In November we took part in a 48 Hour Filmmaking challenge, called Shooting from the Hip. In a past life I used to organise these sorts of events, and have now participated in a few, and it’s such an exhilarating experience – unrelentingly stressful at the time, but really satisfying in retrospect to have achieved the creation of a film in so short a time.

On the Friday night we randomly selected a story-type – ‘Golden Fleece’, which we interpreted as an otherworldly journey, and a specific prop – which for us was a belt. By Sunday night we needed to have made and submitted a short film!

Here is a link to it on Vimeo:

It’s six minutes, so hopefully not too onerous, please feel free to have a watch although be aware that it’s about domestic violence. It’s extremely rough around the edges, partly because of the time constraints, and partly because I was plagued by technical nightmares in the editing process.

Given more time, I am sure we would have shaped it into something more sophisticated, complex and nuanced, but we didn’t have more time, and that’s the thrill of the challenge.

It’s unusual for me to post anything that involves collaborating with other people, most of my creativity is extremely insular and introverted, but it’s actually always lovely making things with friends, and a nicer bunch of people you couldn’t wish to hang out with or come up with ideas that I’d never think of myself, so this year my intention is to be a bit bolder about working with other people.

Really we set out to make something dark and disturbing and magical and strange. I hope you feel we got somewhere near to achieving this, and didn’t traumatise too many children along the way!