Norwood Cheek @ Uni Cinema
2:00pm, Sun 22 Feb 2004
Score: 7
Short Review: Curiouser and curiouser…
An offshoot of the Flicker Festival, Attack of the 50 Foot Reels is a competition in which the participants are allowed one 50-foot reel of Super 8 film, and only in-camera edits – no post-production. Unlike the similar “Shoot The Fringe” competition being run during ff2004, however, filmmakers are also allowed to submit a soundtrack to their movie – but they aren’t allowed to view the movie themselves.
Sounds… interesting, right? Norwood Cheek presented a collection of 16 of his favourite films from this competition, and some of them demonstrated that such constraints cannot dampen creativity and enthusiasm – and, in some cases , enhance it.
Opening films, “The Photo Shoot” and “Unsomniac”, were gentle introductions – simple sight gags, simple direction. “The Gremlin” was the first of many films to utilise toy dolls – a later piece appeared to be a biblically apocalytic Toy Story. “Dreaming of…” was simply beautiful, “Clean” wonderfully paced, and “Model Behaviour” and “No More Americans” being flat-out funny (the latter being just one take). The best piece (in my humble opinion, of course) was “I, Filmmaker” – we had to wait for it, but damn it was good.
It was truly amazing what some of the filmmakers were able to achieve within the restrictions of the competition; stop-gap animation I would have thought improbably achievable was flaunted successfully in “Montage is Conflict”, the closer. And “The Powers of Preston Flair” showed the power of a good script ;)
Despite being plagued by technical problems, this event was a cracker. And if you missed it, then too bad – it was a one-show-only kinda thing. Your loss ;)