Alfie and Dylan dice with film

 

TWO East Clare teenagers scooped third place in the Fresh Film Festival, which took place last week in Limerick.

Feakle’s Alfie Hollingsworth and Dylan Bickerton of One Cent Productions took the third overall place in the senior award category at the festival with their film Diceman.

Alfie and Dylan, both 17, were selected for their high concept thriller, which was described by the judges as having strong production design and sharp cinematography. “It was a bold production that commanded the respect of the judges,” they noted.

The two filmmakers have shared their passion for filmmaking from a young age and have made a number of films. 

Alfie’s love of filmmaking developed from the age of 11 when “One rainy day, my neighbour exclaimed that he had a Lego animation kit, (created by Spielberg himself) and asked if I wanted to borrow it and try and make an animation”.

Alfie subsequently introduced Dylan to filmmaking a couple of years later and the two experimented with stickman animations and an old DV camera. They share a mutual feeling that working together makes the filmmaking process more enjoyable and easier.

The talent behind One Cent Productions has been recognised before now by the Fresh Film Festival, when in 2012 they were chosen to take part in the Hothouse Project, a programme for young filmmakers to come together to make films.

“I suppose I was chosen because I was lucky enough to have the people at Fresh see something in me,” Dylan said.

The duo’s filmmaking ventures were put on hold when Dylan was diagnosed with cancer.

“At first, obviously, it was a shock and I wasn’t in the greatest of moods or health. My first chemo was awful and I was really sick afterwards. It felt horrible thinking that it would be like that for the next six months,” Dylan said.

His family and friends were a huge help to him during this trying time and Dylan is now in recovery.

“They had a huge impact, because as cheesy as it sounds, sometimes when I was on my own at home just knowing that there were people there for me at any time meant a lot,” he said.

Having bounced back, Dylan returned to filmmaking and he and Alfie entered two films to the festival. The first was a promotional film for Limerick City Council on the Make A Move hip hop festival that took place in July last year; the second was their winning entry Diceman, which explores an average man’s discovery of a dice that appears to control his fate.

Alfie describes their style as Guerrilla or DIY.

“We do everything ourselves and even build our own equipment if we can’t afford it,” he said.
Both Dylan and Alfie hope to pursue careers on film sets in the future, but for now their work can be seen at Fresh Film Festival 2013.

This was the 17th year of the event and is Ireland’s largest young persons’ film festival. It provides a platform for young filmmakers to display their work and meet peers and this year saw an unprecedented amount of entries, with over 450 films screened. The competition to find Ireland’s young filmmaker of year took place in the Odeon Cinema.

Under the creative strand of Ireland’s EU Presidency, the festival welcomed partner organisations from around Europe, who took part in a unique event designed to inspire cross-border and international collaboration through the use of the internet, culminating in the Reel Exchange forum at Mary Immaculate College. The forum was open to anyone working with young people in film.