5 Years of Cammes Home-made Film Festival
Cammes Film Festival is an invite-only nearly-no-budget home-made film festival. Each year, me and Katie have invited our close friends to make short films on a theme. Then, after a couple of months, we’ve all gotten together – virtually or physically – and shared whatever we’ve created. 2025 was our fifth year of doing this so I wanted to reflect on this milestone of our little tradition.
Year 0 – The Cammes that never was #
In 2019, Katie was reminiscing about the home-made film festival the families in her neighbourhood had put on when she was a kid. She dug out the story she and her dad had submitted, acted out with cuddly Winnie the Pooh + Piglet toys.
I wasn’t a complete stranger to a home-made film either. Since I was 12, I have been prone to the occasional iMovie sesh the results of which sometimes found their way onto my mishmash of a YouTube channel.
Together, we wondered: what if we were to put on our own home-made film festival for our Cambridge pals? We patted ourselves on the back for the name ‘Cammes Film Festival’. The idea is rarely the hard part though. Katie was studying and I was 6 months into my first ever real-life job. We had a name, a logo, and a Facebook event, but – if we’re being honest with ourselves – we didn’t quite have the time. We let it fizzle out, it wasn’t to be…
Year 1 – “As Seen From Space” (2021) #
Then, in January 2021 England entered its third national lockdown for COVID-19. By this point, Katie and I had already descended into making ludicrous music videos and mock news reports at home to entertain ourselves (thankfully never to see the light of day). Then, having remembered this idea we had on the back-burner, we thought this might be a spirit-lifter in a particularly gloomy winter. We announced to our friends a date for Cammes, this time along with a theme – “As seen from space” – and a set of rules including a 1-2 minute time restriction and a £12 budget.
4 weeks later we were huddled onto a video call watching 8 brilliant, colourful creations from our mates and chatting about what we’d come up with. The films themselves aren’t mine to share, so here’s a collage of enigmatic peeks into what went on:
Katie and I had initially wondered if we’d been too prescriptive with the theme, that we might get similar ideas coming up, but that year and every year since we’ve enjoyed the massive range of what people have come up with from the same theme. Cats breaking lockdown for an inter-planetary cheese-gathering mission, a motion picture palindrome, astronauts adjusting to working from home, and a PSA about why you – yes, you – should be eating coal. It was all weird, wonderful and thoroughly unpredictable.
Katie and I wrote a poem about an alien encounter and illustrated it with shadow puppets.
In The Shadows – An Alien Encounter
We still love this video! It’s so simple! The most complicated part was finding a way to hang up a bedsheet flat enough to cast good shadows onto (pegged between a clothes horse and a thin-backed office chair, if you’re wondering). Actually that’s not true, feeding a marshmallow to a papercraft head was a bit of a task too.
We threw some made-up awards in there to recognise this esteemed bunch of directors: best product placement, most convincing propaganda, most tenuous link to the theme etc. though we keep Cammes quite deliberately non-competitive.
And there it was, we’d all shared what we’d made and the first Cammes was over far too quickly like a home-cooked roast dinner.
Year 2 – “Far Far Away” (2022) #
This year we had one film which served as the opening credits to the whole premiere, we had sustainability targets being placed far far into the future, we had a couple confronting their emotional distance, a behind-the-scenes look at film-makers who thought the deadline was far far away, Paddington Bear made his first Cammes appearance of many in a journey far across London, and we had a sneak peek of the opening credits of Season XI of the utterly made-up TV series ‘Far Far Away’.
This year, I’d discovered Blackmagic’s free editing and VFX software Davinci Resolve. And you’d best believe I shoe-horned some over-ambitious VFX shots into our film about a mirror dimension where lost items disappear to. It’s… well it’s quite clunky to be honest, but I had great fun trying to push the technical side a bit, even if the story kind of suffered for it. Katie dialled in on the soundtrack and made some great original music for it.
Year 3 – “Odd One Out” (2023) #
This year, with a few days to go, we decided to try an in-person Cammes! We thought we’d have a few people over for a viewing party alongside the online event. As the time drew closer and the apologies trickled in, we realised we were about to throw a party for one guest. Turns out, if you want people to show up to something, you do actually have to invite them ahead of time. Oops.
Despite that, we had a great time, and 2023 was another terrific year of films!
We had odd socks, we had an uprising at the marmalade factory, we had The Buggles singing about how hard it is to start a conversation, we saw the world from the perspective of a letter box (in such a captivating way that people genuinely gasped when someone put a letter in it), we saw a man become a video game character against his will and we had a program that predicted the near future. It was awesome!
Continuing to use Cammes as an excuse to muck about with different software, we made this animated short of a poem about a square in a world built by circles using Blender’s 2D animation tools. Katie was navigating the world with Long-COVID at the time, and the writing was a very on-the-nose nod to that. We’re still so proud of this film! We used Adobe Podcast to take our crummy MacBook audio and make it sound actually pretty legit (it unfortunately couldn’t fix my bad american accent though). Katie nailed the music again, and I’m so chuffed with the animation on this.
Year 4 – “Out of Time” (2024) #
This year had a much more successful in-person premiere alongside the now-traditional video call!
We saw a man so bad at time management that he actually slips into a dimension outside of time, a woman’s desperate GarageBand session recreating Frère Jacques, the return of Paddington Bear as the sound technician at a troubling band rehearsal, a thoughtful poem about seizing the privilege of choice in life, a documentary centered on the punctuality of the director’s girlfriend, and a chronicle of the creative process against a rapidly reducing deadline.
This is the only year so far that Katie and I decided not to make our own Cammes submission public on YouTube. Mostly because it’s very in-jokey. It’s a shame really, because the ‘Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban’ remix track that we made for it is a goblet of pure fire.
We were scolded for not sticking to the theme. But, c’mon, it’s a remix of a film about time travel! And we even featured the Corpus Clock for good measure!
Year 5 – “Something Wicked” (2025) #
2025 was a really cool one because we had quite a few newcomers who all ran with it and flexed some serious home-made movie-making muscle! An amazing year of films and yet another year of theme-interpretation diversity. We saw an un-wicked candle scandal, we saw an innocent meet their wicker fate, we saw wicked skating powers, we saw a wicked dog defying gravity, we saw a delirious and delightful Nosferatu-Wicked crossover, and we saw the season finale of everyone’s favourite reality TV show, The Traito– I mean The Wicked.
For mine and Katie’s part, because we were travelling quite a bit during these months, we decided to have more people and more locations in our film and heavily bias it towards a big montage section. Probably for the best since all of our previous Cammes films had been just us two losers. This one is, admittedly, pushing the silly end of the spectrum even for us. The bad guy is a ping pong ball.
…and many more #
It wasn’t a given that we’d do this more than once, especially once people were allowed to – you know – leave the house. We started doing Cammes when everyone had a lot of free time on their hands. Free time comes and goes. People can dip in and out of this in the years that they happen to have the time. Katie and I have dialled our own level of movie-making ambition up and down year by year, to meet us where we were at. But we weren’t necessarily expecting people to keep making time for this.
But we kept putting it out there and it’s gradually becoming a winter tradition amongst friends.
Looking back on these events, I feel proud of the mass that they have added to our social solar system, doing their small part to keep us all in a steady orbit around each other.
And as life goes on and new friendships come into our lives, it’s been a lovely way to bring together different clusters of friends around a common body of references and in-jokes.
It’s a really special kind of person that responds to an invitation like Cammes.