Who are you and what’s your filmmaking background?
We’re Perception Pictures, or more specifically Jade van der Lei (writer/producer) and Josh Tanner (writer/director), and we’re a film-making team from Brisbane, Australia that focuses on long and short-form drama. We’ve been working together since 2008.
What are you working on right now?
We’re developing our Audience Awards entered short film The Landing into a feature length film!
What are you promoting?
Our Sci-Fi/Drama short, The Landing, is now eligible for voting for the LA Shorts Fest competition in the 10 mins and over category. It tells the story of a mysterious UFO landing in 1960 and its shocking present day disclosure. The film became Academy Award qualified when it won the Best Foreign Film Award at LA Shorts Fest 2014.
What do you want the audience to take away from your films?
A deep and enthralling sense of mystery, and an emotional engagement in our characters. We love history and try to play with historical events in a way that we hope piques audiences interest.
What’s your favorite story from filmmaking?
The fact that we discovered an old abandoned movie set from Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns (2006) and incorporated it into our short, film is a great anecdote that we never get tired of telling. It’s largely the reason we were able to pull of the rural American setting here in Australia.
What are your wildest dreams for your filmmaking career?
We love big commercial genre cinema, but also intimate and grounded character driven stories just as much. Our dream is to make films where we find our own balance between the two. Alfonso Cuarón is one of our biggest influences of achieving this middle ground.
What currently inspires you?
The current filmmaking renaissance. There has been no better time to be a storyteller using the medium of film.
What’s your best advice for an aspiring filmmaker?
If you make a short, don’t be in a hurry and rush the script. Production values mean nothing if you don’t have an interesting story to tell. Also consider the running time. Know that anything over 15 minutes is going to limit your festival chances. If you believe your film MUST be over 15 minutes, make sure it earns the running time by being constantly engaging.
Follow Perception Pictures at The Audience Awards.
View and vote for The Landing in the LA Shorts Fest Showcase over 10:00 January 27th- February 10th 2015
The Audience Awards is film’s social network connecting audiences to films, filmmakers, film schools and film festivals. The Audience Awards hosts short film competitions where the audience chooses the best films.
