Blue Mountains Youth Film Festival

My short film 'An Alien's Alien' was shortlisted in the Blue Mountains Youth Film Festival (BMYFF) and therefore was screened at the Edge Cinema in Katoomba on the 20th of October.

My film was about a human who was troubled by a thing that is unknown to the audience. She finds comfort when looking up at the moon and unbeknownst to her, there is an alien on it looking back. The alien finds herself in the same situation as the human and is terribly sad. They never meet but form a connection despite the distance of their homes and give each other the power to carry on.

When creating 'An Alien's Alien' I went through many processes. I have a scrapbook which includes my previous short film 'The Traveller' and in this book I formulated my plan by making an original screenplay, drawing up and storyboard and character design. In 'The Traveller' I discovered that my film crew was too large. This is why I enjoyed making 'An Alien's Alien' because it was solely me and my sister; Siobhan Humphrys. If I couldn't film a particular scene then she would and vice-versa. All the editing was my own but when it came to her make up, (in which I wanted her to have four eyes), my oldest sister Annalisa did the work.

I originally didn't want to act in this short film because I had in done so in my last film and being surrounded by my friends caused me to not take it seriously. This greatly affected certain scenes and the length of my movie. I wanted Siobhan to act as both the alien and the human because I believed it would create a nice theme for the movie such as; "we aren't all so different in the end". But she struggled with learning all the lines in such a short period of time (which was less than a week). She found it so difficult due to the way it was written. Just before creating the screenplay, I read 'Frankenstein', causing the dialogue to be a bit over the top. To halve the work load, I decided to play the human and found my performance was much better with just Siobhan filming.

In the future I want to be a film director and screenplay writer. I am inspired by Tim Burton and Baz Luhrmann and my aim is to work as hard as I can and with any opportunity I can get to become at least a fraction of how successful they are. I'm very thankful that I was chosen in the BMYFF as this has encouraged me to progress with my film making and try get into the top two spots next year.