judging & voting

SFF aims to refine filmmaking skills by providing a reliable barometer of skill and talent.

It will include a comprehensive list of established filmmakers and critics. Craft awards will be judged by directors, cinematographers and composers.

For our Internet Popularity Award, the winner will be decided by audience viewership hits on online websites prior to the festival opening.








Simon Pegg

Simon’s outstanding body of film work, includes his own co-written features: 'Paul'; ‘Shaun of the Dead’; ‘Hot Fuzz’.

Other starring roles include the iconic role of ‘Scotty’ in JJ Abrams, ‘Star Trek’; ‘Run, Fat Boy Run’; ‘How to Lose Friends and Alienate People’; ‘The Adventures of Tin Tin : Secret of the Unicorn’; Mission Impossible 3 ; Mission Impossible 4, and Burke and Hare. Simon also provides the voice for ‘Buck’ in ‘Ice Age III’, and for ‘Reepicheep’, in ‘Narnia: Voyage of the Dawn Treader’.

Simon's debut book 'Nerd Do Well' is published by Random House

Jabez Olssen

Jabez Olssen is a Film Editor based in his native New Zealand. He is currently editing two feature films based on the book The Hobbit for director Peter Jackson.

Olssen also edited Jackson's 2009 feature, The Lovely Bones, and has worked for Jackson on both The Lord of the Rings trilogy and King Kong.

Recently Olssen performed additional editing work on Steven Spielberg's animated film; Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn. Olssen has also spent time working in the UK as a Visual Effects Editor.
Before working in features, Olssen edited television drama and got his start in commercials.

Dave Calhoun

Dave Calhoun has been the Film Editor of Time Out London for the past seven years, where he works as an editor and film critic. Before that, he was Deputy Editor of Dazed & Confused magazine. Dave regularly broadcasts on Sky News and the BBC World Service and has written for papers including The Times and The Guardian.

Jonathan Morris

Editor Jonathan Morris began his career as a child actor. After school he worked as a second assistant editor on television series such as The Saint (ITV, 1962-69) and The Champions (ITV, 1968-69), before beginning a staff job at ATV (subsequently Central Television) in the 1970s, where he met directors such as Ken Loach and John Pilger.

His relationship with Loach, which began with the documentaries Questions of Leadership in the early 1980s, continues to this day, and he has edited the majority of Loach's feature films since the early 1990s.

Kevin Loader

Kevin Loader is one of the UK’s most established film producers.
He is currently in post-production on Roger Michell’s “Hyde Park on Hudson”, to star Bill Murray and Laura Linney, which will be released in 2012.
His most recent film is Andrea Arnold’s “Wuthering Heights” (released in the UK in November 2011). Previously, he produced the award-winning “In The Loop” and “Nowhere Boy”, both of which were nominated for Best British Film at the 2010 BAFTA Awards.
His production company with director Roger Michell, Free Range Films, was behind “Venus”, “Enduring Love” and “The Mother”, which won the Europa Prise at Cannes in 2004.
Other notable credits include “The Oxford Murders”, “Brideshead Revisited”, “The History Boys” and “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin”.

Tim Robey

Tim Robey has been reviewing films, interspersed with the occasional interview, for the Telegraph since 2000.
He read classics at University College, Oxford, and was runner-up for best arts journalist in both the Guardian and Independent Student Media Awards in 1999.
He has been a UK media correspondent for Variety, and co-edited The DVD Stack (Canongate), a guide to the best versions of films available globally.
Since 2002 he has been on the jury of the Evening Standard Film Awards, and is also a member of the London Film Critics’ Circle.

David Morrissey

David Morrissey is one of Britain’s best known actors and directors. His stand-out performances include THE DEAL, BLACKPOOL, STATE OF PLAY, RED RIDING, 5 DAYS, SENSE AND SENSIBILITY and, most recently, SLEEPYHEAD, SCAREDYCAT and SOUTH RIDING. This year has also seen David take on MACBETH in the Liverpool Everyman’s final production to great critical acclaim and he has recently completed filming RICHARD II for the BBC and the feature WELCOME TO THE PUNCH. David can next be seen in cinemas in EARTHBOUND.

Photograph courtesy of Perou www.perou.co.uk

Dominic Allan

Having trained in the production and post-production of feature films, television and advertising in UK, Dominic rose in the 1990s to become an award-winning documentary director and producer, making films all over the world such as: Mandela The Living Legend (BBC1, International Emmy Nominee), The Pipeline (BBC Storyville, Cine Golden Eagle winner at Washington), Israel Undercover (BBC2, Foreign Press Association ‘TV Story Of The Year’ & ‘Journalist Of The Year’). His independent feature documentary CALVET premiered this year at Edinburgh International Film Festival and Sheffield Doc/Fest (Special Jury Award Nominee). Dominic now lives and works out of Barcelona.

www.calvetmovie.com
www.facebook.com/calvetmovie

Gary Tarn

Gary Tarn is a film-maker and musician, born in London, England. Whilst travelling, he became captivated by the music of Indonesia, Africa and India, and studied these, alongside the work of European orchestral composers.
A passion for film led to a career as a media composer, and it was a natural progression to start to shoot and edit images of his own.

His debut feature 'Black Sun' was released in 2005; Tarn's most recent project is an adaptation of 'The Prophet', Kahlil Gibran's classic text, with narration by Thandie Newton.

Marc Isaacs

Since 2011 Marc Isaacs has made more than 10 creative documentaries for the BBC and Channel 4. His films have won Grierson, Royal Television Society, and BAFTA awards as well as numerous international film festival prizes.
In 2006 he had a retrospective at the prestigious Lussas Documentary film festival in France and his work has been included in numerous documentary books and academic studies.
In 2008, Marc received an honorary doctorate from the university of East London for his documentary work. Marc is a guest tutor at the London Film School, the National Film and Television School and Royal Holloway University.
His latest film ‘Outside the Court’ recently screened as part of BBC Four’s Justice season.

Lucy Bailey & Andrew Thompson

Lucy and Andrew set up Explore Films in 2008 to make 'Mugabe and the White African', their first feature length documentary. The film secured cinema releases in the UK, USA and France and won multiple awards. It was BAFTA nominated and Oscar short listed.
Prior to that Lucy had 10 years experience as a television director, working in Natural History and Specialist Factual programming.
Andrew is BAFTA and RTS nominated for his camera work, and has worked as DOP all over the world for 12 years shooting on a range of formats from Super 16mm to HD. In 2009 he won a Guild of Television Cameraman award.

Gavin Humphries

Gavin formed Quark Films in 2006 with fellow National Film and Television graduate Anna Higgs. Quark's recent credits include the groundbreaking feature THE PEOPLE VS GEORGE LUCAS, which premiered at SXSW in 2010 and the BBC Wonderland BOY CHEERLEADERS, selected for HotDocs 2011. Currently being completed is the feature doc THE REAL SOCIAL NETWORK.

He's produced numerous fiction, documentary and animation shorts which have played at festivals such as Sundance, Telluride, Clermont Ferrand and Edinburgh. Two of these films were shortlisted for the Oscars.

Prior to producing, Gavin was an actors' agent for five years.

Barry J C Purves

Barry has worked in animation for over thirty years, on TV series such as The wind in the Willows and Rupert Bear, feature films, commercials and his own award winning films that include Next, Screen Play, Rigoletto, Achilles, Gilbert and Sullivan, and most recently Plume and Tchaikovsky.

Barry teaches around the world, and is a regular member on festival juries. He was written two books about animation and the arts, and was recently awarded an Honary Doctorate from the University of Staffordshire.

Alex Williams

Alex Williams is a cartoonist and film animator. His film credits include "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?", "The Lion King", "The Iron Giant", "Harry Potter", and "The Chronicles of Narnia". He has worked for many Studios including Disney, DreamWorks, Fox, Warner Bros, and Sony.

Alex writes and draws the cartoon strip "Queen's Counsel" which has appeared in The Times since 1993, and has published a number of books. His latest book “The Official Lawyers Handbook” is published by Robson Press in October.

Alex teaches animation at Escape Studios in London, and at many other schools and universities around the world.

Nick Bradshaw

Nick Bradshaw is the Web Editor of Sight & Sound magazine; his interests span fiction, documentary, animation, experimental and short films. Previously Deputy Film Editor of Time Out magazine, he has written for publications including the Sunday Times, the Telegraph, the Independent on Sunday and Guardian online, the Village Voice, LA Weekly, cinemascope and Vertigo. He is also a sometime documentary filmmaker, working on an essay film about derelict cinemas in downtown Los Angeles.

Simon Quinn

Simon Quinn has been working in the Stop-motion animation field for 21 years and heads Bigfatstudio. He started at Spitting Image as a puppet maker in 1987 and discovered stop-motion whilst working at Film Fair in 1990, with classics such as 'The Wombles' and 'Huxley Pig' under his belt he formed a model making company 'The Puppet Factory'. In 2002 he re-booted and line-produced the new series of 'Fireman Sam' (CBBC) and two series of 'Hanna's Helpline' (Ch5 Milkshake) before moving onto Wes Anderson's critically acclaimed, Academy nominated 'Fantastic Mr. Fox' (20th Century Fox). He is currently line producing Tim Burton's new stop-frame feature 'Frankenweenie' (Disney) due for release in October 2012.

Trudy Bellinger

After gaining her Expressive Arts BA, Trudy won acclaim as a photography/film installation artist, before becoming a driving force at the groundbreaking Powerstation, BSB’s Music Television Channel. She then progressed to producing music videos, and was approached by EMI to head their Creative and Music Video divisions, which led her to directing. She has since worked on many music videos and TV campaigns, and is also rebranded Sky Living channel. Her spectacular video for Girls Aloud’s Sexy No No No won the Virgin Media Award for Best video of 2007 and her video for Russian superstar Dima Bilan won three awards including best video at Russia MTV MVAs.

Trudy is also the Executive Producer of Merge UK, the Music video arm of Crossroads Films.

John Hardwick

John Hardwick is an accomplished television, film and theatre director.

His commercials include brands such as Sony, Umbro, Radio 1 and a multi- award winning campaign for Anti-Drink Drive.
John has worked in theatre for many years; his critically acclaimed shows have toured Europe and had stints at International film festivals including the Edinburgh Festival.

He is very well known within the promo industry and has directed music videos for Travis, Blur, New Order, Arctic Monkeys and Manic Street Preachers amongst others. He has also directed several shorts and a feature film. John is based in London and is represented worldwide by HLA.

AlexandLiane

Alex Large and Liane Sommers, have been working as visual artists since 1997. Each having studied performing arts and theatre design respectively at Nottingham Trent University. They moved to Berlin in 2000, where they continued to develop ‘site specific', music driven performance events and installation artworks, which they have presented internationally.

Alex and Liane are most known for their unique and inventive work in the music video world for acts such as Kylie, La Roux, Tiga, Mika and German band Deichkind. They also have incredible experience in live performance and installation of Art funded projects for the established institutions of: The ICA, London; Tate Modern; The Berlin Biennale; Documenta X; Sean Kelly Gallery, New York; Walker Centre for the Arts, Minneapolis; Volksbühne and the State Opera in Berlin).

www.alexandliane.co.uk
www.alexandliane.com
info@alexandliane.com

The awards

Get in touch

Feel free to contact us any time
with any questions you have.
Email us here.


Or


CLICK HERE TO SUBSCRIBE
TO OUR NEWSLETTER