Oska Bright April Blog by Sarah Watson and Matthew Hellett

We’ve just finished our Oska Bright meeting for April. We are shattered! There was a lot of heated debate in the meeting. First of all we had to think about Oska Bright 2011 and the place we will have it in – will it be in Brighton or a different area? We still don’t know where we will have it – we have to get some information from the places that we might have it in before we can make our decision.

Because of the recession we haven’t got as much money as we would like. So we had to think about cutting things, and making things different to be attractive for new funders. It was really hard!

Overall we are quite positive that we will find a way for Oska Bright to keep going – it is important for the films to be seen all over the world so that everyone knows how good films by learning disabled people are. Watch this space!!

In our meeting, we had a look at another film that has been entered into Oska Bright in the past. We practiced our new way of judging the film that we think will be fairer to everybody. That was hard as well – as we had to think more in depth about what makes a film good and not so good.

What we do is go through a list. We watch the film first, then we talk together with advice about judging from Simon so that we can understand everything. The film should be in 3 parts - the start should be quite short - the middle quite long - the end quite short. We think about if the main characters in the film are clear from the start of the film. Then we think if the film is too long. We talk about if the camera is used well and can we see what we need to see. We then think about the sound - is the talking clear and does the music fit with the mood of the film. Has the film
been put together well - does it jump around from one thing to another. Then we ask if the colours of the film suit the story - does the colour in the film portray the season - ie Winter or Summer - if its Summer the colours should be bright and warm. The last thing we think about is if we like the film overall. For eachof these things we vote. Each of these sections gets a mark out of three. So the most a film could get is 27.

This system is really helping us think about how films are put together - when we watch films on TV we are really thinking about how they are put together, and what is good and bad about them. It has really opened our eyes, and it is starting to give us ideas for when we make films in Matthews new camera. Matthew got this for making his new film, Mrs Sparkle.