GREAT NEWS: Altrincham Movie Makers gets ‘back to normal’ post-pandemic.

Speaking at a recent meeting, Dave Hutchinson, competitions coordinator said,

As we are now ‘getting back to normal’ we agreed that all footage used by members in their films should not be more than 2 years old.

During the pandemic filmmakers were limited on what footage could be filmed for their creations, so turned to re-editing existing films and making improvements. Now that a year has passed since the pandemic lockdown regulations were cancelled, normal filmmaking can resume that encourages more filming during this year.

Obviously if you need a bit of footage that is much older as part of your current story that would be fine.

Members have been reminded that 85% of the final film entry needs to be their own footage.

The first 3 months of competitions are open theme so get your thinking caps on. It would be great to have several entries to start the year of as we mean to go on.

Wynne Mood Trophy which was based around atmosphere has not had a winner for the last couple of years due to lack of entries. To encourage members to enter this competition, it has been decided this year to change it to a short Special Effects recreation. All entries are likely to be less than a minute.

Rodger Ball recently made contact with an old friend, Judy Lysaght, who works in the TV industry. Her show real can be seen here: http://theotherplanet.co.uk/projects/cgi-showreel. At 33 seconds into the reel there is a 2 second clip of a man walking up a street. A ship has been superimposed at the end of the street.

Our mission is to recreate those few seconds.

Judy has kindly offered to judge the entries.

We don’t see this as an exact recreation but more the essence. So an office at the end of a street would be just as acceptable. As none of the members fully know how they are going to achieve this, the idea will be that members each show the original footage and talk about how they managed to make the special effect.

Trevor Weston Trophy

There was also a discussion about the Trevor Weston Trophy competition. Members had looked at a list of themes that were created and Trevor fed back he is happy to use one from the list. The aim for this competition is to make the theme more feasible for all members to produce a film. The theme for this year will be ‘Product Commercial’. This can be a real or fictional product. Members now have plenty of time to work on their creative filmmaking skills for this competition as the deadline is 26 July 2023.

Take 2

At the end of the year, Altrincham Movie Makers will have the Take 2 competition. Entries for this competition is open to any film that has been entered during the year that didn’t win first place. Members will be given the opportunity to take onboard feedback and re-edit accordingly.

Below is the competition proposed dates – so have fun and dust of those cameras!

Any question please drop me a line.