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Steve Andrews is no Filmmaker Showdown rookie, although he hasn’t entered a submission in recent years. Of the thirty plus entries, only the ten finalists selected by the judges are premiered at the main event. Steve’s films have never broken the top ten, but 2013 is a new year.
Though the crowd tends to love ski bum style movies full of resort town inside jokes, Steve’s story has a serious tone and packs a political punch. It’s a creative struggle I hear time and time again with these competitions—do you play to the popular vote, or do you stay true to your vision, even though it might fall flat on its face?
I shadowed Steve on his first day of filming and even got to try my hand at acting (abysmal), script reader (nailed it) and sound person (very technical term). But the real action took place later in the competition, when I joined Steve and his team out at the Pemberton Hotel for the filming of a climactic scene. When I met up with Steve, he admitted he was a little behind schedule. As he later told me, "there were very few things that went according to plan, but that is expected. I often times had a plan B for things, but in reality you need a plan F as well.”
When I showed up at the hotel bar where the scene was to be filmed, the actress hired to play the bartender had bailed. The bar was busier than we’d anticipated, thanks to a 1 PM start Canucks game, which complicated the sound side of things. Nonetheless, filming proceeded.
Several hours and takes later, Steve thought we were ready to wrap the scene. With the game over and the patrons gone home, the venue was finally silent. Steve decided to playback the recording to see if it was worth reshooting a few parts, now that we had quiet. Aaaaand that’s when he realized that none of the sound had recorded the entire time. Oh boy.
I imagine the final day or so of the challenge was the same for most of the filmmakers: lots of editing on little sleep, being forced to sacrifice a few of your initial ideas for the sake of time, and wishing there were more hours left ahead of you. In the end, Steve made his submission on time, but he told me he wasn’t happy with the final product. Sound editing had continued to cause trouble right through to the end. He also realized that he had been wearing “far too many hats to do this efficiently.” He says, “My biggest mistake was ignoring the warning signs that I took on too ambitious of a project with not enough help.” His intentions had been to come up with a concept and assemble a team to make it happen, but the project never took on the group dynamic he had hoped for. It ended up being more of a solo project with people helping out than a true group project. “I learned now that it is much better to assemble a crew beforehand and then come up with an idea based on what everyone can bring to the table.” Ah, teamwork. Such a beautiful thing.
Steve didn’t make the final cut, which he attributes to the sound issues with the final product and the fact that his story didn’t have the resolution he had planned. Despite not making the top 10, the film was far from being a failure. He says, “if I count the successes in the project, they far outnumber the one failure—strengthened friendships, experience, being creative, learning. In that light, this weekend was a huge win.”
The Show
The setup for the week of media events is like no other. A six-sided big screen leaves no one with a bad view, not an easy task for a 2500 person crowd!
[Editor's note. I went to the first Filmmaker Showdown show and am now gonna hijack this article for a paragraph or two!]
The show on Tuesday night was one of the best I've seen. Out of ten films, seven of them were exceptionally great. The show started a bit slow and I got a bit worried after the third film, but from there it was banger film after banger film. Although the screening order was randomly chosen, the second half of the show was defintitely stacked with some heavy favourites. The winning film was an entry from a local crew from Pemberton headed by Conrad Shapansky that included two of the most legendary filmers in the world of snowboard cinematography. Nice little bonus for the shred community.
That being said, as both a filmmaker and a lover of this event I have to say it's extremely frustrating to see the pre-screening judges pick such similar fare year after year. Yes, (as Magee also alludes to below) there was a nice mix of comedy and, well, comedy, but with the exception of one doc-style film, every other entry was a narrative-based "movie-movie". Has anyone been paying attention to the media landscape lately? What about viral-video style stuff? Eye candy style edits? Documentary work? Thought-provoking films? I know they were in the mix, as they are every year, but they never seem to make it to the finals. One major problem is that the pre-screeners are all from the Vancouver film industry (read: take themselves a bit too seriously) and cannot be expected to have any sense of what this community is all about. Not that the contest should be only filled with locals, just the opposite, but it would be more than a little nice to have the selection of films represent the whole spectrum of types of "films" we enjoy spending our time watching. Anyone who has been to the infamous B-Grade Horror Film Festival will know exactly what I mean.
I attended the “Second Cuts” event, where the entries that didn’t make the top 10 were screened the next afternoon. There were some solid entries that didn’t make the top 10, especially “The Wonderful Wizard of Aus” (though it was one of many ski bum comedies, it was well executed and super funny) and “Feet”. Based on the second cuts screenings, I had high expectations for the finalists.
I already mentioned that the Filmmaker Showdown is popular. It’s always one of the first to sell out, so they have an Encore presentation the following night, where the people get to vote for their favourite entry. That’s the one I attended.
The top ten films were, in short, wonderful. Though host Feet Banks kept saying how very different the entries were, I couldn’t help notice that nine of the ten were comedies. I guess it’s true that the crowd likes comedies! It would be nice to see a little more variety, but I can’t deny that the finalists were entertaining.
Local Conrad Shapansky had taken home the grand prize the night before with “Katch-Up”, a Charlie Chaplin style black and white silent film. The first place win was well-deserved.
The winning team doing a celebratory "shot-ski" on stage after the win
On the People’s Choice Award night, the audience was clearly drawn to Robjn Taylor and Chris Smith’s “Of Cobblings and Shiny Things” and Angie Nolan’s “Adventures in Loonie Land”. Angie ended up winning $1,000, Olympus gear and a cat skiing trip and I couldn’t be happier for her. I used to work with Angie and I don’t think I’ve met anyone with more passion for acting, film and the arts than her.
People choice
All in all, the 72 Hour Filmmaker Showdown was a whirlwind experience for me—and I didn’t even make a film. All the filmmakers and crews involved deserve major props for their efforts over the past few days. As the “Of Cobblings and Shiny Things” crew said, the event is a great excuse to get all your friends together and have some fun making a film, and that’s pretty awesome.
