. This was deliberate and at times very beautiful observation. This was the second film from Greg in the past three Bluescreens, the last being 'Some Things', screened in January and made with Leo Plunkett, and also with Josh Albiston who provided an excellent score for 'Wander'.
Jilly Duckworth screened 'Mo in the Big Smoke', featuring Mo, the chain-smoking Nun with a hotline to God and an obsession with nailing sinners and congratulating the saved. Let's just say that she was spiritually very nosy. Mo wandered around Battersea Arts Centre, poking that nose around pockets and bags and finding Christ and the Devil in the strangest of places. The tone was comic, but the final scene, a blessing for an unsuspecting passer-by slid from humorous to beatific and then snapped back to end on funny. It was a fine and rather glorious change of tone.
Martin Poulter introduced his film 'Weird Investigates' with the story that he had got into trouble at work for some of the content of this film. Quite ironic as 'Weird Investigates' turned the tables around on the workplace moral panic about accessing pornography on company time and gave us a picture of a workplace where routine masturbation was shockingly interrupted by pop-up Excel spreadsheets and uncalled for Powerpoint presentations. Visually straightforward, Martin managed to keep the film relevant and entertaining.
The final film of the first half was 'I Can't Go to Work I'm Having an Emotional Breakthrough' from Thomas Dunn whose portrait of disrupted nature, 'A Season into a Day into 5 mins and 11 secs', was screened last month. 'I Can't go to Work…' took time-lapsed early morning as its starting point and brought us, via varied and well-chosen images, to the setting of the evening sun. The most affecting section was the slowed down entrance of a young woman, through a curtain of bright sunlight, into the opening of a dark cave. The film was elegiac and moving.
Muscat kicked off Part Two. He is certainly prolific. He introduced a new piece, 'Vitality'. The film was a progression from his other works shown at Bluescreen, such as 'Dirty Sniper' and 'Shephard's Delight' which he showed again tonight. Once more he created the music as well as the visuals, but instead of his usual approach of layering the screen with composite images, he took a single subject, the Skate Park and especially the skater Spex, and experimented with how using freeze-frame could bring out some of the beauty and skill of the skateboarder's art. He would freeze the skater as he lifted into the air and kept him suspended, just for a second and always took him back into motion at the perfect moment on the soundtrack. That's that feed-through from musician to film-maker again.
Sam Roberts took the opportunity of Bluescreen to pull his footage from a cupboard and start the process of bringing 'Tobago Tour' into some sort of final shape. The reaction was positive, but what's not to like about a busload of creative Bristolians heading out to Tobago with drums and friendship and getting involved with the people on the island. Sam mixed scenes of travel and tired arrival with glimpses of the local people and lifestyle, and at its core was an astonishing scene, a rehearsal scene of drums and dancing. What seemed to be a mixture of local Tobagans and their Bristol visitors, the dancers were involved in a complex, beautifully choreographed routine, erupting out of the simple scenes of tourist movement that lay on either side of the scene. There is more to come from the footage, according to Sam, but even in its current form it clearly illustrates how close people from different worlds can become, linked by talent.
Henrik Dahle has been establishing himself on the local film scene for several years with his imaginative, ambitious and very well made films and tonight showed two (actually 3) pieces. 'The Cloud Film/The Rat' linked two films. A locked-off image of clouds on a summer day, an image filmed through sunglasses, is accompanied by an audio track in which Henrik is interrogated as he films by two boys who pepper him with questions and then recommend a Hollywood romance and whom Henrik recognises as being the boys featured in a film that his mate Oli Purches shot called 'The Rat'. 'The Rat' was then shown. Henrik was filming the clouds for another film, one called 'The Equater' which he promises to screen at the next Bluescreen. The other film was 'Dismantling the Bubble', created for last year's Onion Film Challenge held down The Watershed and a film that explores the fragility of relationships and the perspectives that we hold on them.
In this city of animators, we're blessed with a range of idiosyncratic work and Simon Daly's two films – 'Forgotten Inventions' and 'Beachcomber' – add to this range. The drawings were simple, in a way rather innocent but also tough, funny and surprising. The first featured Victorian Pasty Mallets (yeh, I know, look it up), a giant dog-killing pasty and two Victorian heroes. The second gave us the gentle excitement of finding things washed up on the seashore and then presented the beachcombers with a multitude of future finds after an event that defines the phrase 'reaching the end of the pier'. Distinctive and precious work.
Naomi Smyth's film was the longest of the night and is part of a work in progress which documents one of the most exciting cultural movements of the last year or so in Bristol, the Invisible Circus' colonisation of derelict sites to create art and entertainment. 'Road to Nowhere' documented the squatting, in September of last year, of the Audi garage in Cheltenham Road (so we begin and we end the evening in the same patch of Bristol). Any documenting of extraordinary events runs the risk of reducing an outrageously entertaining evening into a succession of clips included for a sense of fairness. 'Road to Nowhere' avoided this. The editing was excellent, overlapping sound and image, and moving us forward through the evening and into the fantastic world of burlesque and performance that the Circus created in the building.
It was a fitting end to the night's screenings, restoring life into a building that could so easily have fallen as Westmoreland House, featured in the first film, was allowed to fall.
A highly enjoyable evening and lots of great films.
Thank you all!
See you in April!
* 15 Sep 2007
bluescreen festival musings..
Trying to keep a record of words about bluescreen in wwwland, feel free to add.......
our European excursion Feb 2007 here (under Fri 2 Feb listings!): http://www.myspace.com/rejectfilmfestival
Mentioned in dispatches here: http://groovymovie.psand.org/solarcinema_films.htm
Profile of bluescreens slot at Big Chill 2006: http://www.bigchill.net/story/1691/bluescreenartistprofile.html?q=Bluescreen
* 5 May 2007
Februarys bluescreen
BLUESCREEN 28.02.07
February's Bluescreen had fewer people but more films, and shorter films than usual. Funny how that works. Sometimes, at 7.30, you think there will be no-one coming and then by 8pm the place is rammed. You never know what's going to be on screen. That's the charm and the excitement. Could be a first-time film-maker with 30 seconds, or a BBC-funded short with high production values. Could have taken an afternoon to make, could havetaken 3 months.
The film-makers sign their films in and drop them in the box. Sometimes, they'll chat to Chris about where it is on the disc, which films to screen or not to screen.
Part of the MySpace changes to Bluescreen is the desire to record the nights, the films screened and the film-makers' details.
We screen so much and people often want to know who did what and how to contact them.
The night kicked off with the return of South Section. Muscat is a busy man. He makes his music and his makes the vids that go with his music - a beats and pictures machine from Knowle, he spills them out by the bucketload, hip-hop and drum and bass. Always lots going on, massive swathes of overlayed psychedelic images, repeated images - skateboards, turntables, plenty of colour - and the biggest fucking snake I've ever seen (a boa constrictor called Benny). Graffiti in motion. 'Dirty Sniper' filled the screen with fast-moving images, 'Sheperd's Delight' brought in drum overlays in image as the drums kicked on the track.
'Bassjump' was an extraordinary mixture of video game humanoids and Bristol landmarks - always wondered what it would be like to jump off Cabot Tower (only kidding). It's the fact that Muscat is both musician and film-maker that makes the videos work so well. He knows what he's doing with the rhythm of the cuts.
James Skates' 'Fireworks and Friends' mixed Nov 5th sky action with a rotated TV screen, playing with the rhythm of a Phoebe scene, jumping the picture and sound back and forth. Mesmerising after a while, almost purely rhythmic.
Another James, James Atkins, showed his film 'Nothing New' which reverse stop-framed the deconstruction of his art show. Entertaining and charming, it ended up constructing a space which you want to live in, filling it with people.
David Bain showed two films. The first was 'Old Man'. David talked about the colour as the aspect that interested him but the audience seemed to betaken more with the narrative that unfolded as an old man, seated patiently at a historic site and somewhat distracted by the blonde that sat next to him, tried his best to work the audio guide phone. It turned into a sympathetic portrait of isolated individuals and done with gentle humour. David's second film, 'Friends' - what is it with friendship tonight? - featured coloured circles emerging onto a white background, pulsing in and out, like ink soaking onto muslin. And that's what I thought was happening. But the technique was different. David was, in
fact, filming tiny dots on white paper and it was the autofocus on the camera that was trying to focus in but couldn't. It resulted in pulsating colour.
Tom Dunn's film, 'A Season into a Day into 5 mins and 11 secs' took a classic pastoral image - English park, huge oak trees - but prevented us from getting into any sort of relationship with it by interrupting the image, distorting the picture through speed and shudder and all accompanied by a voice-over that pressed forward the unrelenting damage and disrespect that we show to the environment around us. There was no joy in this particular landscape. Powerful stuff.
Nagea Rose's two films were very different from each other. 'Start, Stop and Start Again' featured protective-clothing clad figures skipping on the wooden floor of what looked like a brightly lit church hall. The movement and rhythm became engaging and you were hit with a feeling of disappointment when, in a low shot of the skipper's feet, the skipping rope was seen to snag and the pattern collapse. 'Grandpa Got Run Over by a Reindeer' (and how can you resist a title like that) got the biggest laughs of the evening and it was a film that could so easily have been taken as a negative portrait of a woman's obsession with musical soft toys if it wasn't for the obvious fascination of the film-maker with what she was filming. An old lady shows Nagea her collection battery-operated
soft-toy chanteuses, belting out everything from Christmas tunes to the Birdy song, and as the cacophony begins you become fascinated with the bizarre self-centred exhibitionism of these 'entertainers' trapped in their own little turn. Nagea describes the film as 'a sinister, but light-hearted way of looking at the private life of an old lady.' Very true.
I found Vivi Stamatos' film 'Ice Cube Puppet' visually fascinating and in places rather moving. The idea was striking. Scenes - people and places - were trapped within ice that was the focus of a distracted, restless woman on a beach. The images were strong and there was a playfulness that kept the attention and moved the piece along.
Pete Thomas showed 4 pieces, two of which had been made in collaboration with Tom Begley. These were two commercials - one for Guiness and one for Budweiser, both playing on the 'mislead, then reveal' technique of advertising. 'Outlaw' was a simple chase and dispatch film - a man with a stetson and injured leg limps with a crutch after another man running desperately away, eventually shooting him. The long-grass covered hillside landscape gave the film its strangeness. 'Go! Bristol' was totally different in style. Pete had found several images of Bishopston
roads from the first decade of the century and took those still images as starting points as they dissolved into speeded-up moving images of the streets today. What was most noticeable was the extraordinary claustrophobia as the street became jammed with parked cars and traffic disruption.
The second half was filled with a selection of some of the best films shown at Bluescreen over the past year and which Bluescreen took to the Rotterdam Film Festival, the alternative version of the Festival that is. They are amongst the best films - no, in fact THE best films from Bristol residents over the last year. Which ones? That's for another time.
PS - a shout out for the Flannel - Dave's film night that they created in Falmouth. Welcome to Bristol!
* 5 May 2007
For Starters..
Welcome to the bluescreen blog!
Been a long time coming..
2007 -
January bluescreen went well, lots of people in and some good films, will be posting some films in near future.
February saw bluescreen go to Rotterdam for the international film festival, where we screened over 3 hours worth of films screened at bluescreen. A big thank to R Eject Film Festival for inviting us over and looking after us so well! Hope you make it to The Cube sometime soon.
On to Februarys bluescreen at the Cube, we hope to post a list of the films on the night here, so that people can discuss, and will be good for filmmakers to get feedback too.
Ok thats all for now . See ya all on Wed!
BLUESCREEN 26/01/11 - Films SCREENED
2 films from 2006 - Rescored by the Cube Orchestra....Then..Crumpled up Guy - Su Eliot
Mano a Mano - Simon Downham-Knight
Fir Rouge - Vivi Stamatatos
Feast of Fools - Vivi Stamatatos
Kundama - Street Song - Adam Richards (The Treatment Worx)
Nothing of Value - Janet Brandon
Sesame Street Meet My Feet - Javied Idress
Plus from 2006..
Culture Clash - Sid Sharma
Get Good - Francois
Weston Super Mare - Dan Blore
Night on the Tiles - Nimph Productions
Thanks to everyone who came along and for the films! We managed to screen them all, despite the tech/disc problems! Thanks for bearing with us!
We're back 30th March, hope to get VHS player working and screen some old VHS Bluescreen films!
* 4 Jan 2011
Bristolian Filmmakers who screened @ Bluescreen in 2010:
Matt Walker. Naren Wilks. Alexis Jochman. Michael Pacie. Never Future. Scott Buchanan Barden. Matia Cartledge. Matt Lindsay. Calling The Shots. Jon Nobbs. Alan Mandel. Dan Buzzo. John Cockwell. James Sampson. Pete Steadman. Michael Page. Southsection. Steve P. 2nd Light Bristol. Narraser. Rene. Omar. Rob. Omari. Rene. CTS. Sofia Kouzaris. Maia Willians. Thomas Johnson. Jack Wormell. Gareth Evans. Andy Sowerby. Albert Thomas. Andrew Williams. Adam Butcher. Ben Edwards. Keith Kopp. Alistair Stray. Candice Pepperall. Hirofumi Nakamoto. Oliver Snow. Alasdair Ogilvie. Simon Winkler. Thomas Johnson. Ralph Colmar. Nicholas Keogh. Jessica Voremberg. Maria Lee. Rob & Olly. Jesse Meadows . Sam Roberts. Simon Downham-Knight. Dani Antelo. James Reed. Andrew Hickinbotham. Adam Richards. Nick Black. Kristen Griffin.
NB. Some filmmakers screened more than one film and in some cases more than 3 or 4!
* 4 Jan 2011
Films screened @ Bluescreen in 2010:
Little Face. Collide-O-Scope. Tube. Off White Box. The Blackest Lungs Club. Cardboard Orchestra. Sweet Sixteen. Gunpoint. Hear Say. Terminator Salvation. Sunshine. Koyaanisquati. Stokes Croft Fashion Show. Old Up. Television Its Daylight Robbery. My Favourite Season. F.Y.H Butthorn. Worldwide. Dukes. Bluescreen Advert. Heartsafe. First Responders. Is the BBC 4 Me. Eye C (2). Doin Nuffin. New Shit. Three. Omar & Seleem. Changes. Eye (C) 1. United Colours of Bristol. Music Matters. A Day in the life of a Tribute Band. Hypnotherapy. Meles Meles,deux ex Machina. Salspira. Quiet. Flowers. Looking Sound. Bristol Past & Present. Wanted Dead (The Ivory Trade). Man in the Giant Sentry. Tesco Demo 2010. Just Take up your Tools. Soda. Outward Displays of Inward Neglect. A Man, his Wife and a Piano. Cloud Land. Shaking Heads. Fly Away. Lumps. Witless. 6 Tap Paintings. Think Twice. Best Man. Ear Trumpet. A Film about Blue Bottles. Not titled. One Thing after Another. Boys Toys Part 1. Pedaling Poetry. Copenhagen: A City rewritten.Freedom .com.Mano a Mano.The Little Bee. Bristol Central F.C. St Pauls Carnival Memories. I chose this Road (Ian Perry music video). The Wurzels 'Ruby'. The Distance Between. Flash Harry. My Life. Everbody wants to be a Boss. Nowhere to Run. El Griffini: Portrait of the Genius
* 4 Jan 2011
Bristolian Filmmakers who screened @ Bluescreen in 2009
Andy Sowerby, Anonomous, Ben Dowden, Bex Wade, Brian Jackson, Chris Barnett, Dan Buzzo, David Lander, Gareth Evans, Gavin Maitland (x 2)/Tom Robinson, Gordon Emanuel, Hywel George, Jack & Andy, James Don, Joe Spray, Juan Herrera, Lex Johnson, Marcus Crouch, Marcus Valentine, Nanna L Hansen, Obard, Ollie David, Philip Head (x 3), Ralph Colmar, Sandro Granda, Sean Griffiths, Stathis Tsemberlidis, Strathmore Shaghandles, Tom Bennett, Tom Mansfield. Mark Watson. Sebastian Rabas. The Riandos. Silvia Michielon. Tom Day. Glenn Dince. Juan Herrera. Jack Losh. Phil Day. Ali Cacks. Helen Denave. Mike Paige. Asylum Film. Spentmoney AKA Adam Richardson. Colmar. Dan Gitsham. Gareth Evans. Ezra Byrne. Gavin Maitland. Sam Woodcock. Jon Rowe. Simon Bright. Ben Edwards. Janet Brandon. Tom the Flow. Tom Mansfield. Ben Wilding. Maisie Evans. Jessie Tate. Keith Kopp. Olie Kay. James Sampson. Naren Wilks. Sandro Granda.
* 4 Jan 2011
Films screened @ Bluescreen in 2009
A Portrait of My Grandmother,Atem, Average Journey, Beauty from Ashes, Composition 1, Consequences, Deconstruction, Dub FX - Flow/Dub FX – Step, Feedback Portrait 040209, Felixs Machine, Grand Day Out, How it ends, If you could see far enough you could see the back of your Head, Julia, Kyoto Forest & Rund Gang, No Pox, No Sunday of Rest for the Wicked, Nuevas Esperanza & Buchedd a Horas, On a Monday, Pipes & Tubes, Silver Mountain, Street Performers of Lima, The Brian Jackson Show, The Bristol Sound, The Forgotten Half Mile, The Immortal Hour, The Pink Planet, The Year of Spagetti, Transmission, Tulips, Werewogan Showreel, Whats Bristol got to do with Gaza?, Worst Case scenario. 3 short Films. A Walk in Bristol. Out but not down. Blanc n’Fideo. 94 Pre-cut Thoughts. Dead Journey. Gavin McRichards. The Other Side. Dubbed out in Bristol. Day's Devon mini tour. J'aime Bristol. The making of J'aime Bristol. Glass Alley. The Restriction Trap. 2 hip hop videos. The Bristol Zebra. Composition 2. Spring Time: Behind the scenes. The animals reject their names & things return to their origins. Onomatopeia. Then, Voyager. Who is Robert Mugabe? .Merlinism . Four Corners .Sleep . Stars. Filthy Pleasures. Get up. 16. I Never Knew. Turning Tables. Borderline . Jalopy Peppers. The Troubled Lands. War Games. Clocking Out. Bridge Study. NY Shorts. Life after Tsunami (Intro). Le Box.
* 4 Jan 2011
Films screened @ bluescreen in 2008:
Wobbles. Shepards Delight. A Bosnian Mosaic. ....Madagascar.... & WJ Arnold. Solo en ut Maj'eur Pour Triches Industries. Encore une Histoire de Penes Noele. Isolation.White & Gold. Melody 120. Not Cut Out for Crime. Remembering Where We Have Been. Woo. Brother. Four in Ten. Earthen. To Build a Home. Mr Bones. Demo 2. Sweded Films (x 7). Demo 2. Bottle. Explode 3. A Tale of 2 Galaxies. G.R.O.F.U.N. Curiouser & Curiouser. ....France..... A ....London.... Tale. CP- West. Strensham. Doug Tabbard: Human Curler. Womens Voices. ....Bristol.... Girls. Red Eyed Piper. Deja Vu. Jazz Lesson. Dance Film 3. Un Minti di Cafe. Always Watching. Shambala. Mountains of Snowdonia. Hidden Bloom. Road to Somewhere (May edit). I Hate Caravans. Black to White. The Thin White Line. We are all Winners: Balloons. We are all Winners: Rings. Onomatopoeia. I dont wanna Fall in Love with You. So Much Fun. The ....Bristol.... Zebra. Pistol to me. Children of the Revolution. The Perfect Date. Cusp. Burnt. Cinders. Baby, Mummy, Daddy & Dog. Trench Rats. Did we or Did we not. Composition for Green, Blue & Pink. Multi-Storey. Light & Sound. Bird & Witch. Zombies. Africanized Bees. Hulk of Smaller Proportions. Habitat. The Mound. Space Invasion. Hand Story. Alice. 4 Short Films. Instrumental. Elements: Water (1 of 3). The 92nd Job. Ludwiglight. Quest.
* 25 Nov 2010
Bluescreen FIlms screened in November
Hello Hello!!
Here are the films we screened last night at Bluescreen (24/11/10):
The Cube Orchestra were back and started us off.. then we showed:
James Reed - The Wurzels 'Ruby'
Andrew Hickinbotham - The Distance Between
Adam Richards - Flash Harry
Adam Richards - My Life
Adam Richards - Everbody wants to be a Boss
Nick Black - Nowhere to Run
Kristen Griffin - El Griffini: Portrait of the Genius
Then from the depths of the Bluescreen archives we screened....
James Sampson - Old Up
Jack Wormell - Quiet
Dan Gitson - The Sack
Thanks to all who came along last night and for your films too! A very musically themed evening, with a bit of drama and horror thrown in at the end!
Thanks everyone who has shown a film at Bluescreen in 2010.
We are back January 26th 2011. It will be the 10th year of Bluescreen in 2011, so make sure you come down and celebrate with us! See you next year!
* 17 Nov 2010
Next Bluescreen Nov 24th
BLUESCREEN IN NOVEMBER....
The Cube Cinema, Bristol
Wed 24th /8pm/�3/2 (Filmmakers in for Free, but only one per film)
It's the last Bluescreen of the year, so make sure you come down tonight for your last fix of short film screenings for 2010!
Not been to Bluescreen before?
All you need to do is BRING your films down on the night on DVDs, Mini DVs etc, films should be 20mins or under.
We welcome all Film genres, be they Dramas, Docs, Animations, Music Promos, Experimental, Skate vids... you get the idea.
And the best part is you get to see YOUR films on the Cubes Big Blue Screen, Films on the Cinema screen, as it should be!
Not got a film? Come along anyway and get inspired!
Plus the Cube Orchestra and their rescores and Bluescreen Hi-Fi DJ's in the bar all night.
Bluescreen -Screening films since 2001 and Bristols longest running independent OPEN screen Film event. Come down and find out why...
FFI: [email protected]
* 27 Oct 2010
Films screened at Oct 27ths Bluescreen
Sorry for late post but heres a list of the films screened at the last Bluescreen 27th Oct:
Sam Roberts - Freedom .com
Simon Downham-Knight - Mano a Mano
Scott Barden - The Little Bee
Dani Antelo - Bristol Central F.C.
Dani Antelo - St Pauls Carnival Memories
Sam Roberts - I chose this Road (Ian Perry music video)
Thanks for all who came down and thanks for the films.
Next Bluescreen Nov 24th.
* 29 Sep 2010
FILMS screened at BLUESCREEN-BIKESCREEN 29/09/10
Jessica Voremberg - Not titled
Maria Lee - One Thing after Another
Rob & Olly - Boys Toys Part 1
Ralph Colmar - Pedaling Poetry
Jesse Meadows - Copenhagen: A City rewritten
Plus
Some youtube clips of the Bristol Cycle Festival. Check them out here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SKyNCXCKaM>
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4i2OtfWIk4I>
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FcIUn1KkiU4>
http://vimeo.com/15121089>
And a live performance from Les Velobicis:
http://lesvelobici.blogspot.com/>
And the prize of the Mini-Bike for best film of the evening went to Jesse Meadows!
Congratulations to Jesse!
Thanks to all who came down, helped out or took part in Bluescreen-Bikescreen. And also thanks goes out to the Cycle Festival. Hope it returns next year.
* 30 Sep 2010
Summer Festival Screenings
So we manged to screen the following films:
Filthy Pleasures/Get up (Pinch) - Tom Mansfield
Collide-O-Scope - Naren Wilks
Little Face - Matt Walker
Terminator Salvation - Jon Nobbs & Alan Mandel
Merlinism - Ben Edwards
Old Up - James Sampson
Bristol Fog (Upperkutt) - Spentmoney
Off White Box - Michael Page
Stars - Tom the Flow
Dukes - Southsection
At the following 4 Festivals in 2010:
June -
Glastonbury
August -
Supernormal
Redfest
St Werburghs Art Trail
Thanks for the films we screened, they went down really well. Had really good feedback from all the Cinemas we screened at, wanting to know about the films and filmmakers and bluescreen. Thanks again. And see you at a festival in 2011!
* 7 Jul 2010
Bluescreen 07/07/10
Films screened July 7th at Bluescreen:
Alasdair Ogilvie - Lumps.
Simon Winkler – Witless.
Thomas Johnson - 6 Tap Paintings.
SouthSection - Think Twice .
James Sampson - Best Man.
Ralph Colmar - Ear Trumpet.
Nicholas Keogh - A Film about Blue Bottles.
PLUS Bluescreen 2010 compilation:
Filthy Pleasures/Get up (Pinch) - Tom Mansfield.
Collide-O-Scope - Naren Wilks.
Little Face - Matt Walker.
Terminator Salvation - Jon Nobbs & Alan Mandel.
Merlinism - Ben Edwards.
Old Up - James Sampson.
Bristol Fog (Upperkutt) - Spentmoney.
Off White Box - Michael Page.
Stars - Tom the Flow.
Dukes - Southsection.
Thanks for coming down, a great selection of films and a good way to finish before we take a summer break.
* 9 Jul 2010
Bluescreen 2010 Compilation 1
Filthy Pleasures/Get up (Pinch) - Tom Mansfield
Collide-O-Scope - Naren Wilks
Little Face - Matt Walker
Terminator Salvation - Jon Nobbs & Alan Mandel
Merlinism - Ben Edwards
Old Up - James Sampson
Bristol Fog (Upperkutt) - Spentmoney
Off White Box - Michael Page
Stars - Tom the Flow
Dukes - Southsection
* 26 May 2010
Films screened 26/05 at Bluescreen...
17 (!) Films screened at BLUESCREEN 26/05/10
Maia Willians - Hypnotherapy
Thomas Johnson - Meles Meles, deux ex Machina
Timmy Booth - Salspira
Jack Wormell - Quiet
Gareth Evans - Flowers
Andy Sowerby - Looking Sound
Albert Thomas/Andrew Williams - Bristol Past & Present
Andrew Williams - Wanted Dead (The Ivory Trade)
Adam Butcher - Man in the Giant Sentry
Ben Edwards - Tesco Demo 2010
Ben Edwards - Just Take up your Tools
Keith Kopp - Soda
Alistair Stray - Outward Displays of Inward Neglect
Candice Pepperall - A Man, his Wife and a Piano
Hirofumi Nakamoto - Cloud Land
Maki Hitomi - Shaking Heads
Oliver Snow - Fly Away
A really busy evening and lots of really good films! Thanks to all who came down and made it one of the busiest Bluescreens of the year... so far! See you on July 7th for our next open screening. Also look out for our summer festivals screenings, tbc soon.
* 28 Apr 2010
Aprils Bluescreen: Bluescreen Presents.. 2nd Light Bristol
Films screened 28/04 at Bluescreen Presents: 2nd Light Bristol event:
2nd Light Bristol - Heartsafe
2nd Light Bristol - First Responders
Narraser - Is the BBC 4 Me
Rene - Eye C (2)
? - Doin Nuffin
? - New Shit
Omar - Three
Rob - Omar & Seleem
Omari - Changes
Rene - Eye (C) 1
CTS - United Colours of Bristol
CTS - Music Matters
Sofia Kouzaris - A Day in the life of a Tribute Band
* 31 Mar 2010
Films screened at BLUESCREEN 31/03/10
Films screened at BLUESCREEN 31/03/10
Cube Orchestra first up with x 2 rescores, then...
James Sampson - Old Up
Pete Steadman - Television Its Daylight Robbery
Albert - My Favourite Season
Michael Page - F.Y.H Butthorn
Southsection - Worldwide
Southsection - Dukes
A re-screening of Matt Walkers - Little Face
Steve P - Bluescreen advert
A quietish night but a good selection of films. Thanks to all who came down.
* 24 Feb 2010
Bluescreen Sweded 24/02/10
Films screened at Bluescreen - Sweded 24th Feb
Jon Nobbs - Terminator Salvation
Alan Mandel - Sunshine
Dan Buzzo - Koyaanisquati
John Cockwell - Stokes Croft Fashion Show
Plus a selection of non sweded films from the archive.
Disappointing that we didnt get more films, maybe try this again later in the year.....
Anyway normal service is resumed at the next Bluescreen 31/03/10. See you there!
* 27 Jan 2010
Films screened 27th Jan @ Bluescreen
Cube Orchestra first up rescoring x 2 films, then
Matt Walker - Little Face
Naren Wilks - Collide-O-Scope
Alexis Jochman - Tube
Michael Pacie - Off White Box
The Blackest Lungs Club - Never Future
Scott Buchanan Barden - Cardboard Orchestra
Matia Cartledge - Sweet Sixteen
Matt Lindsay - Gunpoint
Calling The Shots - Hear Say
A very busy evening and a really good diverse selection of films. Thanks to all who brought films down and all who came along.
Sorry for late posting of films. see you again on the 24th with your sweded films!
* 6 Feb 2010
Rotterdam Film Fest 2010/Kino Climates
Just back from the 2010 Rotterdam International Film Festival. A great week, despite the weather! Saw so many films, features, shorts, experimental, foreign language...
Top 2 feature lenth ones were 'Reykjavik - Rotterdam' (An amusing Icelandic gangster flick) and 'Do it again' (One persons mission to reform The Kinks, at any cost! A very funny homage).
Also some great screenings, performance art and some very interesting visual things done with 16mm film (!) at Kino Climates...
This was the main reason i was at the festival, the 4 day Kino Climates part of the festival.
Originally we (Bluescreen) had intended to screen some films there, but were too over subscribed with submissions. In the end i went as part of a delegation from The Cube Cinema, all of us staying at the very nice and many bunk bedded ROOM hostel!
Kino Climates was a summit meeting of 70 representatives of 30-40 Europe wide (and beyond) small cinemas, art houses and labs - exchanging ideas, plans, collaborations, discussions, workshops and evening screenings from all the cinemas involved.
An truly inspiring and exciting few days and just maybe the start of something bigger on the horizon, a network of europe wide small cinemas to kick back against the big multi screened and multi national cinemas!
* 19 Dec 2009
Novembers Bluescreen
Bluescreen 25th Nov - Films we screened....
Cube Orchestra re-scored x 2 shorts
Then
Keith Kopp - The Troubled Lands
Olie Kay - War Games
James Sampson - Clocking Out
Naren Wilks - Bridge Study
Naren Wilks - NY Shorts
Sandro Granda - Life after Tsunami (Intro)
Sandro Granda - Le Box
Sandro Granda - ? (Sorry forgot to write this one down!)
Plus some shorts from the archives...
Culture Clash
Mandog
Grandpa Got Run Over by a Reindeer
Doug Tabard: Human Curler
A really good and busy night, and again a great selection of films. Thank you all who came down.
We're back in January, Februarys Bluescreen will be a sweded event, details to follow soon!! Thanks for for all the films you screened at Bluescreen in 2009, see you in 2010!
* 27 Nov 2009
Octobers Bluescreen
Films screened at Octobers Bluescreen:
A reduced Cube Orchestra rescoring an old b/w film in 8mins!
Then......
Ben Wilding - 16
Chris B - I Never Knew
Maisie Evans - Turning Tables
Jessie Tate – Borderline
Jesse Tate - Jalopy Peppers
Then from the Bluescreen archive we screened 3 films, whose link was that each director was called Tom! Followed by a scary docu to finish with!....
So a very quiet Bluescreen, but a good selection of films nonetheless! Thank you.
* 30 Oct 2009
Septembers Bluescreen
What we screened..
Cube Orchestra first up, then:
Jon Rowe - Then, Voyager
Simon Bright - Who is Robert Mugabe?
Ben Edwards - Merlinism
Janet Brandon - Four Corners
Chris Barnett - Sleep
Tom the Flow - Stars
Tom Mansfield - Filthy Pleasures
Tom Mansfield - Get up
A busy and packed Bluescreen, our first one back after the summer. Thank you to all the filmmakers, orchestra and of course the audience.
* 18 Oct 2009
Bluescreen been on the radio!
Bluescreen were on BCfm 93.2fm on the 6th Oct @ 6.30pm, talking up Bluescreen! Thanks go to Tom, for inviting us on his show - Live and local.
* 7 Sep 2009
Bluescreen @ Shambala Festival 2009
Shambala, without doubt is one of our favourite festivals. We had a ball!
This year we were part of a group of people behing the Minds Eye Cinema Tent, ie. The Cube Cinema plus friends. Bigger than last years tent and amazingly decorated, with a lovely chandelier and straw bales as seating! Well done to all the decor crew!
But in typical Bluescreen fashion, all didnt go to plan! We 'lost' 1 of the 2 DVD packs of Bluescreen films we brought along! The one that was lost had all the recent Bluescreen films! Bugger! So we had to screen 2007/8 compilations. And the missing DVDs? Well they turned up the next day in the van!
The rest of the weekend went off really well, with the Cinema tent packed out every night.
Thanks to all who worked and to the people at Shambala for inviting us back again.
* 24 Jul 2009
Bluescreen vs Shambala Party 24/07/09
BLUESCREEN vs SHAMBALA Party - 24/07/09
25/07/09 Update:
....................
And the 2 winning filmmakers, who got to make this years official Shambala Festival film, were.......
Ralph Colmar and Ezra Byrne! Congratulations to you both!....
Heres a list of the films we screened:....
Ralph Colmar - The ....Bristol.... Zebra....
Dan Gitsham - The Sack....
Gareth Evans - Composition 2....
Ezra Byrne - Springtime - Behind The scenes....
Gavin Maitland - The Animals reject their names & things return to their origins....
Sam Woodcock - Onopatopeia....
Thanks to all of the above filmmakers for submitting their films. Also thanks go to Matilda, who turned up and asked to play a few songs, which she did wonderfully well. And special thanks to the band Miss Cecily, for stepping in at last minute, and playing a cracking set. And lastly thanks to Shambala for providing tickets for the winning filmmakers. ....
---------------------------------------------------
22/07/09
Band confirmed playing is Miss Cecily. See you there!
------------------------------------------------
In conjunction with The Shambala Festival, we're having a party at The Cube Cinema! And those lovely people at Shambala are giving us the opportunity to give 2 lucky filmmakers, whose films wins the audience vote on the night, the chance to make a film at this years festival! ....
Heres the lowdown:....
------------------------------....
Bluescreen vs Shambala....
The Cube Cinema, ....Bristol........
Friday 24th July 2009....
8.00pm £4/£3
Party on with Bluescreen and Shambala in a magical mystery tour of film and music to celebrate the coming of the Shambala Festival 2009 (27th-30th Aug). ....
It all starts with Bluescreen...
Bristol's longest running open screen short film night, in collaboration with Shambala Festival, is offering 2 local (ie Bristol ish) filmmakers (and crew) a chance to win free tickets to make a film at this years Shambala! ....
After the films we'll be warming up for the festival season with D.J. sets from both Bluescreen and Shambala's finest, and a live act specially chosen by Shambala.....
FILMMAKERS:....
Bring along a short film, usual format. No longer than 20 minutes, what ever you want to show on the Cube's big screen. After the screenings the audience will vote for the two winning films. The 2 winners will receive: 4 free festival crew passes each, plus tapes and access all areas at the festival, as well as a chance to make the official Shambala film for the year to be screened at the Shambala Awards Ceremony later in the year!....
Films on first, DJs in the bar all night and the band on after the film screenings.....
Come early for film submission (filmmakers free as usual). Get involved!....
www.shambalafestival.org....
www.myspace.com/cubebluescreen....
**PLEASE NOTE: FILMMAKERS WHO SUBMIT FILMS ON THE 24TH JULY, MUST BE THERE IN PERSON ON THE NIGHT, BE AVAILABLE TO FILM BETWEEN 27-30TH AUGUST AND ALSO ABLE TO GET TO THE FESTIVAL UNDER THERE OWN STEAM. **
* 11 Jul 2009
Bluescreen 17/06/09
A very busy Bluescreen last night, loads of films, loads of people. A very big thanks to the filmmakers and to all who came. Heres what we screened i think!
Cube Orchestra rescoring one of their own films
Silvia Michielon - 94 Pre-cut Thoughts
Tom Day/Glenn Dince - Dead Journey
Tom Day/Glenn Dince - Gavin McRichards
Juan Herrera - The Other Side
Jack Losh - Dubbed out in Bristol
Phil Day - Day's Devon mini tour
Ali Cacks - J'aime Bristol
Helen Denave - The making of J'aime Bristol
Mike Paige - Glass Alley
Asylum Week Film - The Restriction Trap
Spentmoney AKA Adam Richardson - x 2 hip hop videos....
Apologies to Silvia Michielon (The Game they played)and Straun Farquhar (Living Wild), which we tried to screen but had a few tech problems with. Bring along again in Sept, and we'll give it another go.
Ok, our regular Bluescreen night returns in September BUT...
July 24th we are doing something special with Shambala Festival, see below for details. Have a great summer of filmmaking and thanks again for all the films last night.
* 22 Jun 2009
Films for screening at Glastonbury Festival 2009 @ The Groovy Movie Picture House
Films:
Gordon Emanuel - Atem
Tom Mansfield - Felix machines
Ben Dowden - Dub FX1 - Flow/Step/Dance Film 3
Tajinder Dhami - Alpha, Diagnostic, Hospitalised
Hywel George - The life and life of Horace/ Nuevos Esperandos
Andy Sowerby - Tulips
Dylan Radclyffe - Doug Tabbard, Human Curler
Mohammed Ali - Average Journey
SouthSection - Wobbles/Shepherds Delight
Anon - Whats Bristol Got to do with Gaza?
Oliver Purchase - Not cut out for crime
Dan Buzzo - Remembering Where We Have Been
(Total = 90mins)
* 30 May 2009
BLUESCREEN 27/05/09
Films screened at BLUESCREEN 27/05/09
Cube Orchestra rescored x 3 bluescreen films
Mark Watson – 3 short Films & A Walk in Bristol
Sebastian Rabas – Out but not down
The Riandos – Blanc n’Fideo
(Collective – Bristol Je t’aime – Not shown, problem with disc)
* 30 May 2009
BLUESCREEN 29/04/09
Films screened at BLUESCREEN 29/04/09
Dan Buzzo - If you could see far enough you could see the back of your head
Tom Bennett - How it ends
Philip Head - The Pink Planet
Ben Dowden - Dub FX - Flow/Dub FX - Step
Jack & Andy - Werewogan Showreel
Andy Sowerby - Tulips
Gareth Evans - Composition 1
* 13 Apr 2009
BLUESCREEN 25/03/09
Films screened:
Starting with The Cube Orchestra rescoring x 3 films from 2006/7, then..
Brian Jackson - The Brian Jackson Show
Strathmore Shaghandles - Consequences
Joe Spray - The Year of Spagetti
Philip Head - No Sunday of Rest for the Wicked
Tom Mansfield - Felixs Machine
Chris Barnett - Average Journey
Ralph Colmar - The Immortal Hour
Marcus Valentine - Grand Day Out
Gavin Maitland/Tom Robinson - Transmission
Great selection of films tonight! And a Bluescreen first - we screened our first ever Animated Opera! Bit of high culture at bluescreen, cant be bad! And we also had a good showing from filmmakers from The Cube itself, making 3 of tonights 12 films.
A Big Thank You to everyone who screened their films, See you next month for more filmic treats!
Oh yeh, one more thing.. We will be screening films at Shambala Festival in august. If you would like to submit your film for screening, bring it along to a future bluescreen. we may have a competition/winner type thing, not yet decided. thanks.
* 15 Mar 2009
BLUESCREEN 25/02/09
Februarys BLUESCREEN 25/02/09 saw a collaboration with SCREENTEST,for a Student Special Bluescreen. Now in its 5th year, Screentest is the National Student Film Festival, taking place 6-8 March 2009, at Bristol Uni.(http://www.screentestfest.org.uk/).
Heres what we screened:
Gavin Maitland - No Pox
Ollie David - Feedback Portrait 040209
Juan Herrera - On a Monday
Phil Head - Pipes & Tubes
Bex Wade - The Forgotten Half Mile
James Don - The Bristol Sound
Lex Johnson - A Portrait of My Grandmother
Sean Griffiths - Beauty from Ashes
Followed by some shorts from Bristol Uni Film Society
.. until the video projector overheated (!), for the 2nd time on the night! At least we managed to screen all the films that were brought along!
And thanks again to all filmmakers who screened films tonite and to Screentest, good luck with the festival.
Right we're back next month, hopefully with a fully functioning video projector and a returning Cube orchestra!
* 28 Feb 2009
BLUESCREEN - WED JAN 28TH
Films screened:
Cube Orchestra rescored 2 bluescreen films from the archives, then...
Marcus Crouch - Julia
Gordon Emanuel - Atem
Anonomous - Whats Bristol got to do with Gaza?
Nanna L Hansen - Kyoto Forest & Rund Gang
Sandro Granda - Street Performers of Lima
Obard - Worst Case scenario
David Lander - Deconstruction
Stathis Tsemberlidis - Silver Mountain
Hywel George - Nuevas Esperanza & Buchedd a Horas
We screened around 100mins worth of films tonight and what a great selection of films they were! Thank you filmmakers, you made it a great night! We had a problem with a coupla films that wouldn't play, but thanks to the quick thinking filmmakers in question, they managed to nip home and get another copy which worked! Just another typical bluescreen night then!
Dont forget its a Student Special Bluescreen in February. Right we're off to Berlin. See you next month!
* 10 Jan 2009
Novembers Bluescreen
Novembers Bluescreen (26/11/08):
Kicked off with the Cube Orchestra, re-scoring some of Southsections work, then the following:
Jill Bird - 4 Short Films
Alisdair Cairns - Instrumental
Ronan Harvey - Elements: Water (1 of 3)
Ralph Colmar - The 92nd Job & Ludwiglight
Thomas Stellmach - Quest
Thanks for the above films and those that turned out on a cold evening!
Bluescreens back in January, so to all you bluescreeners thanks to ya'all for another great year at bluescreen.
* 31 Dec 2008
Bluescreen Filmmakers in 2008
..Bristol Filmmakers @ bluescreen in 2008:
Muscat. John Francis. Dan Arnold. Clementine Lemattre. Penny Russell. Shelley Davis. Michael Page. Oliver Purches. John Rees. Mark Watson. Tom Swindell. Kathryn Timmons. Marina Ellerington. Stuart Bennett. Duncan Speakman. Sylvia Rimat. Kathryn Jeff. Henry Rolls. Chris Essen. Maria Cuervo. Dan Buzzo. Rick Standing. Philip Davis. Nadia Hillman. Joseph Wallace. Jonathan Amstead. Andy Lucas. Dylan Radcliffe. Blair Mowat. Ben Dowden. Vivi. Small StoryTellers. Naomi Smyth. Ben Price. Reg Brunt. Holly Budge. Ellen Wilkinson. Ciara Mahon. Sam Woodcock. Kid Carpet. Wrongboy. Ralph Colmar. Roger & Ruth Whiter. Shanti Sherson. Lizz Hoskins. Paul Dudbridge. BJ. Philip Head. Holly McIntosh. Jack Wormell. Collective Work. Vicar Jockey. Taran Burns. I Buckley & S McKeown. Nate. Oliver David. Jill Bird. Alisdair Cairns. Ronan Harvey. Thomas Stellmach.
* 30 Nov 2008
Octobers bluescreen
Thanks go out to all the filmmakers who came down to bluescreen last week, and of course the non-filmmakers too! While it was a quiet one in terms of people, the quality of the films certainly made up for it. Hope you enjoyed it, we did! Thanks all!
So heres the films we screened:
The Cube Orchestra - Scoring, Burroughs cut-ups
Vicar Jockey - Zombies
Philip Head - Africanized Bees
Taran Burns - Hulk of Smaller Proportions
I Buckley & S McKeown - Habitat
Nate - The Mound/Space Invasion
Oliver David - Hand Story /Alice
And from the archives:
Doug Tabbard - Human Curler
Marina Ellerington - Mr Bones + another
Details for Spookboy, the music producer who was looking for filmmakers to collaborate with, you can contact him here: http://www.spookboy.co.uk/
Details of the One Foot Forward night (Nov 6) are on the Cube website: http://microplex.cubecinema.com/cubewebsite/. Or if you have any films for One Foot events next year, that you would like to have a live re-score, contact details here: www.onefoot.co.uk
And dont forget folks, Novembers bluescreen is the last of the year (back in January) so your last chance to screen your films here for a while. thanks and see you all next month!
* 1 Nov 2008
Films screened at bluescreen 24/09/08
Stuart Bennett - Cinders
BJ - Trench Rats
Philip Head - Did we or did we not
Holly McIntosh - Composition for Green, Blue & Pink
Jack Wormell - Multi-Storey
Collective Work - Light & Sound
Marina Ellerington - Bird & Witch
Stuart Bennett - Baby, Mummy, Daddy & Dog
Plus from the archives:
Southsection
Tom Swindell - Earthen
Apologies to Taran Burns for not screening Hulk of smaller proportions, bring along another copy next month and we will screen it first up. Cheers to everyone who brought a film along.
* 15 Aug 2008
Films screened at bluescreen 02/06/08
Cube Orchestra kicked off things, rescoring 2 films from the bluescreen archive.
Then..
Kid Carpet/Wrongboy - I dont want to fall in love..
Kid Carpet/Wrongboy - So Much Fun
Ralph Colmar - The Bristol Zebra
Roger & Ruth White - Pistol to Me
Liz Hoskins - Children of the Revolution
Paul Dudbridge - The Perfect Date
Michael Page - Cusp
Shanti Sherson - Burnt
Thanks to the 'Burnt' crew for the snacks! bluescreens taking a few months off. So see you at Shambala or back at the Cube in September. have a good summer!
* 4 Jul 2008
bluescreen films at BFMF 2008 14/06/08
Bluescreen hosted The Bristol Filmmakers Festival 2008 in June, along with Cineformation and The Misfit Collective and you can read a review of it here:
http://www.cineformation.com/2008/07/01/bristol-filmmakers-festival
Films screened:
Muscat - Mountains of Snowdonia
Muscat - Wobbles
Naomi Smyth - Road to Somewhere (May work in progress)
Ben Price - I hate Caravans
Reg Brunt - Black to White
Holly Budge - The Thin White Line
Ellen Wilkinsun - We are all Winners (Balloons)
Ciara Mahon - We are all Winners (Rings)
Sam Barker - Onomatopoeia
Dan Buzzo - Remembering who we have been
Sandro Granda - Ull al detail
Sandro Granda - Sonic Day
thanks to all who came to bluescreen and to the festival in general. hope you had a great time. we
will be doing something similar again next year. watch this space.
* 29 Jun 2008
bluescreen now has a facebook group, well technically we had one for a while but forgot to tell anyone!
* 21 Jun 2008
Bristol Filmmakers Festival 14/15th June 2008
The Bristol Filmmakers Festival 2008
On the weekend of 14/15th June, the Bristol Filmmakers Festival 2008 comes to the Watershed and the Arnolfini, an event which gathers together and celebrates the independent film community in the city.
Organised by three local film exhibition and network outfits:
Cineformation, Bluescreen and the Misfit Collective - BFMF2008 screens a variety of the independent film work created in the city, some well-funded, some barely funded and some that come in under a tenner.
The weekend will feature a host of special screenings and provide the chance for independent filmmakers to meet, swap ideas and knowledge.
Festival Programme Schedule
Saturday 14 June
Watershed:
1000-1115; 2008 Programme 1
1145-1300; 2008 Programme 2
1400-1500; Making It in Bristol
1530-1645; Making 90 Seconds of Gold – DepicT!
Arnolfini:
1700-1830; Misfit Collective Trade Fair
2000-2115; Bluescreen Special
2130-2300; 2008 Programme 3
2300-0030; BMFM Party
Sunday 15 June
Watershed:
1300-1430; Blueboard
Arnolfini:
1500-1615; Bristol Rewind - Sweded Classics
1645-1800; UWE/UB Film Showcase
1845-2000; 2008 Programme 4
2030-2200; History of Independent Film in Bristol & Awards
Email: [email protected]
http://www.bristolfilm.co.uk/
* 20 Jun 2008
Films screened at Mays Bluescreen
Main feature: The Small Storytellers - Shambala
then:
Ben Dowden - Jazz Lesson/Dance Film 3
Vivi - Un Minti di Cafe
Blair Mowat - Bristol Girls
Muscat - Red Eyed Piper/Deja Vu/Wobbles
Dan Buzzo - Always Watching
* 30 May 2008
Films screened at 30 Aprils bluescreen
Kicking off the evening, a thank you again to the Cube Orchestra
then...
Jonathan Amstead - A London Tale
Chris Barnett - Womens Voices
Rick Standing - Bottle/Explode 3
Nadia Hillman - G.R.O.F.U.N.
Dylan Radclyffe - Doug Tabbard: Human Curler
Joseph Wallace - Curiouser & curiouser
Philip Davis - A Tale of 2 Galaxies
(and apologies to Mike Page & Andy Lucas for not screening their films due to problems with our laptop, next time guys)
* 23 Apr 2008
Films screened at BLUESCREEN 27/02/2008
John Rees – Woo
Dan Arnold - Brother
Mark Watson - Four in Ten
Tom Swindell -Earthen
Kathryn Timmons - To build a home (plus 1 other)
Marina Ellerington - Mr Bones (plus 1 other)
Plus some from the bluescreen vaults inc:
Battle of Cable Street
& Best of bluescreen 2005
* 1 Mar 2008
Films screened 30/01/2008
Cube Orchestra rescore
&
Penny Russell - Isolation
Shelley Davis - White & Gold
Michael Page - Melody 120
Dan Arnold - Madagascar & WJ Arnold (re-edit)
Oliver Purches - Not cut out for crime
John Francis - A Bosnian Mosaic
Muscat - Wobbles/Shepards Delight
Clementine Lemaitre - Solo en ut maj'eur pour triches industrielles/
Encore une hostoire de pienes noele
Dan Buzzo - Remembering where we have been
* 9 Feb 2008
Bluescreen November, 2007
Bluescreen Blog – 28th November, 2007.
The Cube Orchestra kicked off the night playing beneath two films from, I think, the first ever Bluescreen compilation – 'Again and Again', a dance piece in an abandoned car, and 'Hob Blob', a mixture of Super 8 and animation. In fact, the Orchestra were in reality playing – as they announced at the start – to an imaginary screening of Hitchcock's 'North By Northwest', the percussionist reading out scenes from the script. So you spent an intriguing 20 minutes in several different places at once.
The first new film of the night was 'Green' from Greg Metcalfe, who nipped out from behind the bar at the Cube to watch the movies. Greg wove together a sequence of images from rural and urban landscapes to work with a piece of music from Message to Bears called, obviously, 'Green'. The images were carefully chosen. Stark urban architecture – whether street furniture or landmarks such as the London Eye – cutting dark shapes into grey skies and this was reflected further in the stripped Winter branches as the film moved into the countryside. However, the starkness was soon replaced by timid, and then powerful, fast flowing water, and green landscapes. Simple and effective, with great music.
'Homage à la Mer' was a stark, black and white pen-drawn animation from Daniela Trocker. Simply translated, it suggests a tribute to the sea, but Daniela's sea is a dangerous, challenging place where a swimmer is threatened by first a mermaid, then a giant squid and finally by an obstacle that can't be overcome. The style of animation delivered the underlying tone of hostility and that overwhelming sense of the sea's power.
'Mandogs' from Oliver Purches was a 'sexual politics comedy' in which the director also acted in the film as a dog being taken for a walk by its beautiful owner. Tied up next to another dog outside a newsagents', the two mutts chat about their owners until they are both given a rather nasty surprise. The script was witty, the performances funny but convincing and it used its comedy structure to gently satirise men's reflex understanding that they are always in control of a relationship. Quite a crazy idea that shouldn't have worked but did, with charm and a sense of joy.
Firstborn Creatives, one of Bristol's finest community media companies brought along several pieces of work. The first was called 'Graffiti' and commissioned by Bristol City Council to highlight both the negative as well as the positive aspects of street art. The film drew a clear distinction between the 'selfish' and 'uncreative' nature of tagging – with its anti-social and environmentally disruptive qualities – and the creative potential of graffiti art. The fact that it was commissioned by the Council's Healing the Green team meant that the focus was on the thin line between graffiti as art and graffiti as criminal damage and emphasised – through a couple of artists who were awaiting trial for exercising their talents in the wrong places – that in an urban environment one person's liberating creativity can represent another person's understanding of vandalism.
After the break, Bluescreen regular Muscat screened the first part of his 'Scarfel Pike' piece in which a group of Bristolians brave the elements in the Lake District Underpinned by Muscat's resolutely urban music, the film is interesting for its transposition of city folk into the wildness and bleakness of the countryside of the Lakes. Striding out across the low land, their journey is traced as they move higher and higher into the mist and onto the steep faces of the mountain. On the surface, it's the record of a trip out, but, as with the other section, by the end a sense of wonder at the scenery around slips into the filming. to make the journey up the mountain.
The second offering from Firstborn, 'Postcards from Zimbabwe', was in two parts. Both films – one documentary, one drama – emerged from a scheme that Firstborn director Rob Mitchell was involved in which linked British film-makers with Zimbabwean film-makers and overseen by the Zimbabwe Film Festival Trust. The drama, 'Oh Mama', was a simple, moving and uplifting piece about a young boy who is prevented from rescuing his street football team from ignoble defeat because he is dedicated to looking after his sick Mother. Cutting a deal with the other players, he helps win the game and the team comes to the aid of his mother. The second film, the documentary, followed a young man's exploration of the nature of dance in Zimbabwe and took as its premise the observation that dance is the story of the people. A vibrant, exciting piece of work which underlined how clearly a sense of place informs the identity of art.
Henrik Dahle presented his new work, 'Killing Snails', a DepicT entry that just missed the cut for this year's competition. The film follows the ruminations of an ordinary man with a conscience (played by the more than ordinary local sound recordist hero, Dave Brookfield) who crushes an innocent snail underfoot and sets to thinking how it is that 'we are killers, all of us'. In Henrik's wonderful and unique way, it was both profound and entertaining at the same time. Great idea, executed brilliantly.
'Madagascar and WJ Arnold' was a work in progress brought down to Bluescreen by Dan Arnold, a fascinating and at times moving piece of work which combined Super 8, MiniDV and Dan's own drawings. Part of the film was shot in Madagascar and there were interesting, almost Natural History Unit-style, details of nature as Dan picked up his impressions of a new environment with a deep curiosity. Intercutting the peace of nature with the disruptive buzz of city life, you kept wanting to return to the peace. The film then moved to an exploration of an interior with photographs and then line drawings of an older man, who is revealed as Dan's father, who we then learn died whilst Dan was away in Madagascar. Hopefully, Dan got some useful feedback and I'm looking forward to seeing what emerges in future cuts.
'Black as a Cat' was a short piece from Sam Powell that was filmed to be shown behind a musician playing at Ashton Court. It was a frenetic and zany cat-chase film where a cat-suit clad woman appears and reappears and scares a young man into fleeing through Bristol streets until he finds a way to defend himself. All under a great piece of music.
'Sheepy's Operation' was created by Sabine Lang and Jorda P Ros and featured Sylvia Zidek who screened 'The Transformable Pissing Trousers' at April's Bluescreen. Sylvia took on the identity of a surgeon who visits a house to perform a delicate operation on a soft-toy, Sheepy, whose neck was a little wobbly. The operation – in three parts – is performed with gentle seriousness and there is a definite charm in the way that this tone is retained throughout.
'Visuals Demo 2', from Henry Rolls, closed the night. It was a beautifully edited compilation of images from the summer, what Henry calls 'a little journey into the colourful depths of British wildlife'. The camera swirled around below branches and across the landscape, a fluid and engaging movement which kept a continuous flow and lifted the spirits. An extraordinary fact of its creation is that the whole film was shot on a cameraphone.
Henry's film confirmed that once again, an accidental theme ran through the work submitted during the evening: an exploration of urban landscapes and country detail. Time and again, Bluescreen will gather together a range of films that are linked in ways that you can never predict.
* 31 Dec 2007
Bluescreen Films in 2007
Films screened @ bluescreen in 2007:
Who the Hell is Edward Colston?. Dance, Dance. Me Daya. The Smuggler.Toulouse & the Crystal Ball. The Ghost Girl. The Messenger. Taking the Biscuit. Some Things. News Jamm. Fireworks and Friends. Outlaw. Go! Bristol.. Bud. Guiness. Dirty Sniper. Shepards Delight. Bassjump. Grandpa Got Run Over by a Reindeer. Start, Stop and Start Again. Ice Cube Puppet. Nothing New. A Season into a Day Into 5 mins 11secs. Old Man. Friends. Westmoreland House. Note. Conscripts. Disconnected. Wander. Mo in the Big Smoke. Weird Investigates (Work Porn). I Can' Go to Work, I'm Having an Emotional Breakthrough. Vitality.Tobago Tour 04. The Cloud Film / The Rat. Dismantling the Bubble. Forgotten Inventions: the Regency Pasty Mallet. Beachcombers. Road to Nowhere. Cacophony. Writing on the Wall. Ball. Outlaw. The Transformable Pissing Trousers. Strangers. Factory of Dreams. Mountains of Snowdonia. Strange Encounters. Mo Mingles. The Small Storyteller. The End.Berlin. You Really Came to Hate Me, Didn't You?. The Wall. Beach Burn. Prazdnota - Emptiness. Dead Cinema. 51ºN, 9ºE. Die Zeit. The Worms from Pluto. Paper Bag Lady - Episode 1: The Kite. Pigeon, Signs?, The End. Earthquakeland. The Birth. Dead Cinema. What makes You Feel Alive?. Glassmaster. Frangipani. Forlorn.Mali. Explode . This .Paradise. They Call Home. Billboards. (Anti) BNP Docu. Schizophrenia. Evolution. Wildlife. .Scafell Pike. Sofist. Tying Tone Arms. Beach Burn. Entertainment Through Pain. Character Building. Leute auf Zeichenhette. Joy of 8 Millilitres. The Glastonbury Fraud. No one is Illegal. Arawa's Return. The Big Draw. Suspended Fall. Alpha. Diagnostic. Hospitalised. Vikings. And Maybe But Also. Fate. Killers. Ringing Ani. Green. Homage à la Mer. Mandogs. Graffiti. Scarfel Pike. Postcards from Zimbabwe. Oh Mama. Killing Snails.Madagascar and WJ Arnold. Black as a Cat. Sheepy’s Operation. Visuals Demo 2.
* 31 Dec 2007
Bluescreen Filmmakers in 2007
..Bristol Filmmakers @ bluescreen in 2007:
Alex Johnson. Alice Buckee. Andrew Williams. Bandele. Candice Pepperall. Chuen Hung Tsang. Colin Bassett. Dan Buzzo. David Bain. Elizabeth Bowley. Greg Metcalfe. Henrik G Dahle. Henry Rolls. Howard Warmsley. Ian Southby Jacob Parish. Jacob Whittaker. James Atkins. James Stokes. Jilly Duckworth. John Elsaesser. John Francis. John Minton. Joyce Akrasi. K. Kathy Bray. Mark Watson. Marta Fernandez. Martin Poulter. Michael Schwartz. Michal Czernik. Muscat/Southsection. Nagea Rose. Naomi Smyth. Olly Snow. Pete Thomas. Quincy Andrews. Richard Storer. Rick Standing. Sam Roberts. Sam Woodcock. Simon Daly. Simon Richardson. Steve Brown. Sylvia Zidek. Thomas Dunn. Tom Swindell. Tracy Foster. Vivi Stamatos. Maria Cuervo. Jemma Shipley. George Sander Jackson. Taj Duaui. George Bowler. Patch. Gary ?. Daniella Troller. Sabine Lang. Oliver Purches. Dan Arnold. Rumbi K. First Born Creatives. Sam Powell.
* 2 Dec 2007
October bluescreen
Films screened at Bluescreen 31/10/07
The Cube Orchestra kicked off things and re-soundtracked 2 films from the archives,
and then we screened in the following order:
Maria Cuervo/Gemma Shipley - The Glastonbury Fraud
George Sander Jackson - No one is Illegal
Jacob Whittaker - Arawa's Return/The Big Draw/Suspended Fall
Taj Duaui - Alpha/Diagnostic/Hospitalised
George Bowler - Vikings
Nagea Rose - And Maybe But Also
Patch - Fate
Gary ? - Killers/Ringing Ani
And finished off with a selection of films from the ever burgeoning bluescreen archives!!
* 3 Nov 2007
Septembers' bluescreen
Bluescreen Blog – September - 26.09.07
An expanded 7-piece Orchestra Cube kicked off this first post-summer, and post-Festival tour Bluescreen. They played to two linked short films – 'Bristol Tourist Guide' and 'Highland Tourist Guide'. The Orchestra's improvised musical musings floated above two linked films that were linked in style – fast-motion movement through first city streets and then country lanes, with frequent rhythmic stops for breath and in the first a great deal of superimposition. An interesting insight to emerge visually was that in the city, your movement is always checked - by traffic lights, other cars, pedestrians, etc – whilst the city allows steady fluid movement.
Mark Watson's two films kicked off the main session. 'Billboards' was a documentary charting a protest against the siting of several billboards in the St Werburgh's area of the city. This is a perfect example of where independent film activity can change perception. I'd passed by the sites several times myself but never with the eyes of someone who lives there, never with any understanding of what effect the billboards – some of which have been raised without permission – have on local people and the local community. Bluescreen frequently screens a particular category of material – micro-budget, participatory documentaries – this was a very good example.
Mark's second film, 'BNP' was a completely partial, totally unobjective documentary about the British National Party, using footage from the BNP's own website. Let's be completely partial here and say that it doesn't take much for these goons to look stupid, so Mark just drops little pieces of intertitle guidance just in case we missed anything. At times funny, at other times rather sinister.
Richard Thomas dropped a very short surprise into proceedings from his position in the projection booth. 'Dominoes' was very short and got laughs that lasted as long as the footage. A beach, some Stonehenge shaped large pebbles, a boot and the hope for major collapse. Not everything in life goes perfectly, but the frustration was funny.
'Schizophrenia', from Olly Snow, has been in development for several years and now finally makes it to the screen. It opens with a wonderfully inventive title sequence and moves through several inter-related visual environments – including a garishly shot lounge and a Second Life styled world – with a voice-over of conversations that are apparently scripted but which come across like surreptitious, snatched recordings. These are the schizophrenic voices and the dynamic, surprising images – some computer-animated, some stop-frame animated, some live action – outline a chaotic and unstable world. It is a work of great originality in every frame, great detail. The music is from Headphobe, Ned Clarke who did a fantastic job on the editing. Olly also showed his portfolio reel – a range of artwork that gave an insight into the film.
Muscat was back with three films – products from this extended summer break. 'Evolution' was another Southsection portrait of skaters, this time part of the Vans Test Team event in Bath earlier in the year. Once again, Muscat's laid-back style brought the phenomenal control of the skaters into a magical relief. 'Wildlife' spent time mostly in Muscat's garden, getting all Attenboroughish, but amongst the squirrels and the birds there were a few surprises, most notably a snake in the grass, no really his mate's Boa Constrictor returns, as well as sheep as he cuts to landscapes beyond his back yard. 'Scafell Pike' was another Muscat travelogue, this time to the highest point in England – views, mates, beats and disappearing into the mist.
'Softist' was one of two Joy of 8 films that were screened tonight. Joy of 8 was a scheme in which film-makers were given a Super camera and film and encouraged to film a piece that was edited in-camera. 'Sofist' emerged from the director Richard Storer's dislike of sofas. With a wonderful soundtrack, Richard's well-composed, intriguing images identify some of the more common moments of interaction with this major piece of furniture whilst a voice-over describes both the attraction and distaste that accompanies sofa ownership.
'Tying Tone Arms' was a wonderfully intriguing short from Jacob Whittaker, deeply satisfying and compelling. The detailed procedure of tying a record-player's arm with wire, keeping it in place so that the vinyl skips repeatedly, doesn't sound like an entertaining couple of minutes but it was, with the final image of the tied arm suspended tensely above the wobbling record beneath becoming something rather beautiful.
James Atkins' 'Beach Burn' is a fast-moving, abstract piece shot in Super 8 and tracing the destruction of a piece of domestic furniture. It was an intriguing watch, never resting in one place and the use of Super 8 gave the piece an excellent texture.
Tom Dunn was back at Bluescreen with 'Entertainment Through Pain'. It was directed by Johnathan Osborne and is described by Tom as a 'Drama/doc of the crucifixion of St Peter'. It might have been an overly-ambitious subject to tackle – especially with very basic production - but the strong cinematography and performances brought to mind Derek Jarman's work. It was good to see something shot on 16mm and the very simple images of peace and rest were a convincing metaphor for St Peter's spiritual joy throughout the brutality.
Alice Buckee's first film to be screened at Bluescreen is 'Character Building'. It was a charming film, very simple and intriguing. Several people gave vox-pop interviews about a particular person in their life, commenting on how they knew them and who they are. There are very few links between the stories and perspectives, and although it's unclear if they are talking about same person because of this (in truth they aren't), what emerges is a simple portrait of a multi-faceted character. An exercise, but more entertaining than that sounds. The ending was sad, but that was only one perspective and, as Alice intended the film to be an exploration of how people form an understanding of things, that is the point.
Ian Southby moves away from his normal music production to make a short documentary with Laura Cramer called 'Leute auf Zeichenhette'. It is a short glimpse into the undergrowth in Portland Square during the carnival this year. In the midst of the joy and celebration, there is litter and decay, syringes and waste. Rather like life.
Henrik Dahle's the 'Joy of 8 Millilitres' was the second of the Joy of 8 films screened tonight. Henrik is one of Bristol most distinctive independent film-makers, with films that are instantly recognisable as his. 'Joy of 8 Millilitres' uses a pun to draw away from film-making and onto writing, exploring what can be achieved with 8 millilitres of ink and romping around subjects as apparently disconnected as his Grandmother, the writing of the screenplay we are watching and the ability to create in art what is missing in life. It was funny, energetic and entertaining.
* 2 Oct 2007
June’s Bluescreen
BLUESCREEN BLOG – June 2007
Films screened at bluescreen on 27/06/07
Once again, during this warm June evening, Bluescreen proved that this is the best place in Bristol to see quality film-making on a regular basis. Steve and Chris took a programme of work from the last year to Glastonbury and they will be heading off to various festivals over the next few weeks. If they wanted to take along another quality batch, then this evening's selection is there to draw from.
This time of year at Bluescreen we see several films from graduating students who've studied at the universities and colleges in the area. The first two films of the night – following the Cube Orchestra's exemplary introduction – came from this source. Kathy Bray has just graduated from UWE and she presented 'The Worms from Pluto' and 'Paper Bag Lady - Episode 1: The Kite', It's hard not to be entertained by pink animated worms, actually pink animated worms dancing, in fact pink animated worms dancing in tutus. It was funny and reminded me – and this is definitely a compliment – of 'The Clangers'. 'Paper Bag Lady' was charming, inventive and well written, and could slot right into any children's animation slot. It's clear that Kathy knows the direction she wants to move towards. Delightful stuff.
Alex Johnson followed last month's 'The Wall' with 3 short films – 'Pigeon', 'Signs' (Alex – apologies if I didn't get the title correct for this one), and 'The End'. They were all linked by a clear focus on situations and activity that might pass us by if we didn't have the camera to select the action and keep us attached to what passed in front of us. Pigeons mithering bread on a concrete stairwell, a sole pigeon perched above the signs for The Galleries shopping centre, and the final clear-up by Police as they re-opened Stokes Croft after a fatal accident last month. We are presented with details that, in our hectic lives, we so often overlook.
'Earthquakeland' was an 'imaginative response to the Manchester earthquakes'. It was professionally produced, and mixed documentary interview with a narrative that pulled out several different strands, the former highlighting the immediate personal responses of Mancunians and the latter developing a fictive world that drew out the concerns of many regarding the nature of inner city development. The twin energies of natural and commercial destruction of urban life pulsed back and forth through the film with apposite images and tight editing.
Colin Bassett had hoped to show 'The Birth' alongside 'Dead Cinema' at last month's Bluescreen (the latter was shown again this month). He says that it shouldn't be taken seriously, but his film – created with his brother Mark over 6 hours and edited in camera – looks fantastic and draws on a host of images from works that explore the birth of monsters – 'Alien' and the Golem legend being at the fore. The backdrops gave the film an ancient, almost epic feel.
'What makes You Feel Alive?' from John Minton was commissioned by Blackout Arts and recorded the last days of one of Bristol's most recognisable landmarks, Tollgate House, that stood, until recently, at the end of the M32, greeting people into the city. Before its demolition - which made way to the latest shrine to retail, the new Broadmead complex - Blackout Arts organised the projection of images across three sides of its face and John interwove these images with background and foreground contextualisation from the city itself. John filmed the projections from different vantage points around the city, busy flickerings of light that soon came across like a pulsing urban energy in its own right. The images, such as the God-like architect surveying his creation, were spectacular – matched by an excellent, powerful score – and John's achievement lay in the balance he found between integrating the images of the event and the meaning of the event in the context of the city.
'Glassmaster' from Elizabeth Bowley brought a young woman in an exquisite gold dress into the bourgeois surroundings of a theatre – the Old Vic perhaps? She sauntered through the space, stretched out across the balcony rails and finally came to rest in a pile of furs on the floor of the stalls. This was luxury in a lonely space. There was something elegant but also very sad about the images laid in front of us.
Bristol band 'Leave Land for Water' produce epic and passionate music and they have found their visual match in the animators Chuen Hung Tsang & Chris Hawkes who presented two pieces. The first, 'Frangipani', was an outstanding computer animation about a star that falls to earth, barely escapes the dangers that confront it in this world, and then is rescued. It was packed full of original, dramatic and memorable images and driven forward by the powerful soundtrack. Terrifically moving. 'Forlorn' was equally heart-wrenching. Once again created with computer animation software, the story concerned a man who seemed to have survived apocalyptic destruction and who steps through the wreckage, investigating what is left of his life until his discoveries lead to an epic finale. The score was fabulous and the images settled deeply in the heart and the mind.
Tom Swindell has recently moved to Bristol, having graduated from the Documentary Film course at the International Film School Wales at Newport. He introduced himself to Bristol with a beautifully-shot record of a trip to Africa called 'Mali', choosing two arenas of life to present a picture of the country. The first was the Segou Music Festival, an ecstatic celebration of music, dance and really just a celebration of the joy of life. The second was a trip to a village that is known worldwide for its pottery, with Tom bringing a gift from his own pottery-making father to fellow craftsmen. What distinguished 'Mali' from countless video travelogues was not only Tom's skills as a cinematographer (the excellent composition and colour range especially), but the fact that he managed to achieve a closeness to the people he was filming. It was rare to see someone film from inside rather than outside a new community.
Rick Standing's 'Explode' was a simple idea, executed perfectly. An explosion is looped and repeated but with subtle differences, each loop pulling back a little from the end of the action until you were left with the moment of detonation, a small gasp and stutter. Rick has plans to edit it digitally (the film was a VHS recording from 1995) and it would be worth it. Highly enjoyable and, in a strange way, rather beautiful.
John Elsaesser is becoming the quintessential independent film-maker, returning once more with a fantastically imaginative piece of work called 'This Paradise They Call Home', and proving that some people just won't let the lack of money get in the way of telling a good story. John describes it as a 'Sci-fi environmental warning fantasy', weaving the classical story of Poseidon and Atheni with an epic tale of vengeful Gods and negligent humanity. It made use of a downloadable effects software called 'Wax' which gives the film-maker the opportunity to attempt dramatic images of catastrophe. Fascinating and ambitious work.
This was the last Bluescreen until September. A fantastic night and good high to end the season on.
* 15 Sep 2007
The 2007 Festivals that bluescreen screened films at were...
BLUESCREEN ON THE ROAD 2007
02 Feb 07 -
The R Eject Film Festival @ Rotterdam International Film Festival (7.00-10.00pm)
09 June 07 -
St Werburghs Summer Fair, Bristol (2-3pm & 4-5pm)
22 June 07 -
Glastonbury Festival @ The Groovy Movie Picture House (9-10.30pm).
14 July 07 -
Ashton Court Festival, Bristol - @ The Blackout Tent (All day)
26 July 07 -
ATA, San Francisco, USA - 'The Sparror Screenings'
05 Aug 07 -
The Big Chill, Eastnor Castle @ the Media Mix Tent (7.00- 8.30pm)
11 Aug 07 -
The Bloom Festival, Bath @ the Lost Disco (1.30-3.00am)
18 Aug 07 -
Mutant! I am on the Moon Fest, Bristol (4.00-5.30pm) (didnt happen!)
24-26 Aug 07 -
Shambala Festival, Northamptonshire @ The Blackout Tent
07-09 Sept 07 -
Bestival (via Groovy Movie)
* 15 Sep 2007
May bluescreen
BLUESCREEN BLOG – May 2007
Films screened at bluescreen on 30/05/07
Several film-makers who showed their work tonight were regular returnees, Muscat, Jilly Duckworth, Dan Buzzo, Tom Dunn, and Jacob Parish. That's one of the great things about Bluescreen, the fact that it exists to make screening easily accessible and therefore an intrinsic part of the film-making process itself in Bristol, a place where an audience can be found. It's rare to find film-makers that just make material for themselves, but it's also rare to find a space where all that it takes for a film to find an audience is for you to drop your film in the box at the door.
The Cube Orchestra provide yet another musical opening to the screenings, this time enabling the Moomins to take on a zen-like character with Eastern sounds produced by drum, violin and guitar-like instrument (someone tell me what that was!).
Muscat kicked off the screening again, this time with a new piece and a very different style and subject matter from the work that he's shown recently. 'Mountains of Snowdonia' was a travelogue, a visual diary of a trip up Snowdon with friends. The gentle, steady beats are a reminder of his resolutely urban style but as the shots cut from one sweeping pan to another, it is clear that Muscat is absorbing views that are making a great impression on him.
'Strange Encounters' was created over 22 years ago by Andrew Williams as part of a film-making course. It was shot on VHS and is in the supernatural genre, telling – via a TV interview – one man's frightening story of standing in the Clifton Observatory and being whisked back into Victorian times, where he encounters a mysterious woman in a black dress who lures him to an unfortunate death by falling into the Avon Gorge. There wasn't just the strangeness of the gothic atmosphere - there was also the strangeness of seeing VHS after such a long time and, very impressively, an organ-based score that went from bizarre to extravagantly powerful.
Jilly Duckworth brought along the next instalment of her series featuring Mo, the People's Nun, called 'Mo Mingles.' God should be pleased with this woman. There she is, chatting away with HimHer and standing up for all of those religious smokers out there (lighting it, however, might help) and doing a service for the divine by investigating what changes could be introduced to make us appreciate the DivineGodhead just that little bit more. The answers were instructive – look more like Freddie Mercury, present a regular Godcast – and I hope to God that this woman of the cloth is being listened to. She can also cut a move on the dancefloor.
Jacob Parish brought along 'The Small Storyteller'. He had screened this before at Bluescreen and it's a tribute to the poignancy of the images that they appeared on the screen like old friends. The film is a compilation of Sony Cyber Shot moving images from a year in Jacob's life and it has the immediacy and intimacy of a journal or a diary entry, with images so distinctive that the film has the geography of a dream – random, unsequential, memorable pictures. Friends, landscapes, details of daily life – the sorts of images that you would only pick up if you were within that experience and if you had the eye to recognise them as special, either visually or personally.
It's indicative of the range of work that is brought to Bluescreen that alongside personally-financed guerrilla films shot in the lounge, you can see meticulously produced publicly-funded films. 'The End', directed by K, is a short film produced as part of the Film Council/South West Screen's Digital Shorts programme. It is a narrative that explores several end points – the end of life, the end of hope, and thankfully the end of conviction and fear. Two men meet on a rooftop high above Bristol's Park Row – potential suicide vs. suicide bomber. It's the point of climax for each of the characters, when two desires for death meet head-on. It's stylishly directed with plenty of movement, very well-shot and finely acted.
Dan Buzzo keeps bringing very special short films to Bluescreen. 'Berlin' is a silent, kaleidoscopic burst of images. Shot from the windows of a tube-train through the city, the images are reflected in rows and blossom out to be replaced by the next set and so on and so on. The images open out and come to rest on a station concourse where people move into themselves through the kaleidoscopic effect and disappear. Silent, charming, and beautiful. 'You Really Came to Hate Me, Didn't You' is a found-footage film of separation consisting of two simply presented but strangely moving images whose power derives from their removal from their expected contexts. In the first, the Space Shuttle moves away from the host-plane and off into the atmosphere. In the second, an American fighter jet slowly lifts itself from the ground. The ambient soundtrack lends the images an unexpected power.
Alex Johnson had brought 'The Wall' to April's Bluescreen but technical problems meant that the film couldn't be screened and he brought it along tonight. It belonged very much in April's programme, however, as it paralleled the activity of many of the films last month in documenting the creative reinterpretation of a physical cityscape through the creative activities of a group of street artists. This time it was shot from distance and with a fixed camera, relaying the dramatic repainting of the side of a derelict city centre building. Once again, art transforming the city. This seems to be a favourite Bristol pastime and suggests that wherever there is a Council's neglect of public art, the public will take over.
J Atkins' 'Beach Burn' was an intriguing compilation of Super 8 images. However, technical problems meant that we will have to wait until a future Bluescreen to see the film in its entirety.
Colin Bassett screened 'Dead Cinema', a well-structured documentary that explored the dearth of creativity in Hollywood cinema, laying the blame firmly at the door of the infantilisation of the American industry over the last 20 years and laying the boot – finally someone under the age of 40 is doing it – to that creative magpie, Mr Q Tarantino. To progress his argument, Colin managed to persuade an academic, Mark Bould, to let himself be tied to a chair – a la the intero-torture-gation scene in 'Reservoir Dogs' and put forward his views as to how the American industry got into this mess. I guess he kept his ear as a reward. The points are well made and very convincing. A very sad story.
Michal Czernik describes his film 'Emptiness' as a pseudo-documentary music video clip and details, through often disconnected and repeated images, pictures from a life. The life that is presented is at times harrowing and full of moments of discomfort. There was an Eastern European flavour to the film, which is no surprise as the Director is Czech.
Tom Dunn showed a film that he shot for a director in Germany, a piece called '51ºN, 9ºE'. The film was a well-written narrative exploring Germany after the collapse of the Berlin Wall through the emotional journey of a father who takes his son to his East German birthplace to meet the boy's uncle and in the process come to terms with his past. It was a classic example of the political being explored in the personal.
'Die Ziet' is a 90 second animation brought to Bluescreen by Tracy Foster. She describes it as 'a slightly dark and surreal flight of fancy, as the chiefs of German business daydream about today's news'. What they daydream about is more funny in Tracy's hands than perhaps in the heads of most German industrialists. The manipulation of the news page is an effective and entertaining subversion and it will be interesting to see where Tracy's future East European animation influences take her.
The final film of the evening was from Tom Mansfield, 'A Picture Can Say a Thousand Words'. I won't spoil it by describing too closely what happens, but the film shows how print and pictures can live in harmony. Unfortunately, a damaged disc meant that the soundtrack was missing hopefully he will bring it back for future Bluescreen.
The next Bluescreen is on June 27th and is the last before the event takes its summer break and heads towards the festivals with DVDs in hand. If you want to put your films forward for viewing at the festivals, contact Steve and Chris here.
* 26 Jun 2007 Glastonbury blog
mud, rain and bluescreen!
well we both worked down at the fest, in our other non-bluescreen guises...
bluescreen went on a little later than expected on the friday night @ the Groovy Movie cinema, due to not being able to find a key to a portacabin in the Park area, wherein the bluescreen DVDs lay!
Anyway, thanks Mark and Camilla @Groovy Movie, for taking it all in their stride! We got the films on half an hour late and they were to be shown again over the weekend too. Hooray!
Groovy Movie will now be taking the bluescreen compilations onto other festivals, check here for details: http://groovymovie.psand.org/solarcinema_events07.htm.
Other non-bluescreen highlights:
The Men they Couldnt Hang @ The Acoustic Stage. 1st time i seen them in 20years! and they didnt disappoint. Rousing stuff!
Lily Allen @ Pyramid Stage, with Tery Hall & Lynvil Golding of the Specials, doing a version of 'Gangsters'. Priceless.
Top Venue - (Other than the Groovy Movie Cinema, of course!) was the Flaming Love Palace, in the Circus Fields - Tofu Love Frogs (thurs) and pole dancers (!) and some bonkers band in masks on Sat nite/Sun morn.
CSS and Long Blondes on Other Stage (Sat) & The Stooges rocked bigtime!
The Aliens @ The Park (Fri) - weird eclectic psychedelia (and followed by Spiritualised acoustic set)
Lost Vagueness (Sat) - Dirty Pretty Things secret gig (!)
Cabaret Marquee (Sat) - John Otway throughing himself off a ladder and doing a forward roll! hes just turned 50 too..
Amy Winehouse - Jazz World (Sat). that voice..that beehive..
Fire Show (Sat) - Flames shooting high in the air, could feel the heat half a mile away!
The Who - Pyramid (Sun) - oh it rained but..
Billy Bragg (Sun) - the annual pilgrimage, the voice of the festival, doesnt disappoint & finished with a cover of 'Garageland'
and there were loads of other things too..all a bit hazy now!
have i mentioned the rain yet? or the mud!? well it was hard work and i have leg muscles like steel now! but didnt seem to matter really.
was another really good glast fest.. except for the 3 1/2 hour queue to get out!
* 30 Aug 2008
Bluescreen Festival Film Lists - 2008/07/06/05
Heres the list of bluescreen short film compilations that were screened at festivals over the last few years.
Also listed is the 2008 compilation that was screened at Shambala 22-24th Aug 2008....
Bluescreen spent a fantastic weekend at Shambala in August, screening films with likeminded film screeners from the Cube Cinema. Showing films every night from Dusk to very late! We enjoyed it, hope you did too! Thanks to Shambala for having us!
Thank you for all your wonderful films!
Bluescreen 2008 DVD Compilation
Un Miniti di cafe - Vivi....
And Maybe but Also - Nagea Rose....
SouthSection – (a selection) ....
Marseille - Digital Studio Demo....
Doug Tabbard, Human Curler - Dylan Radcliffe....
Hatchet House of Horror....
Mandogs – Oliver Purches....
Earthen - Tom Swindell....
The Big Draw - Jacob Whittaker....
Womens Voices - Chris Barnett....
Esad - Clementine Lemaitre....
Road to Somewhere - Naomi Smyth ....
Tying Tone Arms - Jacob Whittaker....
Mr Bones - Marina Ellerington....
Green - Gregory Metcalfe....
It Isnt Easy - Jason Havneraas....
....Madagascar.... & WJ Arnold - Dan Arnold....
Alpha - Tajinder Dhami....
Always Watching /Remembering where we have been - Dan Buzzo....
Demo - Henry Rolls....
Hommage a la Mer - Daniela Trocker....
Jazz Lesson and DF 3 - Benjamin Dowden....
Billboards and BNP - Mark Watson....
..............
Bluescreen 2007 DVD Compilation 1 (45mins)....
Kwesi Johnson - Screen Shift test shoot....
Thomas Dunn - I can't go to work today I'm having an emotional breakthrough....
Dan Buzzo – Feeling/Looking ....
Southsection - Snowdonia ....
Noel Goodwin - Ninja ....
Henrick G Dahle - Dismantling the Bubble ....
Vivi - Dos Brutas ....
Tom Cardo-Moreno - Colin and Oscar
Bluescreen 2007 DVD Compilation 2 (45mins)
Tom Swindell - ....Mali....
John Minton - What Makes you feel Alive? ....
Chuen Tsang - Frangidani/Forlorn (2 films)....
Elizabeth Bowley - Glassmaster....
-----------------------------------------------------------
Bluescreen 2005/06 DVD Compilations
Bluescreen Docs (45mins)....
The Ram Inn – Sebastian Nolan/Chris Bradford/James Atkinson
Rusty Road less Travelled – Woody James
Maja – Chris Barnett
Short Sharp Shock – Dee Kalakoti
Old Street – Jacob Parish
Cable Street – Toby Trackman/Yoav Segal
DVD 1 (45mins)....
Culture Clash – Sid Sharma
Get Good – Francois
Weston-Super-Mare.. – Dan Blore
Night on the tiles – Nimph Productions
6 Degrees of Separation – Max Broughton
Body Language – Kwesi Johnson
Untitled – Alex Mckay
29 Fragile Days
DVD 2 (45mins)....
Untitled 2 – Alex Mckay
The Rainbow and Birth - ??
Greenpeace Promo - Chris Boakes
Circle – Laurie Gibbs
Untitled - Charlie Watkins
The Station – Kwesi Johnson
Thin Ice – Esther May ....Campbell....
In the dark – Esther May ....Campbell....
Bert & Ben – Jacob Parish
The Small Storyteller – Jacob Parish
* 2 Jun 2007
April bluescreen
25/04/07
Hopefully, one of the functions of a monthly Bluescreen blog will be to provide a space for the Bluescreen regulars to catch up on what's been in the space when they've been unable to make the event. This month's was a fantastic night. I go to a fair few short film screenings and Bluescreen is consistently the most exciting, inspiring and refreshing film exhibition environment in Bristol.
The evening kicked off differently this month. Two members of the Cube Orchestra – the Microplex's very own resident muso family - accompanied four films that have previously reached the Bluescreen. Looped guitar figures, building slowly on top of each other were joined by piano notes that gradually formed a steady rhythm and provided a very different soundtrack to images that we'd seen before.
The interplay of sound and image lay at the centre of Henry Rolls' 'Cacophony', a film comprising hundreds of cameraphone stills, captured often in sequence at 12 frames per second. The cacophony wasn't aural – James Foster's jazzy drum and bass propelled the images smoothly forward – but visual, as the images charged on top of each other, often with disruptive superimpositions. The camera moved through streets at first, a city rush, with the sky always visible, but then deeper into the city and back out again to different landscapes. Henry's stills camera was a famished eye, devouring rapid visual impressions, but never leaving the viewer feeling overwhelmed or claustrophobic. This was Henry's first major fixed edit; his regular visual activity is Vjing. Very impressive work.
'Writing on the Wall' was a wonderfully engaging documentary from Joyce Akrasi. The subject was the mural work that emerged from the London borough of Wandsworth, mostly in the 1980's but the film is very much about the interface between communities and public space, the way that murals – an ephemeral art that emerges from generations who disappear often before the art does – can capture the political and communal hopes of local people and frequently in the face of forces that power their way ahead, despite and often at the expense of those people. The artists would often include portraits of local people, friends and family, and Joyce was careful to not only provide stark contrasts between the exuberance of the murals and the grey decrepitude of the obsolete industrial buildings that they often fronted, but also to spend time viewing the murals in detail, filling the frame with colour. The mural of the local people at the seaside was extraordinary.
Peter Thomas showed 'Outlaw', a film he screened several months back and one which he recently shot with a friend, Chris Campion with whom he'd collaborated six years ago, on a film called 'Ball'. 'Ball' was an inventive and funny film that could almost be a template for an often derided but usually entertaining genre, the 'we're bored out of our fucking mind and dead skint so let's make a film using every last remaining object in the flat' genre. Featuring a white ball in a bandana (I shit you not), with much of it seen from the ball's perspective, the film was a chase movie as the White Ball hears the Special's classic 'Enjoy Yourself (It's Later Than You Think) and realises that he/she/it should just have a top time around the flat. Involved in feats of daring and physical challenge, the White Ball goes a little too far and disturbs the Second White Ball This Time with Red Stuff Around It and a vicious battle begins. This was a film that fully respected Hollywood Classic Narrative Editing styles as well as highlighting the joy of parachuting with an umbrella.
A fantastically strange, simple and entertaining short from Sylvia Zidek arrived with the title (missing from the screened copy) 'The Transformable Pissing Trousers'. Described, accurately as it happens, by Sylvia as 'a demonstration of the many ways the transformable pissing trousers can be worn', we watched as the film-maker modelled the extremely versatile design triumph that enables women to urinate easily and still be stylish. She said that if we watched closely we could see her attempting to prove it. Frankly, I could see she was trying but I'm not sure she succeeded. It was intriguing, engaging and very funny.
Simon Richardson presented the third narrative film of the night, 'Strangers', featuring a trailer for his friend's film 'Stone'. The film followed the growing and intense obsession of a middle-aged man with a young girl who he was communicating with on a dating website and following through the streets, parks and her home with potentially dangerous intent. Shot on HDV, 'Strangers' managed to be genuinely threatening and provide a surprise ending which still left questions in the air.
Marta Fernandez showed an early cut of 'Factory of Dreams' at a Bluescreen last year when the DVD crashed, much to the disappointment of the audience captivated by its revelation of an extraordinary world. It is a documentary filmed in a factory squatted by circus artists in Barcelona, called La Makabra. For anyone involved in creative production, the world that Marta presents is a virtual utopia, of alternative lifestyles and friendship and experimentation in a capitalist city that, as one of the performers says, has no room for culture. The film at first seems straightforward but as it progresses it is clear that Marta has edited with a very clear structure in mind, one that relates not to theme but to emotion. The performers express their joy at being able to experiment and to learn in a collaborative space, turning their dreams into reality and aware of their extraordinary luck in doing this. This moves into reflections on what the space has done to change and mature them, a realisation made more poignant as they realise that the space is about to be swallowed up to make way for modern offices and luxury apartments. Marta wasn't able to be present to film the apparently violent eviction. Perhaps that was fortunate, because what she included in its place was a sequence of portraits as the artists performed, and worked, and laughed together. It was a glimpse of a utopia and with all such glimpses, terribly inspiring and terribly sad.
Another great bluescreen evening, thank you for your films and see you in May!
* 5 May 2007
Marchs bluescreen
BLUESCREEN 28/03/07
One of the interesting things about Bluescreen is the number of new people who arrive with films – or just to watch – every month. There's often a perception of bring-your-own film nights that the only people who turn up are the film-makers and their mates but that isn't always the case and recently Bluescreen has witnessed return visits motivated by the last programme alone. This month we had one of last month's film-makers assisting in the projection booth, and I don't think she was just looking for her film from February!
'Westmoreland House' kicked off the night's programme. John Francis, in his first film, used simple imagery to present a visual portrait of a building that dominates one of the main routes into Bristol and frequently dominates people's initial perception of the Stokes Croft area. Stopping us in our tracks and taking us away from the traffic and the rush, John's film gives us the chance to properly observe a building which has always seemed to eat away at itself, bit by bit. The use of gentle, sparse acoustic guitar set up an evocative contrast.
'Note' was created by three students – Quincy Andrews, Sam Powell, Fintan Burke - from Cotham Grammar School (sorry, boys, if I got that wrong), and made for an A-Level class. It's a narrative film that traced the progress of a £10 note as it passed from person to person through loss, theft and generosity, highlighting the way we treat others as it made its way. It's not the first film that they've made together – they have a 20 minute piece that may appear at Bluescreen in the coming months – but even at this early stage of their film-making they have a very good sense of narrative and they are all interested in going to film school in the future.
Michael Schwartz describes his 35 second film 'Conscripts' as a 'pisstake' and a comment on Westerns and present day conflict. It was an absurdist piece that gave us a crawling marine, an American officer with his eyes to the skies and a tennis player. Not your everyday combination and the audience loved it.
Sam Woodcock showed 'Disconnection' a film that he made whilst a student at UWE. Another narrative film – not as frequent an occurrence at Bluescreen as you'd expect – this presented the story of a man who has hit rock-bottom and has nowhere to exist except within either fear or nostalgia. Sam has a good eye for the way that the human face can tell a story and the film ambitiously, and successfully, moved in and out of time and place as the main character's imagination took him from the memory of degradation to the memory of hope. It gave the film an up-ending, but the poignancy emerged from the fact that the hope was found in the beginning of the relationship, before everything fell apart.
'Wander' is described by its maker, Greg Metcalfe, as an 'attempt to capture the experience of listening to music while walking in familiar surroundings'. This was certainly present in the piece but what was noticeable to me was the way the camera was deflected from just passing by places and situations and instead spent time observing them. The orange light rising up a night-time lampost, the movement of a leaf in the wind, the changing patterns in a pavement as you walk by. This was deliberate and at times very beautiful observation. This was the second film from Greg in the past three Bluescreens, the last being 'Some Things', screened in January and made with Leo Plunkett, and also with Josh Albiston who provided an excellent score for 'Wander'.
Jilly Duckworth screened 'Mo in the Big Smoke', featuring Mo, the chain-smoking Nun with a hotline to God and an obsession with nailing sinners and congratulating the saved. Let's just say that she was spiritually very nosy. Mo wandered around Battersea Arts Centre, poking that nose around pockets and bags and finding Christ and the Devil in the strangest of places. The tone was comic, but the final scene, a blessing for an unsuspecting passer-by slid from humorous to beatific and then snapped back to end on funny. It was a fine and rather glorious change of tone.
Martin Poulter introduced his film 'Weird Investigates' with the story that he had got into trouble at work for some of the content of this film. Quite ironic as 'Weird Investigates' turned the tables around on the workplace moral panic about accessing pornography on company time and gave us a picture of a workplace where routine masturbation was shockingly interrupted by pop-up Excel spreadsheets and uncalled for Powerpoint presentations. Visually straightforward, Martin managed to keep the film relevant and entertaining.
The final film of the first half was 'I Can't Go to Work I'm Having an Emotional Breakthrough' from Thomas Dunn whose portrait of disrupted nature, 'A Season into a Day into 5 mins and 11 secs', was screened last month. 'I Can't go to Work…' took time-lapsed early morning as its starting point and brought us, via varied and well-chosen images, to the setting of the evening sun. The most affecting section was the slowed down entrance of a young woman, through a curtain of bright sunlight, into the opening of a dark cave. The film was elegiac and moving.
Muscat kicked off Part Two. He is certainly prolific. He introduced a new piece, 'Vitality'. The film was a progression from his other works shown at Bluescreen, such as 'Dirty Sniper' and 'Shephard's Delight' which he showed again tonight. Once more he created the music as well as the visuals, but instead of his usual approach of layering the screen with composite images, he took a single subject, the Skate Park and especially the skater Spex, and experimented with how using freeze-frame could bring out some of the beauty and skill of the skateboarder's art. He would freeze the skater as he lifted into the air and kept him suspended, just for a second and always took him back into motion at the perfect moment on the soundtrack. That's that feed-through from musician to film-maker again.
Sam Roberts took the opportunity of Bluescreen to pull his footage from a cupboard and start the process of bringing 'Tobago Tour' into some sort of final shape. The reaction was positive, but what's not to like about a busload of creative Bristolians heading out to Tobago with drums and friendship and getting involved with the people on the island. Sam mixed scenes of travel and tired arrival with glimpses of the local people and lifestyle, and at its core was an astonishing scene, a rehearsal scene of drums and dancing. What seemed to be a mixture of local Tobagans and their Bristol visitors, the dancers were involved in a complex, beautifully choreographed routine, erupting out of the simple scenes of tourist movement that lay on either side of the scene. There is more to come from the footage, according to Sam, but even in its current form it clearly illustrates how close people from different worlds can become, linked by talent.
Henrik Dahle has been establishing himself on the local film scene for several years with his imaginative, ambitious and very well made films and tonight showed two (actually 3) pieces. 'The Cloud Film/The Rat' linked two films. A locked-off image of clouds on a summer day, an image filmed through sunglasses, is accompanied by an audio track in which Henrik is interrogated as he films by two boys who pepper him with questions and then recommend a Hollywood romance and whom Henrik recognises as being the boys featured in a film that his mate Oli Purches shot called 'The Rat'. 'The Rat' was then shown. Henrik was filming the clouds for another film, one called 'The Equater' which he promises to screen at the next Bluescreen. The other film was 'Dismantling the Bubble', created for last year's Onion Film Challenge held down The Watershed and a film that explores the fragility of relationships and the perspectives that we hold on them.
In this city of animators, we're blessed with a range of idiosyncratic work and Simon Daly's two films – 'Forgotten Inventions' and 'Beachcomber' – add to this range. The drawings were simple, in a way rather innocent but also tough, funny and surprising. The first featured Victorian Pasty Mallets (yeh, I know, look it up), a giant dog-killing pasty and two Victorian heroes. The second gave us the gentle excitement of finding things washed up on the seashore and then presented the beachcombers with a multitude of future finds after an event that defines the phrase 'reaching the end of the pier'. Distinctive and precious work.
Naomi Smyth's film was the longest of the night and is part of a work in progress which documents one of the most exciting cultural movements of the last year or so in Bristol, the Invisible Circus' colonisation of derelict sites to create art and entertainment. 'Road to Nowhere' documented the squatting, in September of last year, of the Audi garage in Cheltenham Road (so we begin and we end the evening in the same patch of Bristol). Any documenting of extraordinary events runs the risk of reducing an outrageously entertaining evening into a succession of clips included for a sense of fairness. 'Road to Nowhere' avoided this. The editing was excellent, overlapping sound and image, and moving us forward through the evening and into the fantastic world of burlesque and performance that the Circus created in the building.
It was a fitting end to the night's screenings, restoring life into a building that could so easily have fallen as Westmoreland House, featured in the first film, was allowed to fall.
A highly enjoyable evening and lots of great films.
Thank you all!
See you in April!
* 15 Sep 2007
bluescreen festival musings..
Trying to keep a record of words about bluescreen in wwwland, feel free to add.......
our European excursion Feb 2007 here (under Fri 2 Feb listings!): http://www.myspace.com/rejectfilmfestival
Mentioned in dispatches here: http://groovymovie.psand.org/solarcinema_films.htm
Profile of bluescreens slot at Big Chill 2006: http://www.bigchill.net/story/1691/bluescreenartistprofile.html?q=Bluescreen
* 5 May 2007
Februarys bluescreen
BLUESCREEN 28.02.07
February's Bluescreen had fewer people but more films, and shorter films than usual. Funny how that works. Sometimes, at 7.30, you think there will be no-one coming and then by 8pm the place is rammed. You never know what's going to be on screen. That's the charm and the excitement. Could be a first-time film-maker with 30 seconds, or a BBC-funded short with high production values. Could have taken an afternoon to make, could havetaken 3 months.
The film-makers sign their films in and drop them in the box. Sometimes, they'll chat to Chris about where it is on the disc, which films to screen or not to screen.
Part of the MySpace changes to Bluescreen is the desire to record the nights, the films screened and the film-makers' details.
We screen so much and people often want to know who did what and how to contact them.
The night kicked off with the return of South Section. Muscat is a busy man. He makes his music and his makes the vids that go with his music - a beats and pictures machine from Knowle, he spills them out by the bucketload, hip-hop and drum and bass. Always lots going on, massive swathes of overlayed psychedelic images, repeated images - skateboards, turntables, plenty of colour - and the biggest fucking snake I've ever seen (a boa constrictor called Benny). Graffiti in motion. 'Dirty Sniper' filled the screen with fast-moving images, 'Sheperd's Delight' brought in drum overlays in image as the drums kicked on the track.
'Bassjump' was an extraordinary mixture of video game humanoids and Bristol landmarks - always wondered what it would be like to jump off Cabot Tower (only kidding). It's the fact that Muscat is both musician and film-maker that makes the videos work so well. He knows what he's doing with the rhythm of the cuts.
James Skates' 'Fireworks and Friends' mixed Nov 5th sky action with a rotated TV screen, playing with the rhythm of a Phoebe scene, jumping the picture and sound back and forth. Mesmerising after a while, almost purely rhythmic.
Another James, James Atkins, showed his film 'Nothing New' which reverse stop-framed the deconstruction of his art show. Entertaining and charming, it ended up constructing a space which you want to live in, filling it with people.
David Bain showed two films. The first was 'Old Man'. David talked about the colour as the aspect that interested him but the audience seemed to betaken more with the narrative that unfolded as an old man, seated patiently at a historic site and somewhat distracted by the blonde that sat next to him, tried his best to work the audio guide phone. It turned into a sympathetic portrait of isolated individuals and done with gentle humour. David's second film, 'Friends' - what is it with friendship tonight? - featured coloured circles emerging onto a white background, pulsing in and out, like ink soaking onto muslin. And that's what I thought was happening. But the technique was different. David was, in
fact, filming tiny dots on white paper and it was the autofocus on the camera that was trying to focus in but couldn't. It resulted in pulsating colour.
Tom Dunn's film, 'A Season into a Day into 5 mins and 11 secs' took a classic pastoral image - English park, huge oak trees - but prevented us from getting into any sort of relationship with it by interrupting the image, distorting the picture through speed and shudder and all accompanied by a voice-over that pressed forward the unrelenting damage and disrespect that we show to the environment around us. There was no joy in this particular landscape. Powerful stuff.
Nagea Rose's two films were very different from each other. 'Start, Stop and Start Again' featured protective-clothing clad figures skipping on the wooden floor of what looked like a brightly lit church hall. The movement and rhythm became engaging and you were hit with a feeling of disappointment when, in a low shot of the skipper's feet, the skipping rope was seen to snag and the pattern collapse. 'Grandpa Got Run Over by a Reindeer' (and how can you resist a title like that) got the biggest laughs of the evening and it was a film that could so easily have been taken as a negative portrait of a woman's obsession with musical soft toys if it wasn't for the obvious fascination of the film-maker with what she was filming. An old lady shows Nagea her collection battery-operated
soft-toy chanteuses, belting out everything from Christmas tunes to the Birdy song, and as the cacophony begins you become fascinated with the bizarre self-centred exhibitionism of these 'entertainers' trapped in their own little turn. Nagea describes the film as 'a sinister, but light-hearted way of looking at the private life of an old lady.' Very true.
I found Vivi Stamatos' film 'Ice Cube Puppet' visually fascinating and in places rather moving. The idea was striking. Scenes - people and places - were trapped within ice that was the focus of a distracted, restless woman on a beach. The images were strong and there was a playfulness that kept the attention and moved the piece along.
Pete Thomas showed 4 pieces, two of which had been made in collaboration with Tom Begley. These were two commercials - one for Guiness and one for Budweiser, both playing on the 'mislead, then reveal' technique of advertising. 'Outlaw' was a simple chase and dispatch film - a man with a stetson and injured leg limps with a crutch after another man running desperately away, eventually shooting him. The long-grass covered hillside landscape gave the film its strangeness. 'Go! Bristol' was totally different in style. Pete had found several images of Bishopston
roads from the first decade of the century and took those still images as starting points as they dissolved into speeded-up moving images of the streets today. What was most noticeable was the extraordinary claustrophobia as the street became jammed with parked cars and traffic disruption.
The second half was filled with a selection of some of the best films shown at Bluescreen over the past year and which Bluescreen took to the Rotterdam Film Festival, the alternative version of the Festival that is. They are amongst the best films - no, in fact THE best films from Bristol residents over the last year. Which ones? That's for another time.
PS - a shout out for the Flannel - Dave's film night that they created in Falmouth. Welcome to Bristol!
* 5 May 2007
For Starters..
Welcome to the bluescreen blog!
Been a long time coming..
2007 -
January bluescreen went well, lots of people in and some good films, will be posting some films in near future.
February saw bluescreen go to Rotterdam for the international film festival, where we screened over 3 hours worth of films screened at bluescreen. A big thank to R Eject Film Festival for inviting us over and looking after us so well! Hope you make it to The Cube sometime soon.
On to Februarys bluescreen at the Cube, we hope to post a list of the films on the night here, so that people can discuss, and will be good for filmmakers to get feedback too.
Ok thats all for now . See ya all on Wed!
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