Raindance / Cacophony Short Film Awards Ceremony
Tuesday 23rd May, Cargo - 83 Rivington Street, Shoreditch, 7pm - 1am
Report by Peter Fraser
On Tuesday, Cacophony Music and the Raindance Film Festival held the awards party for their 2006 short film competition at Cargo, London. The idea is simple. One of the hurdles for low-budget filmmakers is the expense of licensing music for their films. You may have noticed that, in short films, you’ll often hear soundtracks that drone as though the demo on a cheap keyboard has been left running and slowly wound down. Cacophony have a library of decent music for low-budget filmmakers, more importantly at decent prices, therefore they and Raindance got together to challenge filmmakers to take a track from the Cacophony library and construct a short film around it.
Judging by the five finalists screened, out of sixty-five entrants, the resulting films were pleasingly eclectic with genuinely imaginative interpretations of their chosen tracks. In fact, it reminded me that music can play many different roles in a film, some probably preferable to others but all of them very distinct to each other. From music within the film’s universe that the characters hear and interact with, to the soundtrack outside the film’s universe that illustrates actions or emotions in complicity with the viewer, to music that takes precedence over the visuals and even determines them, reversing traditional cinematic relationships, it’s clear that there are many possible permutations. That reverie from the bottom of my beer glass on Tuesday night was not simply influenced by the films themselves but also by the evening as a whole, which was cleverly scheduled to expand on this central theme.
The evening kicked off with music from the excellent Radioactive Man and continued after the awards ceremony with sterling Video Jockey work from Addictive TV, who mixed music along with clips from the Bond films (all the Bonds, including Lazenby), Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Laurel and Hardy among others. The latter clips showed just how far the interaction of music and film has come since Laurel and Hardy, when music was simply illustrative or primed to heighten comic effect, to Addictive TV themselves, with their audio-visual barrage that delivers a fist fight between the two mediums. All this through crazy beats and eye-popping visuals that would have even your dear old Gran strutting her funky stuff on the dance floor. In playground parlance, it was pretty evil.
But what of the films themselves? The first was an expressionist montage of shadows flitting across the serene features of a face otherwise adrift in inky darkness to the sound of some formidable electronica. Meanwhile, the second took a less abstract tack with music playing a central role in its narrative of a dystopian future in which music is banned but subversive rhythms get unwitting feet a-tapping. Nice idea, slightly incoherent realization and, as the judges noted, crowd scenes are a bitch on a low budget. I didn’t really like the third and, typically, it turned out to be the eventual winner. Basically a one-note joke, and in that sense arguably a perfect short film, it played with audience expectations of zombie horror in deserted urban environs before delivering the gag that everyone had turned into a sheep. At least, I think so. Mind you, I was on my second pint and feeling a little sheepish myself.
Fourth up, a really good animation that was prime music video fodder. A robot wakes up, climbs into a radio-controlled car and then gets trapped inside a fridge with a malevolent techno-bubble. Possibly a parable for our times, possibly not, it certainly was brilliant in its execution and it imbued its central automaton with an endearing character, engaging our emotions despite its opaque narrative. Would have been my winner, I think. Lastly, and by this time I was on my third, a tricksy and confrontational short film about murder that very cleverly, although somewhat derivatively, rewinds from the crime scene back to the murder itself to reveal that the murderer was one of the CSI officers responsible for investigating the crime. A pretty good idea actually, I liked it. I’d love to give you the names of the films and the filmmakers but there was no handout for me to take home with me and I’m damned if I can remember. Nevertheless, an intriguing crop of films, an enjoyable evening, and two pints for one at the bar.
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