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VANESSA CASWILL

Towards the end of her Theatre degree, Vanessa, now 25, persuaded her tutor to let her make a short film instead of performing for twenty minutes. Lucky she did.

"I've always wanted to be an artist - to make visual stories - but I thought film would be too technical," she admits. "It was through trial and error that I realised it was the one medium I could create exactly what was in my head and almost download it."

Fortunately Vanessa overcame her technical fears, shooting shorts for fun on a "crappy Hi-8 camera with friends, creating little moments of fantasy in our spare time." But she maintains that her filmmaking career only really started two years ago: "That's when I shot on 35mm for the first time."

Her main entry to the 4Talent Awards was Pudding Bowl, a neat idea wittily told that taps into a primal, almost unspeakable fear of all children - that of being given a pudding-bowl haircut.

The mark of a great film, in my opinion, is the attention to the smaller details, and every scene of the short was brimming with them - from the circle of hair-cuttings surrounding the young unfortunate victim to the expression on her face that said everything she was unable to express with words.

This attention to detail is borne out in Vanessa's description of her own filmmaking process: "I visualise everything in my head very early on. I could tell you what's on the mantelpiece before we've found a location or cast. Once I've watched the whole film through in my head, I set a realistic deadline and do everything in my power to meet it. I think deadlines are absolutely essential for driving you, and those around you, to work as hard as you need to get a film completed."

Pudding Bowl is an example of simply terrific filmmaking that's entertaining from start to finish, and should give everyone heart that part of the future of British filmmaking lies in such capable hands.

Collaboration is a big theme for Vanessa, who points out that filmmaking is "not like writing a novel or painting. You have to trust and respect the people you're working with to be able to tell the story properly."

"I'm always trying to find a way of capturing other people's perceptions of the world; of how something so mundane to one person can mean so much to another," she concludes. In the famously ego-centric world of filmmaking, that attitude is a welcome one.

CONTACTS

www.vanessacaswill.com
vcaswill@yahoo.com

Judge: Dave Edwards, film critic, The Mirror
Photography: Anastasia Taylor-Lind

Vanessa was one of 20 4Talent Award winners in 2007, our hotly tipped young creatives to watch, to hire and to collaborate with. To meet the other 19 click here