Epic Artistic Fail

Write about your most epic baking or cooking fail.

Focusing on the Epic ‘Artistic’ Fail rather than the food aspect, this is the story of when I lost an entire film. My script was one of the few selected to be shot on super 8 by our film school. It was to be my second short film. The actors had been cast, the locations scouted, the costumes and art department organised… catering, the list goes on and on. Because films have a lot of moving parts and require everyone to be working together to bring the vision to life.

Finally months later the films had arrived after being processed overseas and the class had a rushes evening, watching the unedited reels of film that had been shot for all the short films. Everything was great and fun until my first reels screened… black, nothing… the second reel, black nothing. The whole class sat through 6 reels of black film just in case there was something… anything.

After feeling gutted, embarrassed, angry. All the stages of grief. I decided to submit my script for an arts grant and actually won it. So my production had a small budget. Super 8 film was upgraded to 16mm film and we managed to get most of the cast and crew back together to shoot the film again. On much more expensive celluloid film. This was just at the beginning of the digital era and film was still king… and very expensive.

So I suppose the message is don’t give up, even after a massive epic fail, because it could lead to bigger and better things. In the end I’m happy with our weird little David Lynch inspired nightmare that doesn’t make much sense. Anyway judge for yourself – here is Balloon Man 👇