Intel Digital Home Film Competition

Silent Music by Mahalia Belo

The filmmaker responsible for this short film is Mahalia Belo. Having just won first prize for her efforts, we thought we'd quiz her on how the film got made.

How did you find out about the Intel film competition?
I'm a member of a free network for filmmakers and actors called Talent Circle. I receive emails from them regularly and they often have interesting opportunities. The Intel competition was one of them.

What inspired you to enter?
I think I liked the idea of a competition that relied on a good concept. It was open to anyone who was interested in film and it didn't specify any need for previous experience. The first step was to write a treatment for a short. I approached this by thinking creatively and by letting my imagination run, without considering too much about the practicalities of what I was writing. This was quite freeing; I suppose I was inspired to write something for the challenge, treating it as a creative exercise.


Can you tell me about the concept for your film?
Silent Music is a quirky romantic tale about the power of creative communication. It follows Vincent, a young musician, as he moves into an apartment and discovers that making friends with his neighbours is not as easy as he imagined.


How did you come up with this concept?
Well I had been thinking a lot about sound and how we interpret sound waves, vibrations. I was considering what it would be like to be deaf and how deaf people experience music. That was a starting point for me. I had been wanting to write a film that had a romantic content for a while and the story seemed to develop from there.


What has been the process you've followed in bringing your creation from the page to the screen?
This was the point where everything changed. When I found out that we had been selected for the first stage of the competition I went through a range of emotion, the first being elation (with a hint of smug self-satisfaction) through to absolute terror, and confusion. I realised that the story I had written was a bit ambitious, and for about a day I didn’t have a clue how I could create the film in the time given. I was also aware of the amount of help I would need to make the film.

The first step for me was to find my locations. Luckily, I called a friend of mine and went round panicking slightly. She committed to not only letting me use her flat as a location but also to design the film for me. This was great, it meant that I had someone to talk creatively with about the project and we devised a style for the film that really helped me to write the completed script. From that point it was easier to get more help and a cast and crew was formed.

After around two weeks of pre-production, (set-dressing, casting, hiring equipment, finding costumes, finding the rest of the locations) we shot the film over three days. This was a great experience and the atmosphere on set was wonderful; everybody was highly professional as well as being able to have a laugh. They were long days, and the schedule was tight but we managed to get all the shots we needed in camera.

Post production involved editing, sound design, animating and composing the score. We left about two weeks for all of this to get completed, so James Seddon the Editor and Sound Designer, and Matt Curtis the Composer, had a lot of work on their hands. We spent most of the time in front of computer screens. I had to do all the animation as well, which was an integral part of the original treatment. It was a tough two weeks and I don’t think any of us saw enough light, but we were pleased with the finished result.


What equipment did you using to shoot and cut the film?
We shot the film on HDV and then converted it to mini-DV, and we cut and animated the film on numerous PCs and Macs, using Adobe Premiere and Adobe After effects. The sound design and composition was created with Acid.


How do you expect Intel's Digital Home work to affect you, personally, in the future?
I think that this film competition is a brilliant project; it challenges people to be creative. Intel's Digital Home work does the same thing, it gives people a platform to do what they need in an integrated system - taking the personal computer away from the office, or the corner of the room, and placing it into the living area. It opens the doors for more people to work and play and have ideas. More ideas like this from Intel means more products that could help me to work with ease.


What will you do with the £5000 you've won?
Well some of the money will go to the cast and crew who gave up so much time and talent to the project, the rest will probably be put towards making another film that I’ve been devising recently.


What do you think the internship at Shepperton will teach you?
I hope it will teach me a bit more about the ins and outs of the British Film Industry, as Shepperton and Pinewood are really at the centre of any large film being made in Britain at the moment. It would be great to see how the studio system that houses such a creative industry works.

The film

Silent Music is an amazing film to watch - it's hard to believe that it was created by an amateur, with a budget of £500 just. It's incredibly creative, and a worthy winner of the competition. We've hosted the film on the bit-tech servers for you guys to download and take a look at. Let us know what you think of it.

Silent Music by Mahalia Belo

Duration: 8 minutes
Filesize: 29.8MB
Codec: Xvid

Download locations

bit-tech.net Server #1