We, the Judges...
Woo Hoo! and Whey Hey! We’ve got a winner!
You’ve heard of the Cannes Film Festival; you’ve heard of the Sundance Film Festival; you may not have heard of the Great Missenden Annual Jamboree of Terpsichory and Moving Pictures — mainly because we’ve just made it up.
But after this year — well, after reading this, really — you will certainly have heard of the Leicester Blue Film Pageant.
That might, of course, be slightly misunderstood.
To clarify: when we say, “Leicester Blue Film Pageant”, we mean Leicester, as in the place, since that is where Blu-Tack® is made, and by “Blue Film Pageant”, we mean, films about Blu-Tack® not, er, the other thing...
Anyway: rarely before in the annals of Great Film Makers of the World (Vol 1) have so many done so much filming with such brilliant results. All that taxpayers’ money on media courses has not been spent in vain, indeed no.
We asked you to make a 30-second film extolling the virtues of Blu-Tack® and we have been staggered by the results.
Almost 300 of you took the time to write and make films about Blu-Tack®: animated, real-life, drawn, acted: the range was tremendous and often very, very funny, because, well, we like a good laugh.
What were we looking for? To put it frankly, we didn’t know. It had to be with or about Blu-Tack® in some way, it had to be no more than half a minute long and then we, well, couldn’t really think what else it had to be, so threw the brief open to entrants. It could be anything you could imagine, we said, and indeed it was.
Blu-Tack® brand manager Michelle Hayman, High Commissioner for Blu-Tack®’s Inherent Sticky Loveliness, takes up the story:
“We were amazed by the number of entries and the time and effort that went into them.
“It says a lot about Blu-Tack®’s special place in many people's hearts.
“The range of styles was extremely varied, from stop-motion and live action to motion graphics. The final quality ranged from very high production values from professional teams, to short films made by children. But they all shared a love of Blu-Tack® and a tremendous, not to say vivid, imagination.
“Truly, Blu-Tack® is the Blob of Desire; the judges and I thank each and every person who took the trouble to take part...”
Judge Luis Cook and his colleagues found it hard to whittle the entries down to a reasonable shortlist:
"The process was quite tough," said Luis, "because there was such a large number of entries. Just thinking through how to pick a winner was a challenge, so we filtered them, round by round.
"In fact we went through seven rounds of choosing to come up with a final shortlist, which speaks very highly of the quality and variety of the work.
"We wanted to make sure we came up with a shortlist that represented the wide variety of entries. It was lovely to see people experimenting with classic and contemporary techniques.
"It took a lot of debate to come up with a winner, but eventually we did..."
