Screentest

My housemates Maggie and Martin are horrendously more talented than me, and they were nominated for some student film awards this weekend. We fancied a weekend away and carted ourselves a few miles west to enjoy the cultural hub that is Bristol.

And onto the festival. There's a saying about student films: They're either too long, or much too long. We were subjected to both. We thought it would be good to take in a few animations and music videos, as they surely couldn't be more than five minutes, right? Wrong. One of the gems was an 'animation' that was made by walking through the streets of Canterbury and filming it on high exposure and making the lights strobe. For eight minutes.

We breathed a sigh of relief when it came to the comedy bit. Well, until they put on a lovely little number called 'Genre'. The premise itself was okay - exploring the different genres of film through comedy. Problem was, it wasn't funny in the slightest. Unless you're about eight. And have no brain. Also, the technical quality wasn't fab either. Two words: Audio Optional.

The cast couldn't act, the cuts were bad, editing was horrendous. And the worst of it - it was 28 minutes long. 28 MINUTES!! 28 minutes of hell!

The awards themselves were fantastic. We got completely slaughtered on free cobra beer, Martin won an award and thanked our media school for spending all our kit bidget on plasma media screens, and we drank more beer. fantabulous.

However, it couldn't last forever. Maggie's film lost to a wank film about a man who eats nothing but carrots alll day for four days... he turns into a carrot in the end. he called it vegetise me. how original. it wasn't funny and it wasn't clever. twat.

we spent the rest of the night attempting to steal expensive software, but then got a conscience when we were actually successful and gave it back. Martin later threw up on the bar and managed to get away with it. That was about the height of the excitement, but I'm still moving to Bristol at some point. One, it's a very lovely cultural city, and two, the blokes are much much better looking than the ones in Bournemouth. And they don't highlight their hair.