By Zona Marie Tan
48HFP Melbourne producer’s Oren Gerassi has announced that the participating videos at the recent 48HFP project are now available for viewing online.
During a mad, sleepless weekend on October 24 in Melbourne, 31 teams of filmmakers along with a total of about 400 people, got together to create 31 short films in the Melbourne 48 hour Film Project (48HFP).
Armed with a chess piece prop, a theme – "Your life in a fantasy world", and a character – music producer, Rikko Pardee, the filmmakers scrambled to complete their four to seven minute short film in 48 hours. On Sunday October 26 at 7:30am, only 25 films made it to the finish line in time.
The 48HFP participating videos were screened in the first weekend of November at the BMW Edge in Federation Square, while the winners were announced on November 7 at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), where 12 finalists vied for the Best Overall Film.
For those who couldn’t make it to the screenings of this exhilarating event, those films are now available online at the 48HFP Melbourne’s website. The website not only gives access to viewing the films, but allows the audience to network with the respective film makers through leaving a comment on the message board or directly via email.
“In a time when original Aussie films don’t fill up the cinemas some might say that streaming the films online is not the best idea," says 48HFP Melbourne producer’s Oren Gerassi. "We believe that an important way to improve quality is to learn from others feedback, network and experiment with different creative situations, this can be efficiently achieved via a platform that provides international exposure by presenting the quality of Melbourne screen culture to the world.”
The judges of the Melbourne 48HFP were Japanese Story producer Sue Maslin, ACMI’s head of Film Programming Richard Sowada and actor Simon Lyndon (Chopper).