See the original Scene Stealers!

About a year ago, Dave came up with the ultimate challenge and learning experience for our fledgeling filmmakers – the ‘MannIN Shorts Scene Stealer Challenge’. For those that have asked recently no, this has nothing to do with Film 4’s competition of the same name (we like to think they ‘stole’ our ‘stealers’ idea cos it’s just so darn good 😉

The idea is that crews have to recreate an iconic scene from a famous film, frame by frame and in as much detail as possible, giving them a crash course in every aspect of filmmaking. They learn just how crucial every element is – location, design, lighting, performance, camera angles, composition, props, continuity, foley, music, editing etc etc – and how those elements come together to create something magical.

While doing this, they are constantly comparing and contrasting their efforts with something made by The Best in the Business and also learning about individual styles of certain Directors, DPs, Designers etc. It works on so many levels! Clever Dave 😉

What we hadn’t anticipated was quite how good the very first efforts would be…

The two scenes ultimately voted for by our troupes were ‘Here’s Johnny!’ from The Shining – to be produced by Bev Lawley – and ‘Would you like me to seduce you?’ from The Graduate, to be produced by Emily Cook. Hopefully some of you watched our Livestream broadcast from the set of The Graduate SS earlier this year, and you can see a short behind the scenes video from The Shining SS on our MannIN Shorts Facebook page. But to get an idea of how the finished article looks, here is a poster ‘knocked up’ by Editor Simon Harris, using stills of actors Rob Smith and Kat Cawte from The Shining SS shoot…

Pretty good eh?! You will be able to see the finished scenes, and hear our crews discussing how they made them look soooo good, as part of the Sunday evening event of the festival : ‘Big Ideas, Mini Movies!’

Tickets on sale soon…watch this space.