Harbourmaster – BEST FILM at Bristol’s 48hr Film Competition

Harbourmaster was made as part of Cutting It Fine 2025 – Bristols first annual 48 hour film competition – winning the award for BEST FILM on the night.

The challenge? To write, shoot and edit a 5 minute film in 48 hours – all while incorporating three random prompts:

Prop: Greeting Card
Location: Harbourside
Line of dialogue: This can’t be real

From there, we created this short. 

ALEX

‘Harbourmaster’ wins BEST FILM at Cutting it Fine, Bristol’s 48hr Film Competition


Last weekend, myself and Stephen took part in ‘Cutting it Fine’, Bristol’s inaugural 48 hour short film competition.

The challenge? To write, shoot and edit a short film in 48 hours – all while incorporating three random prompts that were randomly selected from a bucket. Ours were:

Prop: Greeting Card
Location: Harbouside
Line of dialogue: This can’t be real

From that, we created a 5-minute short film titled ‘harbourmaster’. 

On Tuesday, we attended the competitions screening event – mainly to support the wide variety of talented individuals who made up the other 18 teams. We were keen to see their weird and wonderful creations, and in a best case scenario, leave feeling inspired by this city’s insane filmmaking talent, all while hopefully having met a few likeminded individuals in the process.

Never in million years did we imagine we’d come away from the night with the award for ‘Best Film’.

We found the process equal parts stressful and incredibly fun. Things are hard as a team of two at the best of times, but they’re even tricker when one half of the team takes on an acting role in the short. Despite this, we’re so proud with what we’ve made, and we can’t wait to share it with you.

Part our prize for winning is for the film to receive an online treatment in the form of a grade and a sound mix from PictureShop – we cannot wait for this unbelievable opportunity, and to then share it to the world once it’s done!

Big love to everyone who has reached out to us since last night, your kinds words mean so much – we were truly honoured to share the screen with your films.

ALEX

The House in Ireland – a short film

It felt long overdue to make a wee video of some kind, so I decided to get reflective (It being a reflective time of year and all) about the old family home in Longford.

In typical fashion, I used a bunch of footage that I initially shot without an intended purpose – I deemed a chunk of it fairly unusable, but it felt a shame to not try and put it into something, so supplementing it with some old family VHS footage felt like the best happy medium.

ALEX

Bewildered 23′ – Creatures of the Deep

This summer I had the pleasure of bringing together the 2023 highlight reel for the truly fantastic, up-and-coming Devon based music festival known as Bewildered.

Across two and a half days, I documented the wide array of musical talent on offer, as well as the incredible festival site itself – which was brought together by a plethora of incredibly talented local artists and creatives – all of whom made it exceptionally hard to condense the magic of the weekend into just a 2 minute reel.

Alex

Wildflower – a short film

Wildflower is the first instalment of filmmakers Alex McPake & Mac Nixon’s ‘Places’ series.

‘Places’ is an experimental collaborative project between the two that flips the process of traditional filmmaking by shooting interesting locations and then constructing a narrative retrospectively.

ALEX

Mud Turners – a documentary short

In an overpopulated and oversaturated working world, two men on the Gower Peninsula have taken up the peculiar occupation of Mud Turning.

Birthed from the minds of Alex McPake & Stephen Shelmerdine, this improvised mockumentary is the third instalment of their ’12 Hour Shorts’ film series . Much like its predecessors, Mud Turners began its life as a conversation on a patio and within 12 hours, was written, shot, scored and edited.

ALEX

Inspiration – a short film

Synopsis: “Man witnesses evaporation and becomes inspired”.

Put together with a collection of throwaway footage that I felt compelled to record one morning, ‘Inspiration’ was birthed from my ever meta brains desire to be, well, meta.

In line with most other projects I’ve put together, this was formed rather by accident, but hopefully regardless of that, you’re still able to find something in it. What I hear you ask? I’m not really sure – but I should probably say Inspiration. Yeah, let’s go with that.

ALEX