EVENT HIGHLIGHTS OF LIVE SHOWS
This category is for the polished edits of any event that uses great camerawork and tight editing to tell a wider and more engaging tale than live streaming. And this year’s winner is a film called Julian Spalding Presents Francis Davison Incredible Art, shot by Jonny Lewis. For Lewis, last year’s overall winner of Filmmaker of the Year, it’s his second win in the 2025 contest alongside his gong for editing. This short film is from a live event at the Goldmark Gallery – featuring art critic, writer, broadcaster and curator Julian Spalding giving a talk on the artwork of Francis Davison. “These scraps of paper, magically transformed, have their place among the genuinely profound art of our times. For, to appropriate a line from TS Eliot’s The Waste Land , each one of them is a fragment shored against our ruin,” says Spalding. The shy and introverted Davison never sought the limelight. He lived to create the work, sustained by the love of his wife Margaret Mellis and the frugal life they scratched for their Suffolk smallholding. Though much admired by artist friends in private, it was not until Spalding championed Davison’s work that the art establishment began to take notice. In 1983, Davison received a major show at London’s Hayward Gallery, which captivated and influenced many – including a young Damien Hirst. Davison died only a year after the Hayward exhibition, and Spalding watched helplessly as the ailing Davison destroyed many of his collages in that final year of his life. This action and the quasi-anonymity of the Hayward show may have contributed to the fact that his brief moment of recognition perished with the artist himself. The winning entry showcases a rare opportunity to see the creations of an artist who many believe should now be at the forefront of 20th-century European art history.
VISUAL EFFECTS CREATING ON-SCREEN MAGIC
Visual effects can include practical and green-screen work all the way through to VFX and virtual production with LED panels. This category is open to anything from old-school in-camera ingenuity to cutting-edge techniques. In a sign of the times, Steven Smith managed to make a stunning promotional reel featuring a McLaren sports car all on his computer. “I was inspired one day when I saw a McLaren speeding on the streets of Dallas, Texas. So that evening, I stayed up until 3am creating this piece of art,” he says. Using Unreal Engine 5, Cinema 4D and DaVinci Resolve, he created visual effects with proper lighting technique and camera positions to make the renders look both realistic and impactful.
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