Filmmaker, Laurie Hill has won the grand prize of £5,000 after being announced as the winner of The 2008 Getty Images Short & Sweet Film Challenge. Laurie Hill scooped the prize at an event held at the AKA Bar in Soho, London on the 25th November, where his short film entitled ‘Photograph of Jesus’ was screened to a very appreciative audience of around 300 from both agency and film. The challenge tasked budding filmmakers with using visual content from Getty Images’ vast collection of archival stills and footage, housed at the Hulton Archive in London, to produce a short film. The brief that the filmmakers received required them to create an original film of between three and five minutes in length, with a minimum of 50% of the content coming from the Hulton Archive.
Basil Stephens was Executive Producer for the Film Challenge, Julia Stephenson from Short & Sweet co-ordinated the directors and the event.
The challenge’s judging panel included creative directors from some of the hottest advertising agencies, namely Bil Bungay, Creative Director at advertising agency Beattie McGuiness Bungay; Graham Fink, Creative Director at MC Saatchi; Al Maccuish, Creative Director at Mother Vision; James Spence, Creative Director at the BBC and Eliza Williams, Senior Writer at Creative Review. Matthew Butson, Vice President of the Hulton Archive completed this formidable panel. The entries were judged against the brief, which tasked the filmmakers with highlighting the breadth, diversity and depth of content available at the Hulton Archive. Foremost in the judge’s minds though was to treat these films as independent pieces of work, drawing inspiration from one of the world’s largest collections of imagery.
