About that time that we made a short film with puppets and ended up destroying a long-running film contest
In October, 2012, we made this short film for the Bloodshots 48-Hour short film contest. Bloodshots had been around for roughly a decade, and my friends and I had made it an annual tradition for five years running.
I had spent the summer (barely) learning to make Muppet(tm)-style puppets, and we had enough puppets on hand to make a film featuring an entire cast of puppets. I was psyched.
The team consisted of me, Steven Smethurst, Evan Valensky, Jordan Lapp, Lindsay Kessler (Steven’s girlfriend at the time), Nick Robinson (since moved back to Australia), and Jennifer Woo (who had done the music for several previous Bloodshots shorts of ours, and whom I had recently started dating, and who is now my wife and pregnant with our third child (life comes at you fast))
We managed to rent a small studio space next to the original location of the Vancouver Hackspace (which itself appears on camera as Saul’s Paw’n Shop)
The screening and awards ceremony was held at the Rio Theatre on Halloween night, 2012.
The screening went well, overall. Plenty of people clearly pulled in every dollar and favour they had, trying to make this their calling card short film: local professional actors working for waivers I guess (officially, cast and crew could not be paid for their work in the contest), obvious use of full teams of pro or semi-pro people working on make-up and effects, use of proper film production cameras rather than our consumer grade DSLR.
Our film harkened more to the contest’s gritty, homemade in a backyard with a video camera roots. Exactly nothing about the project was professional. Even our credits were presented as: here are all the people who worked on this, no dilineation of roles. But in that audience of tipsy and excitable people, the reaction was positive. People were engaged. Laughed their asses off, in places (this was helpful in covering for kind of shoddy sound design). Something about the raucous group-viewing environment, and our scrappy production quality, created a platform for laughing with and at the film.
I think of all the films we’d submitted, only Meouloaf and this were actually submitted on time, and thus, eligible for a prize. Meouloaf, in its year, won Best Grossout. This film, somehow, won the Local Jury Prize for Best Film.
And people were furious.
When the prize was announced, the woman representing the local jury made it very clear that the decision was not unanimous, as though already anticipating and publicly distancing herself from the fallout. When I made it to the stage, some shithead in a top gun costume (on stage, I assume, for Best Shithead in a Top Gun Costume), asked me what film I’d made. I said, “The one with the puppets”. “Seriously?” He said, “You seriously won best film?” He then turned to the guy standing next to him, and laughing, repeated this conversation to his stage buddy, “He won for the puppet movie? you know what I said? I said seriously? I said seriously right to his face”. There was no clapping. No cheering. The mood was sombre. I took my prize package (complete with a bloody hatchet mounted to a plaque, which I have to this day), and made a swift exit, like a thief in the night.
That night and into the next morning, the contest’s facebook page blew up with a torrent of whinging and complaining. I don’t think that people had actually disliked our film while they were watching it, per se, but they hated it now that it had won. They hated that it had won. People complained about the higher budgets they’d clearly provided their films, the better cameras chosen (“we used a RED Camera! A Red Camera! The camera of winners!”)
It got bad enough that Kier-La Janisse, the founder and operator of the contest officially cancelled it forever, that very day.
A month or two later, Steven was at a bus stop somewhere, and being the kind of guy who easily befriends and chats up strangers, wound up in conversation about hobbies and creative projects. Bloodshots came up. Turns out, this bus stranger was an avid participant in the contest. Without prompting, he went into a rant about some complete bastards whose piece of trash puppet film somehow won the contest, thus tarnishing and ultimately destroying it forever. Steven deftly avoided revealing exactly what film he’d worked on.