Each year it's our tradition to enter a short film into Sydney's Tropfest Short Film Festival. Each year we compete against 700 other entries, including at least 100 from advertising and television professionals who shit on everyone with their technical quality, but don't know
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shit about storytelling. Each year their biased judges pick an undeserving final 16, based on unspecified criteria, and more often than not they pick a random winner from countless equally deserving entries.
And each year we get pissed off at the whole thing, yet still enter into competition anyway.
Why? Because regardless of how many professional big budget films enter (some of the finalists have upward of 50 crew, which sort of defeats the purpose of the festival), regardless of the bias of the judges, and regardless of the fact that it's like sticking your art into a black hole (they never write back to you with anything other than "thanks, you didn't win"), it actually keeps alive, in a small kind of better than nothing kind of way, the ideals of independent film makers and film making.
This year (2007) we decided to keep away from the typical Tropfest style cliched 7 minute redundant narrative with mandatory and expected tilt, and decided to remix someone elses work. Well, we'd originally planned one of those cliched short films, but for whatever reason we cancelled the shoot half way through, and decided to film our kitten Phoebe instead. Much more fun!
So here it is, a remix of the old Jam Handy film Easy does it, audio all taken from the original, and the visuals shot on the set of our other incomplete short film. Never work with children or animals? Phoebe starred in both films, and fortunately the outtakes from the first could be remixed as the second. :-)
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