Blogzene

Christine Wilson and Carmen Thompson whose natural habitat is PG.07, Phoenix Building and Top Shop try their hand at film making:

Motivated by the creative challenge and the £100K prize, Christine and I decided it was high time we got to it and made a short ad for the Doritos competition  – King of Ads.  I had a teeny bit of experience of documentary film making from the Teesside Uni’s Spring University (Shortees) and Christine had a dynamite idea, but we only had two weeks so we needed some drastic help.  We went along to one of the Writer’s Block drop in sessions in Middlesbrough Central Square, where we got the inspiration and advice we needed from James Harris to storyboard the idea.  Two hours later we had a story board and a script – wayhey.  Now we needed a cast and in the absence of a budget we had to draw on the scarce resources we had to pull together costume and props.

The main characters were to be Dorito Man (played by Gareth Gent, Christine’s friend and neighbour) and Femme Fatal (Christine herself-a natural in the role).   There were some initial challenges – constructing the dorito mask out of papier mache (thankfully we had already made the exec decision that we weren’t going for realism) and getting Christine’s false nails to stay on (double sided sticky tape).  We were very fortunate to be able to get the help of Matt Rozdoba, Canadian Film Company,  to film for us in exchange for a very spicy pizza.  We hit some scary moments like when our outdoor location was invaded by two blinged up escapees from the dangerous-dogs asylum and when the camera would not talk to the Mac so we could not upload our film.

It took 5 hours filming and 12 hours editing (including pestering James West to help us with the tricksy little shenanigans of Final Cut Pro) to get 29 seconds of advert.  So did we win? No. Was it worth it? Every terrifying-frustrating-hair-splitting second.  We simply couldn’t have achieved what we did without the help we got from everyone involved but the support is out there.  There is simply no experience like making a film from idea to edit and as we have proved with the little resources,  (£40 total budget spent) we had there is no excuse not to have a go.

Written by:  Carmen Thompson

Some useful Links and of course the finished article, Doritos Nice To Eat You Ad

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuucaEQLulM

King of Ads http://kingofads.doritos.co.uk/

Writers Block Drop in Sessions – http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=107076072662897 – with picture evidence of us scriptwriting

Uni Summer Courses – http://www.tees.ac.uk/sections/parttime/summer_courses.cfm