Meet The Creature from the Bag Lagoon in eco-warning film!
Felpham-based film-maker Kevin Short will be showing his ten-minute short The Creature from the Bag Lagoon at the Chichester Cinema at New Park for this year’s Chichester International Film Festival.
Kevin is promising a humorous warning about what might just happen if we don't recycle our plastic bags. The film has been programmed as part of the short film showcase on Wednesday evening August 20 in the main auditorium during the festival.
“My partner Kathryn is American and over the last ten years I've spent three months of the year in America. While I was over there we decided to make some short films. We concentrated on eco-friendly films.
“It just so happened that we had started recycling our plastic bags in this country but people in America still don't. You still get lots and lots of plastic bags in America. It's just crazy. So just before Covid I went over there and made this film which is a warning, a gentle humorous warning about what might happen if we don't recycle plastic bags. In short, the plastic bag monster will come out of the lagoon and come and get you! That was the premise of the film and it's actually done very well. We have won a few awards with it.
“This particular short is ten minutes. And I think when you're making a short, you’ve got to remember what it is that makes a good feature film which is to edit, edit, edit and edit. The original film was 20 pages long which would have been 20 minutes but once we had shot it, we realised that we had to make it punchier and so we edited it to ten minutes. If you see a short film that's three minutes or six minutes or even 40 minutes, you can guarantee that the original would have been twice that length but that it is much better for being shorter.
“It is all live action, and I play the creature. I had to be covered in plastic bags for almost a week. It was exhausting in the Florida sun. I literally had a plastic bag suit made up of black plastic bags, and then on top of that every kind of American plastic bag that you can imagine was stuck. I was covered in about 100 plastic bags and remained like that for the best part of four or five hours a day.
“But it's good. The film's had some impact. People were saying afterwards in Florida that they were being good and that they have started to recycle their bags which is really not a very American thing. You can still go to supermarkets and come away with half a dozen plastic bags every day!”
Kevin is also at the Edinburgh Fringe this August with Samuel Beckett’s 1958 one-act play Krapp's Last Tape (Lime Studio at Greenside @ George Street).