Preloader Film Festival Final 2010

Back to Projects | Posted on 06 Sep 2010

Planet Chippenham the wild wild-life film from Wiltshire College's HiViz production team was the big winner at Preloader 2010. The comedy role reversal short won the Audience Award and the judges Best Script Award.

Local heats took place in Salisbury, Swindon and Westbury and Chippenham; audiences selected a total of 16 films to go through to the final. The finalists included music video from Swindon, animation from Westbury school children, a sports documentary about unicycle hockey from Salisbury and a host of short features and documentaries. The films were screened to a packed and appreciative audience in the Cove Theatre, Chippenham.

The panel of judges included veteran filmmaker and BAFTA Council member Simon Relph, up and coming feature film director Scott Mann and award winning young director Gurchetan Singh. They commended the festival organisers on the overall quality of the work presented and found it hard to reach a final decision.

Best Film was ‘Worthy’: a music video for Mary Spender exploring dreams, fame and obsession by Eleanor Rogers from Salisbury. The judges described this “a powerful and ambitious piece of work, successfully realised”

The Best Craft Award went to the film that the judges thought had the best technical quality in terms of sound, picture and editing, this went to ‘Running With the Mothmen’ a promotional video for a song by Lighterthief made by Barry Andrews from Swindon. Barry is a musician with an international reputation and this award recognised the high standard of his craft skills as emerging talent in the moving image sector.

Best Story went to HiViz productions for Planet Chippenham for “a clever and well crafted story”. HiViz are a group of first year students on Wiltshire College’s National Diploma in Media. This was their first major piece of work together produced as part of a collaboration with industry professionals funded by Creative Partnerships.

“Preloader has now been running for more than five years and it just keeps getting better.” said Wiltshire College's Richard White who has been coordinating the festival since it started. “The quality of the work improves year on year and I think we get better at putting it on. This year it would not have been possible without all the hard work put in by the student team and our Future Jobs funded assistant Howard Ings. We were really lucky in getting such a strong judging panel: a real BAFTA judge and two film directors as judges took the whole event to another level.”

The winning films were screened at the 175th anniversary celebrations of the making of the first photographic negative at Lacock and are programmed into film society screenings at Trowbridge, Salisbury and beyond.