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Team JumpCut

Director Wes Roberts, above-the-line crew Chris Friday, Paula Heap, and Lisl Liang, together with other talented members of Team JumpCut (including our very own Christine Alexander!) who created “Crime’s A Cookin’” for the recent 48 Hour Film Project competition in Tampa-St. Petersburg, were on hand for the Awards Event Friday August 8. Team JumpCut’s production of Crime’s A Cookin’ swept through the awards ceremony, taking repeated honors time and again, which included:

The Top Honor -
"Best Film" of the Competition, which means it will now go on to Filmapalooza in San Jose CA to represent the Suncoast in the International-level competition.

Plus, “Crime’s A Cookin’” also won "Audience Award Choice," "Best Choreography," "Best Costumes," "Best Original Score" and was nominated for "Best Direction," "Best Editing."

Team JumpCut drew the “silent movie” category, which meant they had a mere 48 hours to create their project in that style. A lesser group of dedicated filmmakers may have found this daunting, but Team JumpCut came through with proverbial flying colors, as evidenced by the five wins and two additional nominations.

Director Roberts says, “Making this film feels like we were handed a gift. Everything came together with perfect serendipity; an incredibly dedicated cast and crew of inexperienced volunteers, a unexpected genre we were suddenly required to embrace, and then to be awarded both the Judge's and the Audience's awards for Best Film - it's just incredible."

The 48 Hour Film Project competition requires that a five-to-seven-minute short film be created and completed – including developing the concept, writing the script, structuring the cast, costuming and set-design, filming, editing, titling, and even an original soundtrack -- within the consecutive 48 hour total time period. The competition begins with each team randomly drawing a genre for their film, and being assigned other distinctive elements such as a line of dialogue or a specific prop to be used in the film.

Roberts' fielded almost thirty volunteers as cast and crew for his Team JumpCut. The team received the genre of "Silent Film" and created the award-winning six and a half minute film, "Crime's a Cookin'", styled after the Keystone Kops comedies of the 1910's. The entire film was shot in and around downtown Sarasota using seven different locations. The entire budget for the film was approximately $300, plus a similar amount that was spent on the subsequent wrap and screening party.

“An indie short of this winning caliber would easily cost in the thousands-of-dollars-range to create,” says Jeanne Corcoran, Director of the Sarasota County Film & Entertainment Office. “But due to the incredible people who pulled together on Team JumpCut to make this happen so well, so fast, they did this all for pennies on the dollar in actual hard costs. Bravo!”

For more information, contact filmmaker Wes Roberts via email