As part of this years Encounters Short Film and Animation Festival I was responsible for co-producing a fringe event as part of the Encounters Fringe Programme at The Birdcage Bristol.

The idea for the event was to hold an evening where we screened short films scored live by musicians. James Sampson, Nic Kane and I spent months watching and selecting short films which we sourced from past Encounters Festivals, and Cinefringe. I found the programming of the event particularly enjoyable, and the wokshop led by Gaia Meucci at the beginning of Future Producers proved incredibly valuable. It was hard work selecting films to be re-scored because not being a musician myself it was hard to imagine how a new, live score might work. We tried to select a range of varied films, some that were very visual, and others that were more narrative based. We also selected a combination of live action and animation.

Once we were happy with our shortlist we presented the films to our musicians which we sourced through The Birdcage. This bit was tricky as what we were asking of them all was quite demanding, especially as we wanted each band to score more than one film. We left the final choices up to the musicians as we felt it was important to let the artists have some freedom. If they weren’t sure of one film, we presented them with alternatives until they were happy.

Once the final films had been selected the musicians went away and worked incredibly hard for no money, purely for the love of the project. It was also a new venture for the musicians as none of them had scored any film work before. I have learnt through this project that communication with your artists is key, and always have a back-up plan! We learnt the hard way when one of our musical acts dropped out last minute… luckily our other musicians stepped up and pulled even more out the bag in order to fill the gaps in the programme.

Above is some images of the programme that I designed for the event.

As we were an official fringe event for Encounters it meant that we were lucky enough to get promotion though them, so we were included in their official fringe programme and we were also promoted through the Encounters website. On top of this we designed our own posters which we put up in The Birdcage, we created a Facebook page for the event, we tweeted the event, and were featured on The Birdcage website as well as promoted through their social media. The promotion obviously worked as on the night we hit full capacity!

The event itself went extremely well, we had an amazing turnout, everyone loved the films and each had their own varied favourites, the musicians were incredible and even did an improvised piece at the end to a film we had only shown them at midnight the night before (I have also learnt that a little bit of spontaneity is a good thing!) and I am very proud that Liz, Festival director of Encounters, and Gaia turned up and both gave us really positive feedback.

Overall it was a great sucess, and I am proud to say that it was my first event as a curator and producer.

Here are a couple of images from the night (we also had an official photographer!) I hope to post some more up soon…