Audience Award for Best Performance Goes to

Danny Ashkenasi in “The Pit and the Pendulum – a musicabre”

at the Romford Film Festival

Above is a selfie I took right before the Q&A after the late night screening of my musical Edgar Allan Poe adaptation “The Pit and the Pendulum – a musicabre” at the Romford Film Festival.

The screening had been especially dramatic. The surround sound system in the movie theater was very immersive, making those sections of the film where voice and instruments can be heard in multiple iterations coming from all corners of the auditorium – left right, left behind, right behind etc. – extra unsettling. I was freaking out a little myself, and I had made the damn film and obviously have seen (and heard) it many many times… At the end of the “Pendulum” section a woman could be heard audibly moaning, and I wondered whether she then left the theater.

Spencer Hawken, director of the festival, said during the Q&A that when they screened my first short “The Tell-Tale Heart – a musicabre” two years earlier he saw another woman exit the theater in the middle of the screening claiming the “sounds were too unnerving”. Which prompted another patron waiting in the hallway to see the current Hollywood blockbuster to say “Oh I want to see that” and go into the festival screening instead. Oh, the unholy things I do with cellos…

Anyway, that is just one tidbit of the post-screening Q&A, which was great fun.

UPDATE: And here is the video of the Q&A. Things get really fun when the other two actors take over and start asking questions of me, and then one of them does a little “performance”:

Spencer Hawken, director of the Romford Film Festival

And here is a video clip of me accepting the audience award for performance the next day:

The festival was running since Wednesday, May 24. I arrived Saturday and watched many films and chatted with many filmmaker colleagues. The quality of the features and shorts was very high at this festival. My short screened Monday at the end of the day, almost like one of those midnight madness horror films. Tuesday evening was the awards ceremony where I received the Audience Award for Performance, a fine capstone to my Romford experience.

Some pics from the awards ceremony:

That’s me with Steven Sibley, the director of “Deadly Display”, who was so intrigued by the description of “The Pit and the Pendulum – a musicabre” he rounded up a half dozen film crew pals to join him in the screening, and ended up being an enthusiastic booster of the film.

Steven and some of his “film crew pals”. To the left is Alan Friswell, the model conservator at the Ray Harryhausen Foundation. He showed me pictures of some of the classic Harryhausen stop motion models (from “Clash of the Titans” or “Jason and the Argonauts”) that he had recently restored. I felt like a kid in a candy store.

Speaking of models, the festival also included movie related stands like this mask building exhibition.

More pictures from Q&As. Above Spencer Hawken interviews director Edward Westrop and co-winner for the audience performance award Alain Cooper from the movie “Claudia”. Below producer Kyle Borg and writer/director Clement Jochem of the horror short “It’s Not About Fear”, which movingly addresses hidden trauma. I spent a nice dinner chatting with them over Kentucky Fried Chicken pieces.