Our second entry into the 48Hours Film Festival. Before we took on the name rip focus, our school team was Bus Stop Studios. The year before we'd made a really bad film, but we'd learned a lot, and I was keen to give it another crack.
We got dealt the puppet genre, which can be a real trap if you don't have an actual puppet. A lot of teams cop out and put strings on a real person, and sometimes that works if you fully commit. We had a proper puppet to play the character, and as far as I could tell, we were the only Christchurch team that year who did.
That gave us a lot of room. Puppet isn't really a tonal genre on its own, so you get to decide if it's puppet comedy, puppet horror, puppet romance. We went stupid simple, with a great little script written by Jamin Greenwood and Seth Hibbert. They also also voiced the puppet, taking turns between them. No one seemed to notice...
Luca Turner shot it for us, and his cinematography was a real difference in the school pool. No other school team's film looked as good as ours that year.
We ended up taking out Best in School for Christchurch, and making City Finals against the adult teams, which almost never happens for a school team. That announcement is sitll burned into my brain. The city finals night was an absolute blast, and a real motivator to not stop entering this competition, ever.
