Entries closed

The deadline for the Guardian competition has now passed with Human Touch up against a small number of other films - many far more surreal than amything we came up with. There won't be a judges' result until some time in the next month or so.



I had a great deal of fun making Human Touch, and also learned a lot about film-making, apart from the general truism about how much hard work goes into it. A few of these lessons were sadly learned too late for this production.

-save money on lighting
-never save money on microphones
-if your camcorder actually has lower resolution than your stills camera, don't use the camcorder
-never work with children, animals or furniture
-Windows Movie Maker is the most useless piece of software ever written
-Windows Movie Maker is the most fantastic piece of software ever written
-spotlights gradually slip downwards if you leave them
-keep all your locations near each other

I also learned that musicians are incredibly generous - I was very grateful for the music from the University of Illinois which was released under Open Audio/Creative Commons licensing, and for the kind offer from another musician Mary Mei to allow me to use one of her beautiful harp recordings - if only we'd had the time to use this it would have been perfect for the film.

Will I do this again? I hope so. There are some animation/CGI projects I'd like to see through next. I'm also still thinking about whether to enter the Sci-Fi-London 48 hour competition, and my co-collaborator has some projects I might help out on. Watch this space...