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A team of students from the Faculty of Creative and Cultural Industries won awards at the 48-hour film festival, which takes place annually in ����ý.

It is a film festival with a difference in that all the films are made within 48 hours, must be 2 minutes long and the contestants are given a title, genre and line of dialogue. This year the theme was ‘Mission Impossible – be spies like us!’ with the line “Do you know what love is? I’ll tell you: it is whatever you can still betray.”

Five final year BA (Hons) Film Production students calling themselves Sleepy Bandits entered the competition and won Best Actor and Most Inspired Prop for their film where two hapless British spies hiding in Soviet Russia devise a plan to exterminate ruthless killer Sergei Kalashnikov. The students are Joseph Stringer, Oliver Mills, Ellie McKay-Cross, Jaspar Cumiskey and James Reilly.

The Judges’ comments for Most Inspired Prop were “The fabulously low-tech Wes Anderson animated cityscape perfectly sets the scene for the daftness that follows. A snappy double act in the great British tradition of Phil and Grant Mitchell and Bodie and Doyle.”  

This year, due to the global COVID-19 pandemic, the film screenings were on Youtube and the award ceremony took place on Zoom. The festival audience was made up of competition entrants and the general public. 

After the film screenings, students and staff from the School of Art, Design and Performance led the online audience into breakout rooms for a virtual immersive experience where there were agent’s briefings and coded messages to solve.

The audience enjoyed the captivating spy experience, which included choreography by Dr Phoebe Rumsey and an original song , composed by Dr Ben MacPherson and sung by Lizzie Hughes, a third-year BA (Hons) musical theatre student.

Dr Matt Smith, who led the entertainment, said: “The students brought great energy to performing their work online via Zoom and are true innovators. It was a great achievement during the pandemic, a really buzzy event and even included a shadow puppet credit sequence!”

The entertainment team won the Best Fancy Dress Award and DVMISSION 2021 producer Roy Hanney said: “The creative team behind the immersive experience created especially for us was brilliant.  For the second year running Matt Smith and his team of staff and students produced an impressive creative response to the brief and set up a wonderfully engaging production for the virtual awards night.”

View this year’s DVMISSION and view the .

DVMISSION is sponsored by ����ý City Council, ����ý, Creative Network South and Mad Dog Television, Tilly Films and Taylor and Francis Group.