VisitBrighton Film night

Last night we were at the Sallis Benney theatre for the Visit Brighton film night. The evening was all about how Brighton has been depicted on film, I don't mean in fictional films such as Brighton Rock and The End of the Affair but in tourism films and some early footage from the pioneers of film making. Some of the footage shown included an eccentric man who would keep the visitors amused by peddling his bike off the end of the West Pier and another one where they were experimenting with special effects which showed a man diving off the pier and then apparently jumping back onto his diving board. The films were shown in chronological order from the early 1900s up until the 1950s.

The films shown included a promotional film of Brighton from the '50s. What struck me was that our key messages have not actually changed as much as I expected. The video included the Royal Pavilion, The Lanes and of course the beach. However what surprised me was the range of restaurants on offer and the fact that they used the word cosmopolitan and we thought we were being terribly modern with our marketing strategies, well I guess what goes around comes around, or as the fabulous Dame Shirley would say it's all just a little bit of history repeating! Although I think that is what is so great about Brighton in that while there are always new things happening such as the i-360 there are certain things that will always be here such as the sea and the cosmopolitan atmosphere

The rest of the evening was given over to our film competition. For those of you who don't know, we worked with Final Cut and held a competition for people to film a 60 second promotional short about Brighton. So last night we gave out the three judges awards, the peoples choice award and the runner up prizes, all of which can be seen on our YouTube page: www.youtube.com/VisitBrightondotcom
The People's Choice and third with our judges was Daniel Parsons with Hold Tight: Brighton, second was Drew Cameron with B Right on (you know it makes sense) and congratulations to Tony Moon who won first prize with Brighton's Worst Kept Secret:


If I'm honest I origianlly only went to support our work bit of it but it was actually really interesting seeing all the old footage of Brighton & Hove particularly the aeroplanes flying very low over the beach, I doubt they'd get away with that today! To find out more see the Screen Archive South East website

Charlotte