Want £50,000 to make a short film? Here’s how you can win it

The latest project in the Bombay Sapphire Imagination Series, will give not just one but five people the chance to make a short film with a budget of £50,000. Think you’re the next Spielberg, Hitchcock or Scorsese? This could be your big break.

How does it work? Well, you have to use your imagination of course. The gin geniuses at Bombay Sapphire asked the Academy Award winning Screenwriter of Precious, Geoffrey Fletcher, to write a script. To enter the competition you have to use the script to write a treatment for a film up to five minutes long (if you don’t know what a treatent is then you need to brush up on your cinema lingo). The thing is, the script is seriously sparse on detail. It’s basically just Character A and Character B having a conversation, so the genre, style, location, casting, it’s really all up to you. Sound like a challenge you want to take on? Read the full script and find out how you can enter over on the Imagination Series website.

After the entry deadline of 1st August 2012, Fletcher and the rest of the judging panel will choose five winners from a shortlist who’ll each get that all important £50k budget to make their ‘picture,’ as they say in Hollywood. The winning films will be unveiled at exclusive screenings in early 2013. Imagine having that on your CV, eh wannabe directors?

It’s a worldwide competition so chances are you’ll have some healthy global competition. The contest was originally announced at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York but I went along to the London launch event recently in the heart of media town, Soho. While sipping a gin and tonic from a glass roughly the same size as my head (I know my head is tiny but this thing was gigantic) we listened to Fletcher talk about the competition and why he decided the get involved. Fletcher described how he suffered ‘years and years of rejection’ before he made a breakthrough with Precious. He knows how hard it is to make it in the film industry and hopes that the contest will open some doors for aspiring filmmakers. ‘Perhaps we’ll find some geniuses and they’ll go on to great careers,’ he said.

Need a bit of help to get started? First up, check out the video below for some hints and tips from Geoff himself. Bombay Sapphire will also be hosting ‘Learn How to be a Film Director‘ interactive workshops on Monday 16th and Wednesday 18th July at the Bombay Sapphire Blue Rooms at Zenna Bar (6-8.30pm). Tickets are £15 each and reservations are via info@zenna-bar.co.uk. An experienced lecturer from a local film school will talk about how to get into the film industry, washed down with gin cocktails of course.

Make your own sloe gin cocktail: the Sapphire Sloeberry Flip

Kat making a Sloeberry Flip

This is the second guest post from Katherine Gledhill after her visit to the Bombay Sapphire sloe gin masterclass last week. Yesterday she told us about a way to make sloe gin that doesn’t take the usual three months. Next up, cocktails.

After having our eyes dazzled, taste buds tickled and appetites well and truly whetted with a demonstration of seven different sloe gin cocktails, we had a chance to play dress up and take on the mixologist’s mantle. I had a whale of a time making a Sapphire Sloeberry Flip. Here’s how you do it.

Sapphire Sloeberry Flip

Ingredients:

35ml Bombay Sapphire Sloe Gin

20ml Bacardi 8 Year Old Rum

2 tsp Caster Sugar

1 Whole Egg

Cubed Ice

Ground Peppercorns

The Bombay Sapphire Sloeberry Flip

Method:

1. Mix the sloe gin, rum and the egg and shake.

2. Add cubed ice and shake again.

3. Fine strain into a chilled Champagne flute and garnish with ground black pepper to create a rich, silky smooth, spicy Christmas cocktail.

At the end of the evening I left feeling inspired, ready to take on the world and the Christmas party with the batch of sloe gin I’ve spent so many months making at home. With a cocktail shaker added to the Christmas wish list (this one is perfect for your cocktail loving friends and family and can be personalised) I am certain that my friends and I will be enjoying some more Sloeberry flipping and Sapphire Sloe Cobbling very soon.

If you’d rather have your sloe gin cocktail mixed for you, the Sapphire Sloeberry Fizz is on the menu at House of Hackney’s Bombay Sapphire-sponsored gin den until December 31st.

The Sapphire Sloeberry Fizz is on the menu at House of Hackney until 31st December

Guest post | A lesson in sloe gin making

A Sloe Gin Cobbler

Last Monday, Style & Then Some sent Katherine Gledhill to the Bombay Sapphire Blue Room at Vinopolis to learn about the art of sloe gin. She wrote this guest post to tell us all about it.

What could be better, on a freezing December evening, than a lesson in how to make sloe gin – and how to create beautiful, warming and delicious sloe gin cocktails too? Even long autumn walks in crackling orange leaves whilst picking sloes can’t beat the excitement of learning how to create beautiful flavours with the product of those dark, juicy berries.

In case you haven’t heard of this traditional winter beverage, sloe gin is gin flavoured with sloes, the berries of the blackthorn bush. Usually, it takes weeks and weeks of sugaring, shaking and stirring to allow the sloes to steep in the gin, but last week I learned a much faster way.

My tour of the azure-glowing underground wonderland of Bombay Sapphire began with a refreshing Sloeberry Fizz cockail, a fruity, spicy and delightfully fizzy little number, perfect for party-starting over the festive season.

A Sloeberry Fizz cocktail

We were led down one of the maze of passages to an underground bar for our sloe gin lesson. This method is  much faster than the traditional method of three months in a Kilner jar and it produces a bit of a lighter texture and flavour – you will need a dishwasher though.

So here’s how to make sloe gin the quick way:

1. Wait for the first frost then pick your sloes.
2. Prick with a silver fork or a spike from the bush and freeze.
3. Drink your litre bottle of Bombay Sapphire down to the level of Queen Victoria’s head.
4. Add 450g of sloes (thaw them if frozen) and 200g caster sugar.
5. Screw the cap on very tightly
6. Put the whole thing in the dishwasher for a couple of cycles (about 3 hours in total)
7. Sieve and return to the bottle
8. Make cocktails!

Then came the cocktail demonstration which was quite spectacular, with seven different sloe gin cocktails for us to taste. Tomorrow I’ll share with you a recipe for a Sapphire Sloe Berry Flip.

A Bombay Sapphire Quibble cocktail

The Queen announces it’s officially Gin O’Clock

Did the photo fool you? That’s not actually the real Queen of England, it’s an imposter sent by the Queen of Twitter a.k.a @Queen_UK, the fictional monarch who has a predilection for gin.  The lookalike was on hand last Monday to deliver a speech to mark the launch of Gin O’Clock, the Twitter Queen’s debut book.  (Watch a video of the Queen’s speech below).

Easily one of the funniest fictional Twitter accounts, @Queen_UK has amassed more than 470,000 loyal subjects since she started tweeting  – about everything from life in Buckingham Palace (‘Queen fancy dress party in Royal household this evening. Charles has come as Freddie Mercury. Camilla has come as me.’) to international state affairs (‘One has banned Sarah Palin from running for President to save one’s American subjects from international embarrassment.’). Naturally, a book deal was sure to follow. Gin O’Clock is a diary of the events of 2011, delivered in the Queen’s typically dry tone. Obviously major occasions like the Royal Wedding and a visit from the Obama feature, but who knew the Queen was such a fan of the Brit Awards (‘Pencilled in Cee-Lo Green for the Royal Wedding’)? And she loves Eurovision so much she threw a themed party – ‘Beatrice and Eugenie came as Jedward, which was quite convincing, to be fair to them.’

Helen and I meet 'The Queen' at the Gin O'Clock launch

Gin features heavily in the diary (the contents of Her Maj’s handbag for the Royal Wedding are listed as ‘miniature gin, remote weapons button, reading glasses, iPhone, bag of peanuts) so it made sense that those gin geniuses Bombay Sapphire were enlisted for the book launch. They rustled up a special Gin O’Clock cocktail which Her Majesty heartily endorsed. ‘Any time is the perfect time for a Gin O’Clock cocktail,’ she said. ‘Goodness, it’s gone Gin O’Clock.

Gin O’Clock by The Queen (of Twitter) is available now from all good bookshops and to order from Amazon. RRP £12.99. Visit the Gin O’Clock Facebook page.

IN PHOTOS: Bombay Sapphire vs Rebel Dining Society

Last Thursday Sophie Caldecott and I went to the press preview of the second in the Bombay Sapphire Imagination Series – events that those makers of the blue bottled gin are putting on in collaboration with cutting-edge creative types. We were already pretty excited about the gin aspect, having been introduced to ‘mother’s ruin’ long ago by our own mums, but we didn’t realise the night would also involve lemon bubbles, fizzy flowers and an edible cinema ticket. Here’s a photo montage of how it went down.

On arrival we were presented with cutesy little gold pouches that contained a variety of props that we were told would come in useful later, plus a little passport. We grabbed a couple of gin-based cocktails and made a bee-line for the canapes.

We had our passports checked and started our journey, with the aim of getting each page stamped by completing five experiences. First up, we fished a gold leaf out of the gold pouch and fed it through a slot so that individual peepholes were opened and we watched a ballerina dance.

No, sadly, it wasn’t that kind of peepshow, she didn’t take any clothes off.

At the end of the dance she whispered ‘taste it’ and handed us each a small flower. We cautiously licked them and experienced a strong fizzy sensation on our tongues. It was strangely pleasant.

Soothing the spicy fizz, we were told to take the cinema ticket (golden of course) our of our pouches and not hand it in but eat it.

Chomping on the ticket allowed us entry to a tiny six seater cinema where a girl dressed as a phoenix showed us a short animated film about the rebirth of a phoenix. She was a bit of a minx – she was rather handsy with one of the men in our group.

Next up, our group of six squeezed into a hot air balloon-type contraption. By pouring that vial of blue liquid into the jars the balloonist gave us, lemon flavoured bubbles came spilling out. Our mouths and hands got ridiculously sticky as we attempted to eat them.

For the fourth stamp in our passports a white powder was sprinkled into our hands and we were told to taste it. No, it wasn’t anything Colombian, it was ‘imagination dust’, juniper-flavoured obviously, and a peacock lady told us all about the origins of juniper berries and Bombay Sapphire gin.

Finally we were taken on an imaginary aeroplane ride where we sampled sweetly flavoured clouds. Our pilot provided that all-important stamp.

With a stamp on every page we were permitted entry to the mezzanine bar where we got to sample bespoke Bombay Sapphire cocktails. It might sound a bit weird, but Sophie loved the beetroot-based one, and she’s blogged the recipe here too.

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