Howard-Smith's Obsession

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Howard-Smith entered 5 films at BIAFF2016, achieving 5 stars for Where the Guilt Lies .

My Obsession

Having made films for twenty-one years between 1970 and 1990, on standard 8 and super-8, I had a fourteen-year break and resumed film-making in 2005 after realising how digital video technology had moved on. For two years I taught myself how to use camcorders and how to edit on computer using Pinnacle Studio software (which I still use, staying now with version 15). It was three years later that I felt I'd made a film good enough to submit to BIAFF, a fifty-minute thriller entitled Cashflow, awarded 3 stars at BIAFF 2008.

Since then, I've submitted films every year, and my general trend has been to decrease the running times and increase the numbers of films I make.

I'll make a confession. My film-making has in recent years become more and more of an obsession and there isn't a day that goes by without my running new story ideas round and round in my head. My day job (demonstrating and selling mobility scooters) frequently involves my driving several hours a day so I have plenty of time to think. Some of the ideas I have go nowhere. I have many partial stories where I just can't think of a good ending. I sometimes run these ideas past people who frequently claim that the endings of my films have been "predictable"... so it's strange, isn't it, that they can't "predict" what the endings would be to these incomplete stories!

The fact is that I have great drive and ambition to be one of the top amateur film-makers. For some time I've been trying really hard to come up with that brilliant, winning short story that will make it to a Diamond Award. It hasn't happened yet, but "there's always next year..."

I'm not a team player and don't belong to a club. I like each film to be a "Howard-Smith film" in as many ways as possible, so I always do my own sound recording, photography and editing in addition to directing. Although I usually (but not always) devise my own film stories, I do like to hand over to others to write the scripts as I'm aware that others can write better dialogue than me. I come in for some 'stick' sometimes for starting each film with a Hitchcockian profile of myself smoking a cigar - people say it shows conceit - but I'm not going to stop using this logo anytime soon.

Most of my films are dramas and thrillers as they are my favourite genres. So many people have said to me, "Why don't you make a comedy?" Comedies are so much harder to make successfully. Are the audience going to laugh at the film out of politeness? Or are they going not to laugh at all which is even more embarrassing? My attempt at a 2-minute comedy for BIAFF 2016, Marriage Vows, got me my lowest award in years, just 2 stars! This was one of five entries, more than I've ever submitted previously in any one year. My subtitled Russian drama Avoidance, for which I had high hopes of 5 stars or Diamond, languished in the 3-star category. A ten-minute thriller called Pay As You Go also gained 3 stars, and a gentle drama entitled Cara got 4 stars.

But my most successful film this year is the 28-minute thriller Where The Guilt Lies.

This coming year I'm really branching out into new territory, as I'm working on a period drama set in the time of Romeo & Juliet, a musical, a farce, a spooky horror and a drama. Whether they all actually get made remains to be seen...

Howard-Smith