A perfect win
30 Oct 2017
All is not as it seems at Madam Murphy’s orphanage, perfection comes at a cost, and the chilling secret behind the forbidding facade is slowly revealed ...
“It’s about keeping the audience in suspense and revealing the story a little at a time, which is what makes short film in particular a really good way of connecting with an audience,” says Year 13 student and writer Simon Brown. “You don’t have much time, so you have to make every word and action count.”
In a thrilling twist, the Christ’s College and St Margaret’s College short film co-production A Perfect Child won the Best Senior Secondary Fiction category at the 2017 ATOM Awards.
At the Awards, held in Melbourne on Wednesday 25 October, suspense gave way to anticipation as Simon and HoD Media Studies Peter Hewson from College, along with Year 13 student and co-writer Nina Hogg and Head of Faculty, Technology, Trudy Keys from St Margaret’s, waited to hear the results. “We were in shock when they announced we had won, but it was incredible, sensational – and an absolute honour to be able to accept the award on behalf of cast and crew,” says Simon.
Filmmaking is very much a collaborative process, with each person or part, no matter how small, combining to create the whole. More than 65 students, industry mentors and teachers were involved and, from start to finish, A Perfect Child took a year to produce. “It was an amazing opportunity to be able to approach filmmaking in a professional way. By using industry standard equipment and working with and learning from industry professionals in every aspect of the production, we were able to create a very polished finished product,” says Simon.
A Perfect Child stars Tigerlily Perry as Ava, Alice Taylor as Lauren, Eilish Moran as Madam Murphy and Benji Clark as Harry. It was written by Simon, Nina and Year 13 student Henry Seaton, produced by Peter Hewson and directed by former student William Burns, with cinematography by Year 13 student Hugo Beale and original music by Year 13 student Jeremy Lidstone. See it online at http://atomawards.org/2017-student-entry/a-perfect-child/
The ATOM – Australian Teachers of Media – Awards celebrate the best of Australian and New Zealand screen content from both the education sector and industry. Now in their 35th year, the ATOM Awards are one of the longest running film and media awards in Australia.
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