I decided to enter Flickerfest. It all started with my sister’s Eve’s idea. Flickerfest is an international and Australian short film festival held each year with different categories.  The festival screened the finalists in January at Bondi Beach. Some outdoors at night “under the stars”, some in the threatre at the Bondi Beach Pavilion.

I entered three of my videos which included my interview with “Dick Smith, Businessman, Adventurer, Philanthropist“, my environmental video called “Rewarding Recycling” and my video about “Treetop Adventure Park“. The video that I wanted them to select and the video that I thought had the highest chance of becoming a finalist was my Dick Smith video. We were told that over 2,200 videos were entered and only 19 videos were short listed in FlickerUp. Surprisingly, my video “Rewarding Recycling” was selected as a finalist. My sister, Eve, entered one video which was based on how Australia created Wi-Fi, and it was also selected. We had very proud parents that day!

When Eve and I were accepted we were given a list of instructions for extra stuff. They needed extra formats of the video file, photos and other stills needed for promotional material.  There was so much extra to do for the festival! The instructions were very difficult to implement and understand because they used very technical language. After some researching my sister and I finally understood what to do.

A few weeks later on a very hot day my very happy family were driving to Bondi Beach to attend Flickerfest and watch the finalists’ videos with many of our family friends.

We saw all 19 finalist’s videos and I noticed most of them were stories with a moral at the end. There were two videos which I particularly enjoyed. The first one was called “Misconception” by Shendell Hay. At first it appeared to be a murder story because a man lined up knives, he was wearing gloves and there was a red substance on several items in the kitchen which looked like blood. However, at the end there was an unexpected twist when he actually was just making some jam! The life lesson of that story is that if you change the way you look at something, the thing you are looking at will change.

The next video which I particularly enjoyed was called “My Only Enemy is Time” by Elly Carantinos. The video was about an old Greek man that had just been declared legally blind by his doctor.  We learnt about the cycle of life. The man was speaking in Greek (which I can understand) and there were English subtitles at the bottom. He explained that as a younger man he had built his holiday home by himself and then he went on to explain he was now too old to do any repairs to it and so now unfortunately he was forced to sell his holiday home. The video shows the old man going to the cemetery to visit his wife and his other friends. He made an analogy of life to that of a fig on a fig tree. The fig grows and develops and after a while the fig will fall off. This was my favourite video and it brought many tears to my eyes. In fact, I am sad again writing these words.

We were then given a twenty minute break so the judges could make their decisions. As we were at Bondi Beach, we went for a quick swim with our family friends the Voulgaris’ and we were quickly back, ready to hear the judges decisions.

The judges didn’t pick my video, but I was happy to be one of the 19. I was very lucky to meet the judges and hear how they judged the videos. This was an amazing experience and I hope to enter more videos in the future.

They did pick someone I know for the winner, but I am not allowed to tell you who. Sorry but Eve has promised me that she will blog it this week or I will have to tell you 🙂

 Ruby