New year, new category of blog posts to add to the mix: the video vault. Over the years, especially during high school, I’ve made a lot of videos. Some were short fiction films, some were humourous reports of school trips, others were proper little documentaries. While I haven’t had much time lately to make new ones, I loved and still love the filmmaking process. Getting a bunch of friends together and finding an excuse to try out this camera angle or that visual effect – it’s great fun! So, while biding my time until the next foray into film, here’s a look at an oldie.

There’s no better film to start this series with than Fatal. By the end of this year, it’ll be 10 years old. When a high school video competition was announced back in 2004, a few of us creative types banded together and decided to win the competition. My 16-year-old self wrote a script about the topic half the other teams turned out to have written about too: drugs. Heh. Our tale, however, was told non-chronologically, which helped it get noticed by the jury. Add a soundtrack entirely composed and performed by two of our teenage teammembers and, apparently, you really do have a winner!

The film is in Dutch, so readers who are not from the Netherlands will have to make do with watching the pictures, I’m afraid:

All through the competition, photos and videos were made of the workshops and the award show, edited together by the organisation in this overview:

No less than two video reports have been made of the award show itself. The first is by the organisation of Expose Your Talent itself, I believe:

The second report was made by two of our schoolmates, Jeroen Deijkers and Carel Tonino, including an interview with professional actress Victoria Koblenko, who hosted the evening:

Making Fatal – and, let’s be honest, winning Expose Your Talent! – proved to be an important stimulus for me to keep at it, make more short films and pursue a career in creativity. Others in the team are also making a proper career out of what they did in our little film: Roel Dirven is currently on stage in Soldaat van Oranje: De Musical and Romy Coomans is a professional singer now. I’ve a sneaky feeling we’ll see more of them soon, when I look back on another old video…