ASFF short film festival

On Friday 9th of November we went to the ASFF short film festival in York. We went to two
masterclasses, one where Danny Cohen (Cinematographer) talked about some of his work,
and a talk from the head of production at Warp films, Barry Ryan.

Warp Films Masterclass

Barry Ryan talked about the latest in film productions and a lot about Warp films and its achievements
as this year it is celebrating its 10th year. He talked a lot about how to get ahead in the business and
all about budgets and how much you truly make off box office intakes once all your financers and
people who put money into the project have been paid.


It was really interesting to hear all about what his experiences have been working for Warp and he
gave a lot of opinions on current issues and what the future looks like for film makers. He took some questions at the end of the session and this led into a discussion about how he got into the industry and he earlier also talked about how competitive it is and that the majority of aspiring young film makers are unlikely to become big and successful.

He spoke a lot about how they were celebrating 10 years and he mentioned all the achievements and
what they have accomplished over that time, for example 18 films , 5 tv series and much more. He also
mentioned a few future projects they are working on and it sounds like they are just going to continue
to be more successful. He said that the 10 year celebrations are taking place all this year and in
particular they are doing a special viewing of dead man's shoes but with the whole score
being done by a live orchestra.


Danny Cohen Masterclass

Danny Cohen started by talking about how he got into the industry and how initially he did a social science degree and then became a photographic technician which gradually led into him being the cinematographer he is today. Throughout the master class Danny gave useful tips to any aspiring cinematographers, for example he said that you have to be very resourceful, you're never going to have enough equipment or crew. He also said that you start small and make mistakes that then become something interesting. They then showed different clips from films that Danny had worked on and discussed what it was like and which were
more of a challenge. Danny Cohen worked on This is England(Shane Meadows, 2006) which was made by Warp films. This linked very well with the Master class from earlier and both master classes will come in very handy when talking about British cinema in coursework and the exam.

He also gave more general tips not just about cinematography but he talked a lot about location and how directors like Shane Meadows got a lot of ideas and inspiration on location meaning that you have to react a lot to what you see when on location. He talked about some of the problems he comes across when working. He said he was recently working on the film version of the musical Les Miserables. The director wanted all the actors to sing live and to preserve there voices this had to be done in as little takes as possible and with a few cameras on them at once so they then didn't have to re-shoot from different angles. He then also talked a little bit about how by making them sing live this would also make post filming harder as people would have had to edit out mic packs attached to them etc.


The other films mentioned and talked about included, dead man's shoes (Shane Meadows,2004) another warp films production, Dive (a film for tv aired about 3 years ago), This is England 88 (the tv series) and Peer point (2005 another film for tv) and The Kings Speech (Tom Hooper, 2010).