Aesthetica Short Film Festival

On friday we took a trip to York to visit the Aesthetica short film festival. The first venue we went to was a music video screening as it ties in with our coursework. We watched the videos for about an hour before the first master class. There where a lot of interesting videos on show from all around the world. Some from England, Europe and the US. A lot of the videos where concept and narrative, most of them didn't have any performance aside from the rock video. One video that stood out to me was Fossil Collective - Let It Go which used great animation to tell a story and stop motion. 

The first master class we went to was the Warp Films: The Latest in Film Production - This master class featured a talk from Barry Ryan head of production at Warp films, one of our exam case study s last year. The talk went over: The history of Warp, Details about films they have made and film making in the future. He went over in detail some of the challenges and successes of the Warp films along with Warp X and a bit about working with digital technology as well as the 10th anniversary of the company. The talk was insightful and interesting and should help us when it comes to re-sitting the exam in January. We also got to see a short comedy film called 'Cook Book' in the break between the two masterclasses. It managed to get the comedy across well without using any dialog which shows the importance of mis-en-scene and acting. 

The second talk was Danny Cohen on cinematography. It was an interview format in which we where played a clip from a film he has done camera work on. We saw extracts from Pierrepoint, This Is England and The kings speech. He talked out using different techniques about shooting different genres and films with different film sizes. He also talked about challenges for filming Les Miserables a new feature and live performances. He also took questions from the audience.