We touched down in Berlin on Thursday evening after a month spent working alongside PlayStation to put together a finale event for their Shoot! project.
It’s all about celebrating the art of short film by giving six young filmmakers the chance to make a movie with the financial backing of PlayStation, and the creative input of an experienced mentor. All six films are free to download in high definition on the PlayStation Network – a major opportunity for new voices to be heard by a wide audience.
We backed the project because we believe in what it’s doing – opening up a new distribution channel to incredibly talented filmmakers producing high quality work. Put the brand cynicism to one side, and it’s clear that this is exactly the kind of thing that can drag cinema into the twenty-first century.
Berlin was the culmination of a lot of hard work from the filmmakers, PlayStation and Shorts International, who are also screening the films on ShortsTV.
It was a competition of sorts, and Berlin was about picking a ‘winner’, but mainly it was a chance for everybody to come together, have some drinks, enjoy the films, and harness that sense of collective energy – that something kind of important might be taking place.
Our job was to sort a special guest for the night to present the awards and hang our for the evening, and we duly hooked up with The Silence of Lorna’s Arta Dobroshi at the Grand Hyatt for a few (okay, a lot) of ice-breaking beers.
Arta couldn’t have been any nicer – not just an enthusiastic MC, but a brilliant laugh and expert ‘Albanian’ dancer… Although it meant we spent most of Friday with a hangover while everybody else set up the venue – the members-only Tausend club in East Berlin. Close your eyes and picture a nightclub in East Berlin. That’s basically the Tausend – shabby chic, underground, with trains rumbling overhead. Very intimate. Very cool.
The party itself was a success – not just because loads of people came along and had a good time, but because the unanimous opinion was that the six films on show were of an incredibly high quality. As Arta said in her speech – she’d been judging the official Berlinale short film competition for a week, and she hadn’t seen anything to compare with the Shoot! movies. That’s pretty high praise. The Best Film award went to Anthony Green for The Dreaming; Joel Wilson and Jamie Campbell took Best Screenplay for Bitter (even though, as Joel admitted, they didn’t write it); while Uwe Flade’s Prison Food got an Honourable Mention.
After that, Addictive TV played us out with a booming set.
Congrats to all the filmmakers for killing it with their shorts, and also to PlayStation – even though this was billed as a ‘finale’, hopefully it’s just the start for Shoot!. Quality filmmaking plus free digital distribution sounds a lot like a workable equation for the future.
You can check out all the films now at the PlayStation Network.
