Blog: Loco London Film Festival

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Sunday afternoon found myself, The Frames Of My Film, Mr J Dredge and some PALS in POPLAR, to attend part of the Loco London Comedy Film Festival. We were there specifically for the Loco Local section run by Poplar Film because they were showing our short film The Job Interview as part of an afternoon of shorts.

It was all VERY INTERESTING. The event took place at Spotlight in Poplar, a rather GROOVY arts/community centre that should have been dead easy to get to from Stratford except that the DLR was shut so we had to get a taxi, which felt DEAD glamorous - all it needed was a red carpet and the PREMIERE experience would have been complete!

There were eleven films on including ours, and some of them were GRATE - I particularly enjoyed Russian Roullette, Two Dosas, The Elevator Pitch and Orange Charlie, probably because they were all funny and sort of sweet too. Some of the others were what they call "dark" comedy i.e. has lots of bits where you go "ew!" and not many actual LARFS, which isn't my sort of thing. Oddly, it seemed to be these ones that had had the most money spent on them, though that may just be my PUNK ROCK BIAS coming in. It was very noticeable though that some of the title credits were almost as long as me and John's entire film!

I did feel a bit NAUGHTY being there with our little film which we'd spent a couple of days on, when some of the others were clearly such TITANIC EFFORTS. One person came to talk to me about her business helping filmmakers get their work into festivals. She talked about strategies, identifying markets and the range of approaches you could. I thought "But we just sent it into one film festival by email and got in, it was peasy" but decided that perhaps saying that might seem rude.

At the end there was a PANEL discussion, which John sat on - they'd asked one or both of us to do it and I thought John would be best as he has a proper background in comedy that he could talk about, and I was right for LO! he was brilliant. Our little group sat and nodded enthusiastically as he made Excellent Points and also Humorous Remarks - as with all my previous encounters with The World Of Comedy, everybody seems to think it's WRONG to actually be funny in person, so John stood out a bit!

As we left we said a proper thank to the organisers for a) having us and b) running such a brilliant event. I'd never been to anything like it before and had had a LOVELY time - I guess we'd better get strategising and see if we can go to some more!

posted 26/1/2015 by MJ Hibbett

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