MovieFest

Well, the Movie Fest National Finals are finally over. The longest award ceremony ever - especially considering very little was actually said about the short films that won and what was said was overwhelming negative and depressing. I left feeling embittered and somewhat baffled. Were we meant to feel guilty at walking home with prizes after subjecting the judges to watching our paltry efforts? Am I meant to now give up the hopeless dream that I never had of becoming a professional film-maker?

The judges were generally harsh and, in one case, quite mean and in the brief moments of their bloated and lengthy speeches when they weren't talking about themselves and their illustrious careers, they were pretty much discouraging the young students from trying to be NZ film-makers. They also had, it seemed, all worked with Peter Jackson. We were told, more than once, that he started making films when he was 8 on a Super-8 camera. When he was 12 he was editing like a _professional_*. It is hard to recall all the aspects of the judges' careers, and also Peter Jackson's film-making career, that were covered because the ceremony dragged on for about 2 hours. My brain seems to have frozen over all the bits that didn't irk, offend or fill me with righteous indignation. They seemed to believe they were giving a series of seminars on themselves and seemed a little indignant when the audience didn't have questions to ask them. Why the heck would we have questions to ask them? Sure, I appreciate professionals taking some time out to judge the competition but I was pretty tired and was, like much of the audience, just sticking around to find out how the films did and see if we won an iPod. The last thing anyone really wanted to do was to encourage them to speak for longer. Especially the first guy. Costa Botes. He was horrible. He slammed all the films for having bad sound. It seemed a little odd that straight after saying what he really cared about was how the films told a story (and that he 'didn't care about technical aspects'), he then hassled them all for having poor sound. He was then rude to the MC. When the guy held the microphone too close he snapped "if you push that mike any further up my nose, I'll punch you". He seriously needed to lighten up and learn some manners. I mean a third of the audience were Primary school entrants. You don't need to spell out the harsh realities of trying to make a living making films to five year olds. It was like having an Art critic arrive at a school fair and rubbish all the kids' finger painting because it wasn't technically professional. "You amateurs. You'll never make it as a professional artist with these shoddy, uneven strokes. Why your little doggy has five legs! When van Gogh was your age he was painting landscapes! You think you can make it as an Artist. No! You'll end up sketching caricatures at the mall and barely making a living drawing overweight housewives and their hideous children."

Even the nicer judges didn't really say much that was positive about the films. The competition made out like you would get specific feedback but there was nothing. I had expected a line or two of individual feedback from the judges for each of the three films in each category. Maybe a brief comment about what they liked in each one and/or some constructive criticism. Not even the winners got specific feedback. There wasn't even something brief like "It was funny" or "nice story" or something said to each contestant when they received their prize. It was like they didn't even know which film you were representing when you got your prize. The MC even forgot which primary school film won not long after handing out the prize and had to be reminded which film to play by the audience. The 'nicest' comment that was said about a specific film was before the winner of the Hobbyist category collected the prize. The MC said something like it was a nice film because it was a last minute entry that they saw after watching two really bad entries. Terrific. It is so nice to know that they publicly slate entrants' films as bad.

For all the technical criticism that was made about the sound in the entrants' films, the ceremony itself was not without technical difficulties. The DVD and then the computer crashed a couple times half-way through the winners' films.

It's a pity that the prize-giving ceremony** was so awful because on the whole the competition was quite a positive thing. I was really impressed by all 3 Primary school national finalists. The little kids were adorably cute and it is awesome to see youngsters making some good short films. The Secondary students did well too especially the winning 'Horror 101'. It was a superb effort. Technically well-made and really entertaining. They were the Grand overall winners as well and it was thoroughly deserved.

* Presumably this was told to make the 12 year olds in the audience feel inadequate? I mean there were a bunch of Primary school kids who had edited their films but their efforts in this amateur film-making competition were not professional enough for the judges' liking?

** It seems such a misleading name. Implies a sense of praise and accolade would be shown for the finalists rather than contempt.