Filmy filmers everywhere!

But what a lot of busy filmy filmers Limerick has been producing of late! Stef has his ‘Psychic Gangsters’ and there was a film commissioned by the Belltable shown on Wednesday and tonight was the first L.I.T. film festival awards. Limerick already hosts a pretty cool and prestigious event for the wee filmy filmers: The Fresh Film Festival. But Simon (firewire) McGuire,(that's his head above, an asset to Limerick if ever there was one,) has organised a separate event to cater for all the media-making adults. Mr McGuire’s event provides a platform for media manipulating students of the Art college, Mary I, UL, and L.I.T, as well as anyone else who wants to have a go, to put their stuff out. Basically, to ‘run it up a flagpole and see if anyone salutes it’. Getting most of the salutes tonight was a vampire movie set in rural Ireland: ‘Nos na ratu,’ which pretty much swept the boards. The clips of it shown weren’t all that engaging, but whaddya know from clips? I’ll put the full results down the end of this rant, soon as I get'em, but first a little about the event itself.
It was technically ambitious, and had a real Oscars feel about it. Sadly, the crowd in the room didn’t seem large enough to justify all this effort, which made parts of the presentation feel over the top. When the production values are big and the audience small, this is perhaps unavoidable, but combined with some technical problems at the start, I couldn’t help but feel that a little simpler and humbler may have been a little bit slicker. Once it started moving, it moved well. The MC was great, and the speeches brief and to the point. For comedy relief there was Limerick uncovered’s Concy Ryan, with his inspirational ‘All this and I’m still on the scratch’ speech.
As for the awards, I’m really in no position to comment because I had thought I was going to see the winning films and not to see the awards ceremony. I was wrong, they showed them during the day so I missed all of the films. Judging by clips wouldn’t be fair so I’ll list the winners and say no more about it, save this:
(Firewire) McGuire’s idea, like all the best ideas, is obvious when you think about it.
As an event, it was ambitious and if it was overly so that’s because it is the festival’s first year, and it hasn’t even figured out what it is yet. The whole evening was in essence a type of rehearsal for the bigger and better event it intends to become. I really hope it does. It’s good for Limerick, it’s good for creativity, and it’s good for life. I recommend if you have a project, then enter it, and if you don’t, then an event like this is exactly the reason to start thinking about one.
From an application process involving forty; the winners were judged from a short list of sixteen as follows:

Name followed byGenre:

Alone in Survival Drama
Books Vs Ebooks Factual
Bottom Dog Factual
Broke Drama
Diva Next Door Factual
Get Even Drama
It Never Happened Arthouse
Latent Adj, Hidden… Arthouse
Nos Na Feratu Drama
Northside Learning hub Factual
Permission to Remain Arthouse
Sola Scriptura Drama
Soul Waves Factual
Sweet Dreams Arthouse
The Eco Village Factual
The Goodbye Bed Arthouse