There’s a Hippopotamus on our Roof Eating Cake
It was almost a year and a half after completing my Bachelor of Film and Television at Swinburne that I had the same closure most others received at the end of theirgraduate year. My major project was writing and directing a live-action adaptation of the classic Australian picture book, ‘There’s a Hippopotamus on our Roof Eating Cake’ and we were nowhere near ready to exhibit what was merely a rough cut (receiving a grade of about 60%) at the end of our studies.
While only having our naive ambition to blame, I could not help resenting all the cheerfully celebrated films at the ACMI graduate screening (of which our film was absent). Feeling like a ghost in my seat, I pondered whether the gamble of our colossal endeavour would ever pay off, or just disappear into the ether. We didn’t know it at the time, but our short film would go on to take the whole next year to complete.
So after much refinement and a personal three month European hiatus, the film finally premiered at the 2011 St Kilda Film Festival to a Saturday night Astor crowd of over 600. The producer Joel Sharpe and I then took off for the UK for our international premiere at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, and are now screening later this month at MUFF (the Melbourne Underground Film Festival). The film has also just been selected for the Tacoma Film Festival in Washington USA (October), which has all lead to further interest from other festivals worldwide.
The Edinburgh trip was particularly noteworthy as we were honoured to hold a forum event for 150 Scottish film students, which included a screening of the film with an in depth Q&A following. It gave us the gratification we’d been waiting for, with a great sigh of relief.
In retrospect, Swinburne could have been well within their rights to push for the completion of the film a year and a half earlier, on the threat of academic failure. This could have also led to the exhibition of a substantially inferior product and the spectacular flaming demise of the whole damned thing. But they didn’t. They gave us the space and support to do it properly.
Thank god for that.
-Written by Jaime Snyder.
For more information, stills and the teaser trailer, see: www.pocketbonfire.com/current.
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