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Hey all! Before I start my blog discussing The Raindance Festival and Last Rites, I’d to just like to say hello to all the new students starting Acting & Performance at Sheffield Hallam University! Studying at Sheffield was undoubtedly some of the best years of my life, and if you let your passion for arts truly come out, you’ll make some of the best work to remember when you leave, and take pride in the fact you made some great projects for people to enjoy. The best advice I can give is take every opportunity you can, there’s always something new to learn, even when you leave uni. Your lecturers are some of the most supportive people I’ve met, they’ll really push you to give your best, but you’ve got to push yourself as well. I remember performing and rehearsing a Hamlet Monologue with Neil Sissons in 2^nd Year, and those 4 minutes on stage performing Shakespeare is still a treasured memory of mine. Of course, there are lots of great memories from my time at university, such as learning Advanced Acting Techniques with Dr Henry Bell, and being in Dopplegangster’s TREEFXXXERS. If you remain open to learning something new, embrace curiosity, and be your best, collaborative self, you will do some amazing things whilst studying at university.

Now, onto Raindance! So, back in August I was a part of the National Youth Film Academy’s Set Ready Course, which was a course that aimed to bring actors, directors, cinematographers, writers, and a whole plethora of talented, young people together. The aim was make a short movie that would be going to The Raindance Festival, in association with Procam and Odeon. In addition, we would have a movie premiere of our movies at Greenwich’s Odeon in London this October. However, this was delayed to the 10^th April due to the restrictions put in place by COVID-19. Furthermore, The Raindance Festival is no longer a fully public event, but more of an online festival for people to view and stream their movies. This was only a minor setback, and as an actor, you’ll come across them a lot, and when that happens, you’ll find that the best way to deal them is with optimism. Raindance is still one of the biggest film festivals in the UK, and there is so much more than the Festival itself. Raindance hold many events and workshops that support young artists trying to breakout in the industry. So even if, I’m not going to be there, networking and meeting new people, the film is still going to a festival (Yay!) and the premier is still happening. It will probably be a better time for it as well, the restrictions may not be so harsh, and it’ll be a great opportunity to celebrate a film that my friends and I worked really hard to make.

So, onto Last Rites. What is Last Rites? Well, it is a comically dark, satirical mockumentary that investigates the lives of three janitors, Sarah, Nicole, and Daisy. However, these janitors are not ordinary janitors, no, this trio of cleaners are responsible for cleaning the grotesque and disturbing crime scenes, left by The Scorpions, a menacing  criminal organisation. If only our poor journalist Simon Oiseau, and his camera crew, knew what lied ahead when he decied to film their everyday lives of these three for his Documentary series ‘Women in Unconventional Roles’. Will he give the footage to the leader of The Scorpions, The Sadistic ‘Grandmother’ OR will he give it to the two feckless private detectives? (one of them being played by me). I guess you’ll just have to watch it and find out. Filming this project has been extremely good fun.  Working with Adam Dokhan (The Cinematographer) and our two directors Alishah Ahmad and Amber Wright was a thoroughly enjoyable experience. It was a joy being able to play Ronnie Jones, one of the Private Detectives, who I describe as being an amalgamation of Deadpool, Jake Peralta, and PC Danny Butterman, though not as smart, capable, or skilled, just equally delusional. It was fun being able to perform monologues to the camera, to play a character who allowed me to properly improvise and create great situational comedy. There’s nothing more enjoyable than working with people who you can bounce ideas off, because we were all on the same page about what kind of movie we wanted to make, spending months working together on Zoom Calls in lockdown to develop all the characters in this film, it meant we were all ready from the moment the cameras began rolling.

However, even with all our ideas, it was the writing of Oscar Robinson and Ben Archer that truly made Last Rites. Inspired by fantastic mockumentaries such as What We Do In The Shadows and This Is Spinal Tap, Last Rites balances dark themes with humour and ridiculousness in an exploration of how far people in desperate situations are willing to go. This movie essentially satirises society, it questions whether or not society determines people into taking questionable jobs and resorting to crime because of the limited opportunity society provides. Therefore, it is up to the audience to decide whether these three janitors are innocent, or if they themselves are an accessory to the murders they clean up. It is the moral argument of free will and determism, whether a person’s actions are influenced by other factors, such as poverty, poor education, wealth inequality etc, or whether it is purely the individuals decision to go down the path of crime. To conclude this blog, I will leave a link below to Last Rites, which will be available to stream from the 28^th October, along with the other National Youth Film Academy movies I will also leave a link to. Thank you all so much for taking the time to read my blog. I wish all you students at Sheffield Hallam, from first year, to third year the absolute best of luck, enjoy these years, and embrace your own individuality!

https://cinema.raindance.org/film/last-rites-nyfa/

https://cinema.raindance.org/collection/nyfa/