Tam Mỹ Tây festival selections

Last year we seized the opportunity to shoot two conservation stories in Central Vietnam with WWF. 

We're excited to announce that one of those films, Tam Mỹ Tây, has scooped Runner-Up in the Documentary Shorts category at Films for the Forest, judged by BAFTA-winning director Richard Linklater (Boyhood). It will also compete at Ekotop-Envirofilm in Bratislava this September.

The film follows the ever charismatic Mr Dành and his endeavours to persuade his community to help protect  the vulnerable Grey Shanked Douc Langur. It's a love story, and we undoubtedly fell for the passion he and his crew of volunteer rangers shared for their Langur friends. 

With three days to shoot in extreme heat, we're grateful to our largely local crew who led the production with Director, James Thomson, and DOP Josh Guyan. We look forward to its release into the wider world soon.

Learn more about Tam Mỹ Tây, including upcoming festival screenings, over on FilmFreeway.

Melt recognised at Scottish Enterprise Awards

We’ve been awarded Best Full-Service Film Production Company at the Scottish Enterprise Awards 2021.

The Scottish Enterprise Awards highlights a vastly diverse range of exciting and innovative organisations and industries based in Caledonia. The awards programme aims to be a robust and thorough representation of the best businesses throughout Scotland.

During the pandemic we pivoted to embrace animation and archive for our short film work, while developing a pipeline of commercial and non-fiction projects.  Melt founder and director James Thomson said:

“This award recognises the creativity and effort that our team invest in our projects across Scotland, the UK and beyond.”

As we build on this track record and try to push boundaries, we want to send a big thanks to friends, family, supporters and collaborators for growing with us on this journey.

Reflections on Space

Space has long been the domain of sci-fi movies and blue chip nature documentaries that paralyse us over our planet and specie's survival. The idea goes that someone up there (in space, or Government) will save us.

The view of earth from above depicts the ecosystems that sustain life as fragile, beautiful and vulnerable. But do these top-down visions give us agency or take it away, in a time when civic action is urgently needed?

Overused as it has been, this perspective has dislocated filmmakers and audiences from engaging with human driven stories that provoke us to think, feel or do something positive about the crises on our doorsteps.

During Ahmir Thompson's must see feature debut Summer of Soul (2021), we learn how festival goers boycotted the 1969 moon landing in style… Celebrating a powerful fusion of music, dance and culture in Harlem, Apollo 11 was seen as a lavish misuse of public funds.

A race may be on now to harness space for good, exposing environmental and human rights abuses obscured from the public eye. But if we want to change how we relate with the world and each other, maybe we should plant our feet and cameras on the ground more often?

Nucleus development shoot on Isle of Man

We’re excited and relieved to have completed a development shoot on the Isle of Man for our first feature Nucleus, exploring the legacy of nuclear weapons testing between two islands.

Supported by Screen Scotland and produced in partnership with Hailstone Films, Nucleus sees Director, James Thomson, reunited with longstanding collaborator Thomas Hogben (Director of Photography).

Having overcome some tricky weather, it was amazing to finally film with our characters and experiment. We can’t wait to go back for our next phase of filming in the new year.

Stop-motion animation explores Forest Crime

Working with WWF, Interpol and Client Earth, we produced a short film exploring why and how Forest Crime must be tackled in Europe.

The film was made with Gabriella Marsh, stop-motion animator and graduate of the Royal College of Art. Gabi made the process incredibly collaborative, pictured here with us in London shortly after lockdown. 

The short film screened at a European delegation on forest crime this month bringing together stakeholders in law enforcement and civil society. Watch it over on our Vimeo channel.

Requiem for the Anthropocene

As everything came to a standstill in 2020, people began to describe a stronger connection with nature. We felt the bonds between the physical, biological and social tighten around us. Reflecting on a new UN paper Human Development and the Anthropocene, Belinda Reyers from the Stockholm Resilience Centre said:

“Cascading crises like the coronavirus pandemic show that in our hyperconnected, rapidly changing world, environment and human development are no longer separate or separable. They are deeply intertwined”.

That we are wholly dependent on a larger, more powerful and complex organism than our own is a humbling thought that may take years to sink in. As filmmakers, we have a responsibility to help process this and tell stories that embrace this fact of life.

Koyaanisqatsi (1982), with a poignant soundtrack by Philip Glass and no dialogue, is one of the more poetic tributes to the Anthropocene built in our honour. But to communicate new direction and hope for humanity, maybe we need a more empathetic and grounded response?

Temujin Doran’s Sum (2015), a uniquely simple tale from the afterlife, reflects the beautiful and absurd ways that we experience our time on earth. Cloud Atlas (2012) is another meditation on the unseen forces that bind our world. My Octopus Teacher (2020) depicts a valuable healing process that we can all learn something from.

The future of cinema

Sarah Lonsdale from the London Film School interviewed us for her article, The Big Sleep, which explores the cultural impact of Covid-19 on Edinburgh’s historic cinemas.

Close to our heart and doorstep is The Cameo, a beautiful art deco theatre where my grandparents went in the 50s. Sitting in those warm velvet chairs, you can’t deny the magic of bringing folk together to experience the world anew, or the risk of doing so in this new world.

Christopher Nolan’s dedication to the vehicle of cinema is well known, as demonstrated by Tenet, the only major title to hit the big screen in 2020. In The Nolan Variations he touches on what moviegoing means to him as a director, producer and screenwriter:

“The thing that makes films completely unique is the combination of subjectivity - the visceral experience - with shared experience and empathy with the rest of the audience. It’s a borderline mystical experience. You read a novel: totally subjective experience. You can’t share it with other people. You’re in that narrative on your own. The stage has the empathetic experience, but every person views the stage from a different point of view. Movies have this very, very unique mixture of the subjective and immersive, but it’s also shared.”

As we adapt and rework our plans for Nucleus and other productions, maybe it’s a positive step that features can be released simultaneously in cinemas and on VOD platforms? It could lead to a groundswell of support for indie films ordinarily dwarfed by blockbuster releases.

New work in development for 2020

Change is a catalyst for creativity. Embarking on a new project we hired studio space in Maida Vale London this year. We also opened our doors to new people, ideas and communities, as we enter pre-production for our debut feature film, Nucleus.

We’re excited to be co-producing Nucleus, our latest work of non-fiction, with Hailstone Films. Planning is key to everything we do and last month we took over The Ranch in Leith to test out some concepts before shooting begins on the Isle of Man (below) next year.

In other news our producer, Charlotte Hailstone, is celebrating a film she assistant produced being shortlisted for an Oscar. A cerebral and cinematic journey with water as the main character, Aquarela (2019) is playing in cinemas now and can be streamed now on MUBI. 

Melt joins IDFA delegation in Amsterdam

We’ve just returned from a lively week in Amsterdam attending IDFA (The International Documentary Film Festival Awards) in Amsterdam.

Travelling with producer, Charlotte Hailstone, our dutch voyage was enabled by a bursary from Screen Scotland and the SDI, who are consulting for a feature documentary we are developing together.

We met with US and Canadian sales agents and broadcasters, fellow filmmakers, and collaborators from the worlds of music and animation. Out of the 300 films screened and 250,000 tickets sold, Midnight Family (2019) and Honeyland (2019) were our favourites, both distributed by Dogwoof.

The sun poured down on us most days, and the city was a magical place to explore by foot and bike. With 38% of all journeys around Amsterdam are made by bicycle, compared to just 2% here in the UK, we’ve got some serious catching up to do!

Animating for a carbon neutral production

Until Elon Musk completes his global subterranean rail network, flying is sadly the only way to shift us and our film gear between continents. But another crafty solution to lowering our carbon footprint is to animate!

So when WWF asked us to build a short video for their Bankable Projects initiative, we chose to bring together custom animations and recycled film content sourced from WWF’s library and ours. You can watch it here.

Our third animated project this year, Melt led on script development, storyboarding and editing. We were also fortunate to collaborate on this with Blanche Anderson, a leading voiceover artist and Scot!

If you have a hybrid animation-film project in mind, let us know.