Last night, our short film "Unseen City" was a finalist in the 8th annual Smiley Charity Film Awards at The O2 in London.
Although we didn't secure a win in our category, the Longform Under £500,000 Award (for entries over 8 minutes long and the annual turnover of £500,00), MYWORLD reached the finals, surpassing 80% of the entrants. Thank you to everyone who voted for us!
The MYWORLD team consisted of Tom Sweetland (the director and producer) and Wayne Chin, who shared his experience of homelessness in Unseen City. Editor Tom Sales, who also produced our MYLONDON promo video and YouTube shorts for us last year, couldn't make it.
We love the concept of the Smiley Awards. In the programme they say: "In a world yearning for change, Smiley News is an antidote to the negative mainstream narratives. Our MYLONDON project and photography mentoring group is all about focusing on the positives.
If you would like to see the winning films, please check out this page where you can see them.
One of the powerful ones was Fair Checks, a campaign to let past offenders erase records of past offences because they have done their time.
Another was Our World 2030, which imagined a world that understands people affected by autism.
There wasn't time to show all the films, so only the winners of each category were played to us while the participants made it up to the stage to collect their awards.
The winning films were all powerful and gave us inspiration for how we could produce our promotional film for MYLONDON this year. They all seemed to have one thing in common: they were very focused on their messages, whether it was protecting hedgehogs or explaining dementia or autism.
While we didn't get the award, we're very happy with Unseen City which follows Wayne Chin around the City of London as he takes photos for the annual MYLONDON contest. It also features a few more participants in the project, including Nisha who was made homeless after a domestic abuse situation and Kevin who explains that it was only when he crouched down to take a shot of a man's colourful trousers on Tottenham Court Road did he realise that was a view he saw regularly when he was a rough sleeper.
READ A RECENT ARTICLE: Paul Ryan wins Hero of Photography Award
Here at Cafe Art / MYWORLD we have produced quite a few short films over the past 12 years. The one that went viral, in 2015, is interesting to analyse. Even though the 2015 film on the Cafe Art YouTube channel shows 25,000 views, the crowdfunding Kickstarter webpage statistics shows more than 250,000 views from when it went viral via 200 media channels globally in August 2015. There must have been something that worked, although trends have changed with more use of TikTok and other new ways of seeing social media.
In a few months, during the MYLONDON contest, we will be creating a new short film!
Below: Xavier Quadeer talks about his photo, an RPS mentor explains the camera and the cover of the 2016 MYLONDON calendar from the 2015 promotional film.
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