Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Film Festival success for "How Europe Got Its Name"

Our short animated film "How Europe Got Its Name", 6 min, has been selected for public screening in the "New Beijing International Film Week". This is a big step forward for us and we are very very happy about it. You can see it in the festival program at:
Link to Beijing Fest 2009 Selected Movies
"How Europe Got Its Name" appears a little over half-way down this page.

Backgrounder for new readers: the democratisation of film-making makes production easier for us (yay), and easier for zillions of others(uh oh) so selection panels can be choosing as little as 5% of what they receive. Why Beijing? My 1980s successes were often in non-English speaking cities. Our movies this century have been collecting rejections from US and NZ festivals so when "How Europe .." was ready, I thought it was time to revisit the wider world. I liked the style of this festival and the film-makers connected with it - you can see what I mean by using the above link and looking around the festival site.

"How Europe Got Its Name" version 1 was made in 1 weekend when we were competing as "Team MITCIT" representing the Manukau Institute of Technology in the New Zealand 48 Hours Furious Film-making Competition. It was wildly ambitious to do a speed-film-making competition with modelling clay animation but we did get it all shot and we got a panic edit version over the finishing line with 2 minutes to spare. We won a small audience-favourite-vote award for 3rd place in our heat.

The Beijing Festival entry is the completed "Version 2".

We can not show you the complete movie on the web yet because we are exploring its film festival and commercial potential. I do plan to post about a 30 second sample soon.

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