Originally published in print February 2021.
Shooting a festival-quality film may seem like a rather unrealistic creative endeavour for a student. It can be particularly daunting when you read of “low budget” independent films that cost roughly €1,000,000. Unfortunately for us, most students don’t have a spare million within reach after having to pay preposterous Dublin rent and university fees that already felt like a bit of a rip off before our in-person classes were cancelled. Movie money always appears a little fantastical from a distance, but the costs do add up. A lecturer in one of our film classes last year broke down how much a film that we had been scheduled to shoot at the end of that semester would have cost in the “real world” if we were paying cast and crew industry minimum for their contribution. The total sum for shooting a three-page script that only consisted of four scenes, with five days of prep, three days of shooting and one day of post-production, would have been €23,140.75. This doesn’t even include equipment rental, which can be very pricey. We had to plan our shorts with a budget of €0. Money plants may exist, and they may be beautiful, but they won’t finance your low budget film. This lack of budget can place a huge burden on a young filmmaker who is bursting with ideas and vision, but it can also be a special kind of pressure that forces innovation and creativity. Sometimes, this budget-less creativity can be rewarded by a film festival.
Cáit Murphy, a Senior Sophister student in Film and English Studies, is one such Trinity creative whose cinematic ingenuity caught the attention of festival programmers. She Talks in the Afternoon (Cáit Ní Mhurchú, 2020) is an experimental documentary short that was selected for two film festivals last year, first as a finalist at the Lift-Off First-Time Filmmakers 2020, before going on to be nominated for Best Student Film at HER International Film Festival. The film is a collage of voices, images and reflections, sitting with three friends who meet up and talk in an afternoon in August 2019.
With the high-concept desire to record a conversation in a restaurant or café, inspired by the cinéma vérité films of which she is a fan, Murphy approached several different locations to ask for permission to film, and was grateful to the very accommodating Beanhive on Dawson Street. Murphy made the film with her friends Ren O’Hare and Tilly Driscoll Smith, and they weren’t given a script. Instead, they were prompted to discuss issues important to them: namely, gender, place, identity.
The film was shot on a Sony camcorder, as Murphy prefers the aesthetic quality that it captured over that of a smartphone. She shot lots of footage (about an hour or so of conversation) which gave her plenty of content to edit from and allowed her to be selective of both dialogue and image in post-production. Sound quality can be one of the major challenges on student films, as specialist equipment can be pricey, but bad quality sound can at its worst make a film truly unwatchable (like a certain palindromic blockbuster that did not save cinema). To avoid this, Murphy used a setting on the camcorder to better pick up speech and further optimised the dialogue in post. Ultimately, she did not look for perfection and wanted the street sounds to be an integral part of the finished product. The result is a poetic blend of conversation and diegetic street rhythm, and you truly feel as if you are sat with these friends listening to the fascinating things they have to say whilst surrounded by the hustle and bustle of the world. Those were the days.
In terms of post-production, Murphy relied on the free resources available to her, such as Trinity’s Mac Labs, which all have Final Cut Pro editing software installed. She suggests that “it’s worth making films (especially experimental films or documentaries that are cinéma vérité in style) which don’t require a crew (shooting by yourself, shooting on-the-go, making your own music, editing) and learning those skills.” When finally submitting to film festivals: “be patient. It took a year between shooting and festivals where the film was screened.” Unfortunately, this does usually cost a bit of money, but you can narrow down which festivals to submit to on FilmFreeway by focusing on student film categories, free categories and experimental film categories (if appropriate). If you find the right festival, you won’t need to pay much more than a cinema ticket. Keep an eye out for Dublin University Film Festival (DUFF) from DU Film (running April 16-23), which is open for film students in Ireland, and free to submit to this year.
Whilst Murphy’s creative process is significantly more sophisticated, it is not the only way to shoot a student short to gain industry attention. Mugged Off (Lola Fleming, Peter Horan, Connor Howlett and Grace Kenny, 2020) is a film I co-directed and starred in about a man having an affair with a sexy mug after his first mug lover goes missing in the vast wilderness of St. Stephen’s Green. Seriously. We had a budget of approximately four bus tickets up O’Connell Street during production and four coffees for pre-production while we came up with the idea, shot it on an iPhone using the in-built lens, made it a silent film to avoid having to worry about sound quality, used a royalty free soundtrack, and edited it on a laptop’s free editing software. Last year it was selected for the Dublin International Film Festival’s (DIFF) First Frame student showcase, and it was screened at the Light House cinema in Smithfield. If a film that features me half-naked in bed with a mug can make it to the big screen, who knows where your filmmaking could take you?
She Talks in the Afternoon and Mugged Off are available to watch on YouTube.
Follow @caitmxrphy on Instagram; @caitmurphy10 on Twitter.
