If the TropJn finalists, all lined up in the soporific heat for their photo call, noticed the weather it didn’t show. Perhaps even if it was snowing they wouldn’t have noticed. Excitable and chatty but focused and enthusiastic to share with the assembled media, these young filmmakers demonstrated a clear understanding of what it means to be finalist in the World’s largest short film festival by and for ‘kids’.
The support for an emerging career given by this wonderful festival is so important. And they come back time and again. The winner today has been a finalist for the Pineapple Trophy three times before.
This gaggle of junior Producers, directors , editors, actors range from 12-15 and have tackled genres from Action through Drama and Science Fiction to Comedy, displayed such a range of skills across the medium. They all seem intimidatingly multi-skilled.
I spoke to Lisa Studdon (NSW) , animator , artist, director and producer of FIREWORKS. It’s a wonderful offering about a young girl whose pet chick runs away. Love and friendship are the themes as the chick sends up fireworks to find her way home. The chick is jumping on a button as the beautifully drawn fireworks explode. The young filmmaker, has lost count of the number of cells used in her creation but tells me it’s a labour of love. Lisa explained that she thinks in images. That she never stops scribbling and responding to the world around her as she draws, edits and lays the soundtrack of her work.
Meghan Humphreys (SUBJECT 39) also has the makings of an auteur. Using her sister as the single actor she also has created a powerful intimate film. Here, an undefined fear and outside force controls the life of a young woman, Subject 39, who is trapped in a white room with only a blinking red button to provide hope. Megan not only wrote produced and directed but built the set with her own hands. For her, the excitement is in the telling of the story. “You actually don’t need dialogue” she says. The film can be its own story. This is Meghan’s second time here.
Meghan was a Queensland finalist. There were 6 filmmakers from NSW, 3 Victorian, 3 other Queenslanders, 2 from South Australia and a UK finalist. All finalists had to have a trigger, a button, in their film somewhere.
The other Queensland offerings were the films PAUSE and SEVENTY EIGHT.
PAUSE : Sebastian Marsden (Director + Producer). A boy explores the junkyard and finds a pause button. The film is notable for its wide range of shots from the vistas which begin the piece to the complex framing of the junkyard, even a tracking shots of a boy on a bike and a runner. The sound effects really add to the piece with sirens, barks and a well recorded voice over to guide the story.
SEVENTY EIGHT : Oliver Marsden (Director + Producer). Three boys take their practical joke too far. This film has arresting use of colour as keystrokes over a black screen begin the story. Technology draws us in and a blog is the narrator and bookend. The lovely shots from below of beakers of changing coloured ingredients are a real highlight.
From South Australia there were 2 finalists. Both from Renmark and created as a school project from Renmark West Primary School. There was obvious community support as the locations and background players were many.
THERE’S A BEE IN MY BELLY BUTTON : Celeb Crook (Director), Owen Sullivan (Producer), Liliana Guy (Producer) is a sweet film, focusing on an unfortunate young man who disturbs the bees in the park and one takes up residence in his belly button. A mixture of animation and live action, the film has a fine comic performance from the young man who is afflicted with a cartoon bee. The POV shots of the bee are terrific and the ‘no bees were harmed’ at the end was a perfect cap to a charming comic movie.
THE ESCAPE PLAN: Nisanar Sen (Director), Grace Nuske (Producer). A T Rex invades the classroom and the kids are trapped as the dinos go on a rampage. There is so much enjoyment in watching what the youngsters find funny here. Grossness and slime and having your teacher eaten are all part of the fun with some terrific animation of the creatures and a technically very successful opening sequence using only sound effects and close-ups.
There was one UK finalist this year. NEW LEAF: Tom Harrison (Director + Producer) has love spilling out off the screen as a disenchanted young man finds companionship in a dog he is looking after for an elderly, hospitalised neighbour. Told as a series of repeated scenes emphasising his loneliness, the film has a great soundtrack from the silence of his dreary life to the triumphant chiming audio of Tom’s growing appreciation of his new dog friend.
Apart from FIREWORKS there were five other finalists from NSW.
XPERION: Aniruddha Chennapragada (Director + Producer) is Lego animation. It manages to be both atmospheric and narrative as it cuts to random scenes generated by the writer’s block-curing Xperion machine. The soft jazz and American accents of a detective noir and a samurai revenge drama plus an overblown, cheesy romance make an appearance. There is great work inside the frame with soft focus foregrounding and really well done stop action.
TO INFINITY AND BEYOND! : Jack Dignan (Director + Producer) begins evocatively with medical equipment, white hospital room and sick boy on a white bed. Into the scene comes a red unformed space soldier who will help him to engage and defeat his cancer cells. They burst outside through a window into a world of colour. This is a carefully constructed film with an engaging central performance.
CAT BURGLAR: Darwin Schulze (Director + Producer) also has a character filled central performance by Hannah Issacs in the title role. Hannah won the Best Female Actor prize for her funny, driven portrayal of a girl who has a cute and loving poodle but yearns for a pussycat. Hannah and Darwin made the whole audience laugh during their interview when they said that their inspiration was from a Google Plot Generator site. A spoof site called Goggle makes an appearance in the film as does a kick-ass, sleeps with a gun, cat protecting granny!
Modern tech also takes a starring role in SOCIAL DEATH: Liam Alexander (Director + Producer) when a boy’s mum comments positively on a Facebook photo that is meant to give him street cred. He searches for a way to delete the comment and save himself from social death. Satiric and with a cracker finale, there is a particularly great scene which involves an operatic background to a series of jumpcuts as Elliot desperately tries to make himself acceptable. The insertion of Claymation lions for him to be thrown to is clever also.
CHRONOPHOBIA: Christopher Spiropoulos (Director), Daniel Nailand (Producer) is just lovely. Using a washed out colour palette, it’s brooding and mysterious as, after the death of his father James receives a box which might allow him to save his dad. The storytelling is truncated as befits the theme and the jumpcuts and representative flashbacks combine to make a truly delightful film. This was my pick of the offerings actually.
The judges, however, found their favourites in the Victorian films. Third place and worthy Winner of the Best Male Actor was Oliver Crawford Smith in THE SUBURBAN LUCHADOR: Oliver Crawford-Smith (Director), Oliver Bailey (Producer). This tale sees a young man, bullied by thugs, find a solution in his training to become a Mexican Wrestler. Inspiring and physical, this film explores uses the tropes of adversity to take its hero to success through comic visuals and cartoon sound effects.
Runner-up was DING DONG: Isaac Haigh (Director + Producer). Boys ding-dong-ditch the wrong house when the owner proves to be a shotgun totin’, lawnmower riding, revengeful senior citizen. The film, and the film within a film inside it, has an excellent rendering of tension and surprise through the framing and the audio track. The recording of the dialogue is exceptional actually. It’s a story of clear moral purpose too.
The winner of Trop Jr for 2016 was the stop motion Claymation offering CHESS PEOPLE: Yianni Rowlands (Director + Producer). Another evident auteur, the filming took place entirely on Yianni’s bedroom desk. An avid musician, he also produced the sound design which located the two worlds of the film very clearly. A dark and light world are separated by a wall, the red counterpoints and musical fore-shadowing show that there be a way to unite the separated spaces. When interviewed Yianni spoke eloquently about racial discrimination and young people’s separation from community. It’s his 4th time as a finalist, he has been runner up in 2012 and as he is now 15 it was his last chance to win the ugly but coveted prize.
I wonder if he will appear on the Tropfest main program next year. For many of these young filmmakers, they must now look to the adult world. It might be a cliché to say that they are all winners but it is simply true. Their work on the big screen today, and all those people there to watch, as they become our next generation of Australians in the art of film! I, amongst many, will be keeping an eye out for their names as well as looking forward to meeting next year’s TropJn finalists.