48-hour wonder

 IS FILMMAKING the new rock 'n' roll? Consider it for a minute. Much in the way that cheaper guitars and amps gave birth to the garage bands of the late Sixties we are now seeing an increase in aspiring filmmakers with the advent of more and more affordable video technology.

 Also the proliferation of cable and digital channels now means that there’s more air time than ever before that needs filling. Where are the next generation of filmmakers going to come from?

 Look no further than the Blue Room - the monthly showcase for new short films at the Cameo that marks its first anniversary next Monday.

 Originally conceived by Edinburgh Mediabase there are any number of reasons why this bold venture should have fallen at the first hurdle - waning audience interest, lack of films, poor quality of the product on show.

 Yet for all its potential shortcomings the Blue Room has taken off in a way that even its organisers scarcely dreamed of.

 Each event so far has sold out (often up to a week in advance), the audience travel from all over the Central Belt to attend and the evening is already programmed with films all the way through to the beginning of next year.

 Devised last year as a means of bringing shorts to Capital audiences beyond the Film Festival circuit, The Blue Room takes its name from the upstairs studio of Edinburgh Mediabase which is painted blue for chromakey camera work (transposing any background image in place of the blue).

 Originally the event was planned to take place at Mediabase’s HQ in Thistle Street Lane as an opportunity for every member of the centre to have a chance for the films to be shown. However, Mediabase co-ordinator Paul Ryan suggested that the evening be taken to a cinema to give the filmmakers every chance to network and discuss possible collaborations.

 If this all sounds like a rather hermetically sealed little club - your mind does tend to envision a group of people dressed in black polo necks and baseball caps discussing the relative merits of various lenses - it is not.

 Mediabase’s remit is a social one with a mission to make filmmaking and the world of film accessible to as many people as possible. It offers access to equipment for anyone who wants to make a film, training for those who want to work in the industry and an audience keen to see fresh, innovative ideas.

 "Our members vary from people just out of school to people working on community projects to people who hire from them commercially for major shoots," says Blue Room organiser Duncan Rennie.

 "And the films that we screen run from grass-roots, one-person movies to fairly big budget productions."

 The Blue Room even offers a regular opportunity for complete novices to make a movie for nothing - The 48 Hours competition. Every month the audience is given a brief for a short film and are asked to sketch out their treatment for it.

 The winner is picked by Mediabase staff the next day and is given the use of a digital camera for 24 hours and a further 24 hours in the editing suite to put their mini-masterpiece together.

 Couldn’t happen to you? - don’t be so sure. Evening News reviewer Jason Hall (filmmaking experience: none) popped into The Blue Room for the first time this March out of curiosity and filled out his brief ("Film must contain a park bench, a banana and a phone call") for a lark and turned these three disparate elements into a magnum opus called Jumbo, a ‘comedy’ (he claims) about "a man who loses his pet elephant and turns to a monkey".

 The next morning Jason got a phone call from Rennie at Mediabase and found himself hooked up with a professional cameraman and an editor to help him complete his film.

 While Jason’s first Oscar is still a good few years away, he is understandably enthusiastic about the experience.

 "It’s a great way for anyone who’s ever even contemplated making a film to just do it," he says. "The great thing about the whole experience is that it’s not at all cliquey."

 Each winner is shown the following month. Last month’s winner, which will be shown on Monday, is by film school graduate Brian Robinson who turned his brief ("Kung Fu vampire fun - must include gore") into a light-hearted horror romp about two vampires swapping drinking tales at a party.

 Robinson credits the experience with re-energising his interest in movie-making. "It’s a cheap and fun way to make a film on a format (digital video) that is becoming increasingly more widespread and accessible," he says.

 "The fact that there is little time to shoot makes you think on your feet a lot more and teaches that compromise might be the mother of filmmaking.

 "I’m sure that even on a well-funded film there are times when you have to adapt your story and situation to unseen problems that might arise. Having no money to shoot a film guarantees you have to adapt."

 Barely a year old, The Blue Room has become such a success there’s talk of organising a similar evening in Glasgow and an evening in the larger Cameo One in mid-December which will show the audience’s favourite shorts from the past 12 months.

 "It’s crucial that the evening expands," stresses Rennie. "The demand is there and it’s vital for grass-roots filmmakers to get their work seen."

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