The Shanghai Short Film Competition 6.2 had some very impressive entries and some real stinkers! Anyhow, the range of talent was obvious.

Here are the Winners:

First Place: “The Corp.” directed by Jean-Michelle Tori
Second Place: “Talking Heads” directed by Michael Beets
Third Place: “Tradition” directed by Severin Bonichon

Best Actor: Richard Trombly in “Claustro”
Best Actress: Christy Shapiro in “The Love Story of Alfred J. Pintuck”

Special People’s choice award: “Tradition” directed by Severin Bonichon

The gay love story of “Tradition” was a memorable experience with excellent cinematography, music and a touching storyline. Thought the winners, I think won more for their visual flair than for the substance of the movie itself. “Talking Heads” was a very interesting seemingly roto-scoped experimental piece that had some amazing animation style visuals and cross scene effects. It was not at all in the style of Michael Beets, but he still makes it memorable piece, as are his other films. “The Corp.” can be best summed up as: “Bad guys in helicopter shoot at another guy, guy runs away, bad guys come inside, shoot some more and finally capture the guy”. The movie had amazing special effects with a helicopter moving around the office building and shooting through the windows, as well as bad guys with gun blazing in the building. The movie, as flashy as it was, was just that, all flash and no substance. Perhaps this film deserved an award for best visuals, but I would not choose it as the winner by far.

The people’s choice award was audience voted piece on which movie they thought was the best. Their choice was “Tradition”, a movie with no special effects and all substance which I thought was a better reflection on truly innovative filmmaking.

As always though, native NY actress Christy Shapiro gave an outstanding performance in “The Love Story of Alfred J. Pintuck”. She is truly one of the outstanding talents we have the privilege of having here in Shanghai.

One last congratulations and praise to all the filmmakers and actors out there! Keep up your passion, and let’s see if you can outpace yourselves at the next competition!

MeiWenTi Productions has done it again. Bigger and better they have put up a wonderful show, also incorporating a script contest. This time filmmakers were treated to a weekend workshop where they learned about the many aspects of filmmaking, such as camera, sound, lighting, editing, etc. MeiWenTi brought an expert in each field to lecture the eager filmmakers about it.

The contestants were given about 2 and a half weeks in which to shoot, edit an produce the film. They all came through with flying colors. The Prizes were handed out Saturday March 11 at Velvet lounge, where audience members had a chance to view all the 7 submitted films.

This is right now the only place you can get a list of winners from Saturday afternoons event: 

The winners are as follows:

• Best Script from the script competition: Beth (Last Name?)
• Best Originality of the Script: Finding Fidel
• Best Cinematography: Love
• Best Editing: Love
• Best Actor: Chad Bagley (Finding Fidel)
• Best Actress: Eve de la Rosa (Finding Fidel)
• 3rd Best Film: Party Piece
• 2nd Best Film: Love
• Best Film: Finding Fidel

I want to give a big congratulations and a standing ovation to everyone who was involved, the lecturers; judges and especially all the filmmakers.

Those darned independent filmmakers just can’t get enough of making movies in Shanghai. This time there is another short film competition underway by MeiWenTi Productions. The new contest dubbed “Contest 2.0″ will be the biggest we have seen yet.

With 8 teams totaling 45 people, this time it is serious. There are filmmaking workshops organized to help amateur filmmakers make professional films. Juan Vargas, organizer, and director and producer in MeiWenTi Productions, has recruited experts in production, lighting, sound, directing, camerawork and editing. These experts will voice their experience to the teams to help promote the professionalism of making films. There are some local as well as foreign experts on the panel.

The films will be shot between February 15th and March 3rd, with the awards ceremony being on March 11. You may ask why the shooting is between such specific dates? Well, as in the last film competition, there will be 4 specific elements that must be included in the film for it to qualify.

In the last contest the requirements were:

1. That one of the characters is “allergic” to gravity
2. One of the characters has a nervous twitch
3. There must be a scene with an elevator
4. An unhappy ending.

It remains to be seen what wacky and innovative stuff they come up with for this contest. This time the contest is a bit more lenient, as before the contestants had simply one week to shoot, edit and produce the film.

MeiWenTi productions describes their unique position:

Meiwenti Productions goal is to become a key player in the revival of Shanghai’s film industry.  To do this, we believe that the first step is to get the city’s filmmakers on their toes! 

We will see how good the filmmakers are on their toes in this next contest. Planetkarl will be sure to bring you more updates closer to March 11, so you can come and see what Shanghai filmmakers have to offer.

A little while ago, I mentioned about Shanghai’s independent film makers. While they represent the growing mass of the Independent Film Industry here in Shanghai, the majority were foreigners. I ran across an interesting article by Lisa Movius that details the efforts of Chinese Filmmakers.

There are more and more experimental films coming out of Shanghai these days. While in Beijing the trend for independent filmmaking is towards feature length and fully developed films, this is not so prevalent in Shanghai. The community in Beijing was brought up around the culture of entertainment, especially with Peking Opera and the like.

Back when Shanghai used to be second only to Hollywood in filmmaking, the world had it’s eyes on Shanghai to produce some amazing films. Produce it did, but after the Cultural Revolution, the entire Industry ran away to Hong Kong and Beijing. Beijing followed a cookie cutter type plan to churn out countless TV programs and films, while the remains of SMG produced a lot of politically motivated content.

These days, the viewers are driving the content to new levels. People are realizing they need to start making better content, especially to compete with the foreign content “leaking” into the country. Independent filmmakers are also taking this opportunity to show their skills, and that they can produce the same or better quality than the media giants.

You can see many examples of exploratory and art filmmaking throughout Shanghai, such as the current exhibition at the Museum of Comtemporary Art entitled Love@Fiction. There are plenty of videos you can watch that I think border on the insane. Strange videos of a woman wrapped in plastic wrap with a tinfoil hat, a computer generated image of a girl wearing an animal costume that performs a metamorphasis into another animal. It is just really weird stuff. 

Eventually we will start to see a great deal of “normal” type independent films coming out of Shanghai, along with the artistic type. It also seems investors are more willing to put their money into a Shanghai production because the filmmakers in Shanghai tend to be the serious ones, where in Beijing, filmmaking is done so rampantly, it’s hard to tell what is good and what isn’t.

For those of you that missed it, there was a short film competition in Shanghai last December. You can find the winners on the Film Contest Winners page. I recently came upon an article in the Asia times that puts Shanghai’s Independent Film industry in perspective.

Government restrictions are always a constant scorn to independent filmmakers. Though, through gestures like this event they might be able to make a home for themselves in Shanghai. As mentioned in the article, once Independent Film start to make money, the Chinese might be more interested in releasing their tight grasp on the industry.

Independent films could be the cornerstone to bringing more, and bigger production studios to town, to set off a cascade that will see the Chinese film industry come back to its original home in Shanghai.

Way back in June 2006, from Mei Wen Ti Productions’ first Short film competition, “The Quick, The Short and the Cut!” the winners emerged.

There have been many more competition since, and you can look up all the later competition winners on youtube under Mei Wen Ti Productions’ Youtube profile.

For movies that I have been in, you can check out my portfolio.

First Place:

Pyjama Love (10 mins)
Written, Directed, Edited, Acted in by and basically completely created by Michael Beets and Beth Lenon

Second Place:

Final Fantasy (5 mins)
Crew: Xu Li, Gillian Hush, Elizabeth Bacon
Cast: Bill, Annie Zhang, Gorden Zhang

Third Place:

DVD (5 mins)
Crew: Jud Wilmont, Jeff Colen, Wendy Yu
Cast: Kyle Percy, Riche Ard
Production: Arui, Adrian Jones, Deliko Wong