Darren is an independent British film maker, he is well known in the industry for editing, directing and producing all things short film. Coincidently, he is also step dad to one of the students in our class, therefore we were advantaged to have him come in to speak to us and share his knowledge mainly surrounding British short films.
In the two hours Darren spent with our class, we spent watching several short films that he had either produces, directed or editing, and in some cases done all three. Every short film he showed us, he would explain in detail what challenges he faced, what inspired him, and also how proud he was. It became very clear after a short while that working in the film industry is very exhausting and competitive, however Darren's passion shone through when he responded to a question 'this job is a passion, what I do day to day enables me to challenge my creativity and that anything is achievable, the only thing stopping something coming to life is you'.
Although all the films he showed us were on low budgets, or even zero budgeted it wasn't obvious at all. He explained that in order to be successful on a low budget, you have to be a person that people want to work with for free. A lot of the time Darren had to rely on friends, co-workers or family to help out. Similarly he would use old props and paint them to make them look new, or raid charity shops to find low cost clothing.
As a class, I felt that everyone could really relate to what Darren was telling us. In some way or other, we have all made our short films on a zero budget and used what we can to make it as successful as we can.
One aspect he spoke about was the editing and he told us about the story where he was editing part of a advert I believe for a company and the producers and directors shot the footage they wanted and gave Darren a short amount of time to edit it all together. This at first I thought was understandable as everyone is working on a countdown to get films and adverts out and published however it wasn't until he started to speak about editing until I understood why it was impossible to get it done in time. He said ''it takes 1 hour for every 1 minute of filming to edit'' therefore say if she was editing a movie, it would take him over 100 hours to edit the film together therefore the editing is the most time consuming process of the whole cycle.
Here blow is a link of Darren S Cook talking about the short British film ''Three''. When we was looking and watching some of his short films, it was apparent to me straight away after watching them that ''Three'' is my favourite out of all of them, just because of the comical elements. The plot is so simple, however so funny and the simple storyline just makes the audience interact with that's going on and make them enjoy and appreciate short films.
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