Harley Davidson and 303Lowe launch The Open Road Film Festival – entries open till Oct 6
Harley Davidson and 303Lowe have created a film festival with a twist – The Open Road Film Festival.
In collaboration with FINCH, director Gregor Jordan (near left) and actor/producer Bryan Brown (far left), the festival was born out of the brief for Harley-Davidson’s new 24-hour test rides, and the thought that you can now ‘wake up with a Harley’. It invites filmmakers to use the end sequence shot by Jordan as the start point for their film, and then create the 24 hours that leads up to it.
The festival is calling for entries up to 6 minutes in length including the closing sequence. Jordan has carefully crafted the ending to be filmic, yet achievable on a lower budget – whilst also avoiding any perils like recognisable talent.
Films submitted to the Open Road Film Festival will appear online at openroadfilmfestival.com where a panel of industry experts including Brown and Jordan will judge the submissions based on film craft, storytelling and originality. A people’s choice award will also go to the film that receives the most votes from the viewing public.
Says Brown: “The more opportunities for young Australian film makers, the more creative the Oz film industry can be. The Open Road Film Festival is fantastic because it has the potential to help new directors get noticed. The prizes are pretty good too.”
Says Jordan: “This festival has a very cool exercise in film making at its heart – one ending and a thousand different beginnings. I can’t wait to see what people will come up with.”
As chief sponsor for this new festival, Harley-Davidson has offered a bike to any filmmaker as a prop for 24 hours. The winning film will receive a Harley-Davidson Iron 883 and a Canon 1Dc body, with runners-up and people’s choice sharing in a raft of other Canon professional DSL bodies and lenses. A total of ten films will be short-listed for competition.
Says Simon Langley, ECD 303Lowe: “With fantastic partners involved, we’ve created a festival that will not only help young film makers get a start in the industry, but generate content that showcases the adventures anyone could have with 24 hours on a Harley. I look forward to seeing the finished films.”
Client: Harley Davidson
Agency: 303Lowe
Executive Creative Director: Simon Langley
Associate CD: Richard Berney
Associate CD: Steve Straw
Creative: Helen King
Designer: Paula Cardona
Sean Ascroft – Head of TV
Matt Clarke – Head of Business Manager
Kristy Cruickshank – Business Executive
Nic Chamberlain – Head of Digital
Matt Pratley – Executive Producer
Peter Herekiuha – Lead Digital Designer
Baptiste David – Digital Designer / Photographer
Federico Barera – Lead Developer
Atul Narang – Developer
Jonatan Morales – Digital Media Strategist
Liz Starke – Digital Media Director
Production Company: FINCH
Director: Gregor Jordan
Executive Producer: Rob Galluzo
Executive Producer: Michael Hilliard
Producer : Sophie Thiellon
27 Comments
Hey, very cool idea and lovely website. Well done to all involved.
Wow, a helmeted bondage victim, a sexy female silhouette, a motel, some handcuffs, the Queen of Hearts, and a stolen Harley Davidson.
With an amazing third act like that, just imagine how great the endless number of alternative films, all with that same mind-blowing finale are going to be . . . a whole festival’s worth of cracking good fun, “one ending and a thousand different beginnings”.
We can hardly wait, and gee, isn’t this Branded Entertainment we’ve all been looking forward to in the ad world really exciting?
Don’t know if the big thinkers at Lowe303 or Finch ever considered this, but wouldn’t the results have been a bit more interesting if they’d given everyone the set-up and let them imagine where it goes and how it ends? Just a thought.
hogfest
If that turns out to be Toby Withers under that motorcycle helmet, I’m guessing that the tens of people who sat through all 22 episodes of The Great Crusade (and that probably includes the post crew) are gonna be absolutely ropable.
Branded definitely, entertainment, only in the imagination of a marketing executive, and a few of the cheerleaders in production.
Gold at Cannes though, which actually got more laughs than the series.
Nice one FINCH, don’t listen to the Tool in the Coal mine. Maybe wave at them from the stage when you win again at Cannes next year for Branded Entertainment….
The set up for this ‘festival’ is like a bad comedy skit, or a good Christopher Guest film.
I mean, they give you the ending? WTF? and a not very interesting ending at that.
Someone, in some meeting, at some point, must have said, at least to themselves if not out loud, “but the endings are all going to be the same, so a minute or so before the end of every one of these short films, the audience will lose interest because they’ll not only know what’s coming, but they may have sat through it once or twice before they just refuse to look at any more versions of the beginning. No matter how good some of these entries may be at getting to the bit we know, people are just going to be numb, and bored shitless. Aren’t they?”
Then again, it’s ‘branded entertainment’, so the bar is pretty low. Can’t help but think that this format sounds like the brain child of a marketing exec and a B.E. producer sitting around brainstorming over drinks. Here’s a hint, take a writer along next time you go barhopping.
Reminds me very much of the comp CB and Silverscreen ran years ago. They published an image of a bloke holding a toilet brush on the cover of CB and called for creatives to write a script around it. The entries were judged by Steve Henry and the winners were shipped off to Cannes.
Nice thinking overall.
Given someone not too amateurish with a camera, perhaps some decent, interesting entries as well. Film craft is a criterion, so hopefully people take the cue.
Mr. Spinal Tap, I think you’ve attaching too much importance to the fact that the ending is a given. Seeing how people get there supplies the interest, methinks, even for people outside award juries. And writers and barhopping? Pah, they talk too much even when they’re sober…
@Chestnut In A Coal Mine, or should we call you the site’s webmaster? apologist? or just the executive producer?
The problem with Branded Entertainment is that in order for it to work for a brand and certainly for an audience, even a web audience, it actually has to be entertaining.
While they may talk too much for your liking, even when sober, that essential entertainment part of your project will require a writer. The fact that you feel there’s “too much importance (attached) to the fact that the ending is a given” tells us you’ve been drinking without one so far, and the results are sadly telling.
Love it. Nice one Hilliard you big hunk of man flesh.
I’m not sure you even understand what’s going on, mate.
a) The entry films are six minutes long. About 90 seconds are supplied already, i.e. the ending. Your argument is that “No matter how good some of these entries may be at getting to the bit we know, people are just going to be numb, and bored shitless. Aren’t they?”
Er, no, that really depends on how good the 4.5 minutes leading up it are. Because you’re telepathic, you know already that each and every entry is going to be shit. Congrats on your uncanny foresight, now go play the stock market. Each and every person watching or judging these entries already knows what the ending is. By definition. Geddit? By…definition. That eliminates the chance of a twist in the ending…by…definition. Hence the challenge, creatively. Becos dat is de mekaniks of de kompetishun. OK?
b) “That essential entertainment part of your project will require a writer”. Will require? This is crowd-generated content, so why? I can’t grasp whether your point is:
a) branded entertainment is enhanced by being scripted by writers, or
b) the mechanics of this project would have been enhanced by getting a writer involved initially, because “a marketing exec and a B.E. producer” would be incapable by themselves.
Either way, you’re wrong. Doritos Superbowl commercials in the US are crowd-sourced and are excellent. In the second case, why is a writer better than a content strategist, art director, designer, suit, media planner, anyone else with ideas?
Now, get a grown-up to explain this to you, and don’t sit too near the speakers, it’s bad for you. There’s a good lad.
If only more clients bought work like this we’d all have more fun. Nice one guys.
@Spinal Injury
The contest of making a short film with a set up, or a requirement, and a specified time limit has been done again and again, and we’re guessing that some clever lad, like the intrepid EP here said, hey, what if we reverse the idea and give ’em the ending.
Lightbulb!
Well, those ‘content strategists’, whatever the fuck that is, (does anyone really know what that term means, other than marketing school self-annointed whiz kids?) were more than eager to embrace the new, whether or not the new had any validity, and and everyone swallowed the Kool-Aid and jumped on board, yes the suits and the media planner and all the little wannabe creatives were part of that scrum too, but not before some research of course. We can just see the looks on their faces.
Of course no one was suggesting that the entries needed a writer, although that would be a helpful skill for the young filmmakers, but a writer might have been of some use in this conceptual phase, along with some work on that third act you shot.
Now somehow, several hundred years of narrative storytelling are going to be reversed by Harley and Lowe and Finch with the help of some eager amateurs and they’re going to make compelling ‘content’ (whatever happened to storytelling and image making by the way, content sounds like any old shit that goes in the container, and curiously makes the container or the delivery mechanism the valued star . . . really clever, if you’re an accountant) that asks an audience to be entertained by a variety of set ups and journeys when they already know how it ends. Good luck, and by the way, if the ending had been a little less cliched, maybe this genius proposal of reversing the shorts contest would be a little more interesting.
Yes, Mate, we, the grown-ups, do understand what is going on, and it’s not pretty.
While we’re at it, let’s just get rid of these writers and creative people altogether and ‘crowd source’ our ideas, like that genius Doritos work, you know, use unpaid and unskilled everymen (‘users’) because who really needs skills to come up with a clever idea for film and tv anyway, anybody can do that, right? Sounds like the Tim Robbins speech from Altman’s ‘The Player’.
This from the same crowd that made ‘The Great Crusade’. Despite the Gold at Cannes awarded by a jury of the same sort of disciples of ‘branded’ that love this shit, well enuff said, and that one did have a writer . . . presumably, although.
“why is a writer better than a content strategist, art director, designer, suit, media planner, anyone else with ideas?”
One sentence that completely sums up why there is so much rubbish being produced. So as a creative, your ‘e cool with me presenting my media planning ideas? No. I didnt think so. But dont worry. I wont cause Im smart enough to know what my skills are, as against every goddamn f-king suit/client/strategist who bought a 5D or watched a series of Breaking Bad and thinks they are a creative genius.
This isn’t “. . . Benjamin Button” where you’re so taken by who he is that you’re dying to know how he got there.
The idea that whatever precedes the this bog-standard story of a semi-sexy female who’s handcuffed a helmeted man to a motel room bed, stolen his Harley, and driven off leaving him the keys to the cuffs stuck to a Queen of Hearts playing card is somehow going to be so compelling that an audience will want to wade through even the finalists, all the while realising that they’re going to have to see the daytime Soap/Soft-Core Porn quality finale one more fucking time just beggars belief.
Ass to fanny describes this concept perfectly, and the idea that it was all driven by a cabal of suits, marketing execs, branded entertainment producers, and media strategists desperately looking for something to marry to Harley’s money is all too believable.
A great brand deserves better. Hey, maybe try making a great tvc, now there’s a concept.
Bryan looks like he’d rather be anywhere but doing that promo.
‘I’ve done my 10 minutes, now pay me and let me out of here.’
Maybe he just saw the end sequence for the first time. It had to be an unsettling experience for an actor of his stature.
Maybe after ‘Australia’ and ‘Cocktail’ it’s not so bad.
@Back In
Yeah, let’s just write a TV ad. That would be so much better for the industry and our clients. You’re probably a ‘consultant’ now right as you lost your job a few years back? If you didn’t, you’ll be losing it soon with that mindset.
@Not an old ad wanker
If this is the future you and your mob are envisioning for advertising, ‘user generated content’ that you’re all trying desperately to sell to your likeminded marketing chums, the suits, the strategists who can’t speak a sentence without it containing the word digital, or branded entertainment, then you’ll all be out of work when the audience wakes up one day to realise that it was a scam and that a new delivery channel without any compelling stories to tell is all style and no substance.
Sponsorship of ideas and images and stories and events that people want to watch, read, participate in has been a part of advertising for a very long time, but the founders of the industry realised that what they put out there for a brand had to be engaging, had to connect on an emotional level, at least the good ones did, and that when the work is too obviously branded and not that entertaining, people see it too blatantly as advertising, huckstering, and they turn the channel, or get off the site, or tune out altogether because it’s just noise at that point.
Once you’ve seen a cat using a toilet, you don’t really want any more of the same, and if ‘users’ by and large could make compelling stories, then everyone would be writing for film and tv and the web, but it’s not that easy, it’s a learned skill, like science, and finance, and medicine, and not not everyone can do it.
It’s not the grocery store that’s important, it’s the groceries, and thankfully this opinion is not age specific as there are plenty of young people in the industry who don’t buy into the digital revolution and the attempt to turn their creative skills into just another pile of ‘content’ any more than the ‘old ad wankers’ you and yours are so fond of slamming whenever someone objects to your allowing the accountants to run the creative shop.
…when people logged on as “Meh” and their actual posted comment was…”Meh”.
Hooray for Good for all ages. Exactly true. The only reason the “likeminded marketing chums, the suits, the strategists” love platforms is they can codify and understand them in their small linear minds. Unlike a story, which they cannot process until it is made and in front of them….ie almost impossible to commission. Plus also there is a whole plethora of useless jargon and metrics they can learn if they embrace ‘digital and content’. I dont think it will be long before the clients realise that the suits that smile so sweetly at them are just trying to fleece them yet again.
Bryan Brown was awesome… in the eighties!
Enough said.
“It’s the chance for more young Australian film makers to..zz.z..z..z..z……..z”
Just another way for more tedious stuff to be produced under the banner of ‘content’.
@good for all ages
Why don’t you just wait and see what they produce with the campaign instead of being a bitter hack. The industry will be a lot better for it…
You gotta love the sponsors of these marketing initiatives when the best they can come up with as a response to anyone who doubts that their endeavour is sincerely likely to produce anything of any creative value is to label the doubter a ‘bitter hack’.
If the industry is seriously going to be better off after the Open Road Film Festival, that may say more about the sad state of the industry than anything can really.
A ‘hack’ by the way is defined as ‘a person, an artist or writer, who exploits, for money, his or her creative ability or training in the production of dull, unimaginative, and trite work; one who produces banal and mediocre work in the hope of gaining commercial success.’
Now that would on just about every level apply more to the creators of this little commercial gem than to anyone who might call it into question.
As far as bitter is concerned, after seeing a few too many of these ‘branded entertainment’ projects, who wouldn’t be as they leave a decidedly bitter taste in one’s mouth.
Wait and see? Sure. Wait and see, and we all will. Vroom vroom. Or as the great Sam Fuller said, “a boy, a girl, a little problem, a big problem, action!”
@patient one
We’re patiently awaiting a re-write on that :90 ending.
The girl drives off with his Harley, and the guy, the mystery man with the helmet still on, finds the key to his handcuffs attached to the Queen of Hearts. As a screenwriter, someone’s going to make a brilliant marketing manager. The mob that concocted this little gem would make Zalman King’s ‘Red Shoe Diaries’ look like ‘Double Indemnity’.
The website leads with ‘this is the end’. Couldn’t have said it better . . . the impossible task of creating 4:30 that will somehow make sense of, illuminate, save the final :90 from the ridicule that is its destiny. The living end.
Scorsese, Coppola, and Spielberg could enter this contest, Christ reanimate John Huston, John Ford, Frankenheimer, Cassavettes, all the Johns in film history as a team, and they’d all fail to resuscitate this DOA.
One consolation, however, that Trop Fest may no longer be the most painful short film festival to sit through (and how is Open Road a festival exactly?), so expect a nice card from Polson over at Lowe any day now.
This may do for the brand what ‘The Marlboro Man and Harley Davidson’ did back in the early 90s, along with burying a few careers, some in their infancy.
The Marlboro Man and Harley Davidson is an awesome movie.
Can we get a link to a Finch blog that can educate us as to what is good and award worthy? They seem to have a different criteria that is difficult to understand – other than praising your own work and laughing at your own jokes. What’s the secret?