Thumbnails #5

Making Your Own Film Festival

When I was about 15 I got my first volunteer job at the Edinburgh International Film Festival. I was working for free handing out Audience Award voting slips and collecting them at the end of a screening, but along with those duties came a pass that allowed you into pretty much any screening in the festival. For three summers I spent a bit of August collecting voting slips/checking press passes/lugging film reels between projection booths and then spending the rest of my day watching movies. One year I caught 32 movies over the ten day festival period, hopping from one screen to another.

One of the things I loved most about the Film Festival (and later about working in Filmhouse) was the themed seasons - retrospectives of a director’s work, or collections of movies centred around a theme, an era, or a nation’s output.

However, through making Filmish and raising the kids, there were a few years where I lost my enthusiasm for watching new movies. In fact between about 2012 and 2020 me and my partner were much happier to sling on something we’d seen a dozen times before than to take a ‘risk’ on something new and potentially challenging.

But 2020 hit, and we were stuck inside, and suddenly going out the cinema (one of our favourite things - no surprise) was off the table. And that’s around when the idea of making our own Home Film Festivals came about.

The idea: to programme a series of films to watch together that would get us watching things we’d never seen before, and allow us to engage with movies in a different way.

Space-uary, our first dry-run, was only a partial success. Programmed for January 2021, Space-uary was a chance to revisit a genre of movies that I’ve always had a soft-spot for. Unfortunately, after a promising start with Prospect (2018) we got caught in the weeds rewatching the Predator and Alien movies in chronological order (don’t bother doing this! It makes no sense!)

But we did learn some lessons, and our subsequent season A Journey Through Time was much more successful. For this one we each chose a movie to represent each decade from the 1920s to the 2020s, aiming to fill in gaps in our cinematic knowledge or revisit movies we hadn’t seen in decades. It was a really rewarding experience, filled with cinematic gems like the silent witchcraft documentary Haxan (1922), the still-relevant anti-carceral polemic I Am A Fugitive From a Chain Gang (1932), and the stirring melodrama Written on the Wind (1956) (Turns out, I love melodramas!!)

Since then we’ve run some other home festivals: Crimeuary/Journey Through Crime (which had some amazing entries like In a Lonely Place (1950), Rififi (1955) and Set It Off (1996), but ultimately felt too same-y) and Trainuary (which was probably our most successful yet.)

So, you might want to do this yourself? Here are my top tips for organising your own home film festival.

Choose A Great Theme

This is the backbone of a great home film festival, and it harks back to what made Filmish such fun to write and draw. With my Filmish comics (both the single issues and the chapters in the graphic novel) I always loved looking at a wide selection of films that were united by a common theme, be that the role of Food on Film or the power of architecture in cinematic storytelling. With your home film festival, you can take a similar approach, choosing a theme that will unite a wide range of films. This is where something like Crimeuary went wrong (too samey), but something like Trainuary succeeded, by uniting everything from time travel (Source Code) to war (The Train) to mystery (The Lady Vanishes).

Aim For Variety

Choosing a theme will set you on the right path, but make sure that you’re packing your festival with a good range of experiences. It’s like making a good mixtape - you want some highs and some lows, some crowd-pleasers and some more challenging fare. With the right balance your festival will fly by, and feel like a rounded, worthwhile experience.

Try Something New

Don’t worry too much about taking a risk. Part of the reason we’re doing this is to expand our film knowledge. Try a punt on something you’ve not seen and you might find a new gem. And even if it sucks, I’ve found it interesting getting an insight into some older movies that haven’t passed the test of time so well - The Cassandra Crossing (1976) is a paranoid 70s thriller with a stacked cast of Hollywood stars that feels so specifically of its era that it works well as a time capsule, if not so well as an actual movie.

Don’t Let It Run Too Long

Both Crimeuary and A Journey Through Time suffered from being too long, dragging on for months, and often getting interrupted by diversions when our patience with the theme was wearing thin. Trainuary was 18 movies long, which I think was pushing it. I’d aim for a nice round 10, and slip in another few if you still have a passion for it once you’ve cleared those.

Don’t Rely on Streaming

One of the first lessons we learned was that if you want to programme a truly great season, you’ve got to do your research and you’ve got to source your films. Don’t settle for whatever is on Netflix - stand by your passions and track that movie down! Spaceuary crashed and burned because 90% of the movies on our list weren’t on streaming. Sicne then, we’ve done our research, narrowed down our choices and then put in the effort to find copies of the movies we want. Ebay is your friend here, making it normally very easy to find cheap second-hand DVD copies of the movies you want to watch.

Finally, I want to recommend some of the movies I’ve discovered through all this:

The Train (1964)

There’s so much here to talk about. It’s a gripping thriller in the vein of Wages of Fear, shot in glorious deep-focus black and white. Burt Lancaster dominates the screen as a train engineer fighting a secret war against the Nazis in the French resistance, his allies whittled down as their plans slowly go off the rails. Paul Scofield gives an impeccable performance as his arch enemy, a Nazi general obsessed with transporting Paris’s iconic art collection to Berlin. It’s one of those war movies that stands above the pack with something to say beyond ‘war is bad’. The central question it asks is, is art worth dying for? And if so, how many must die to protect a culture’s treasures? It offers no easy answers, throwing a series of increasingly cruel trolley problems in Lancaster’s way as he fights to stop a train full of stolen art escaping over the border into Germany.There are so many beautiful, subtle visual allusions throughout - visuals that will stay with me, and questions and themes that offer no easy answers.

Set It Off (1996)

I wasn’t 100% sold on this one when I watched it, but damn does it stay with you. Part of our Crimeuary season, it sees a group of black women who turn to bank robbery to escape a culture that abuses and discriminates against them. Part heist movie, part buddy movie, part political polemic. It’s not perfect, but it stood out in a season full of sad-crime boys feeling sorry for themselves.

Written on the Wind (1956)

I admit I went into this one not expecting to vibe with it, but it was awesome. I’m now a card-carrying melodrama fan! I don't think any plot description would do it justice - it’s an intense family drama, a love triangle, full of intrigue, secrets and betrayal. The kind of stuff that would be horrible to live through but is presented with a detatched, heightened, gossipy dra-mah that it feels like you’re reading it from the pages of a trashy magazine.

That’s not to play it down. This is goooood. The mise-en-scene is super lush. It’s got symbolism for days. And Robert Stack’s performance as an alcoholic, and Lauren Bacall’s reaction to it, was genuinely upsetting to watch - absolutely spot-on in a way I’ve not seen before.

Parasites!

It’s the story of my life, but I always jump into January telling myself I’ll get on with some exciting dream projects just as soon as I’ve cleared my to-do list of client work and then POM it’s May and half the year has almost gone. It’s a question of expectations of course, so next year I’ll tell myself it’ll be nice to do some personal work come July and I’ll be fine.

That said, I did manage to fit in some cool stuff since the last newsletter, including this cell diagram of a Leishmania parasite…

The interesting challenge here was to design something that would also pop beautifully to colour-blind viewers. I hadn’t considered colourblind accessibility before but I wish I had. Fortunately I found some great resources online to help explain things and point me in the direction of how to go about colouring something beautifully while also making it readible and attractive to colourblind folks. I was pleased to discover that Photoshop has a colourblind mode (View > Proof setup) which I could toggle back and forth between to preview what a colourblind person might see.

As you can see here, only really blues and yellows remain, and the biggest job is ensuring that tonal and contrast difference is maintained, and avoiding colours that simply turn to mud for colourblind viewers. I’ve still got lots to learn here, but I hope to maintain awareness for myself going forward and incorporate this knowledge into future designs.

I’ve been working on some other stuff too, and I’ll share it soon…

The Wilhelm Scream

You’ve no doubt heard about the Wilhelm Scream. You’ve certainly heard the Wilhelm Scream - the stock scream that’s been put into an uncountable number of films, so many in fact that it’s now an in-joke for those in the know. But only recently did people get to hear the origin of this piece of film history, and what a joy that was.

There’s something so funny and lovely about imaging this guy in a sound booth, trying his damnest to scream convincingly enough for the producer. And when he hits it right, the producer knows… we know… because we’ve heard it a thousand times before.

Here’s a nice wee blog post about the process of finding and restoring this piece of film history, from over at freesound.org

Final Recommendations!

A few things I enjoyed recently:

📺 ER - I’ve been rewatching ER and it’s a lot warmer and funnier than I remembered. // 🎬 To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before Trilogy // 📖 Octane Render by David Blumenstein - A really good piece on algorithmically generated images (aka ‘AI art’).