Attention attracted by shorts

Youth is terrific. It has youthfulness. Intelligence has intelligentness.

Then there is informativeness, innovativeness and irreverentness - key concepts every one.

It was, in fact, those concepts that attracted me to the New Zealand Young Producer Shorts 2012.

But the clincher was this: The British Broadcasting Corporation was involved.

The BBC has BBCness. Not just Britishness - British Broadcasting Corporationness. The very idea fills me with happyosity. Not to mention joyity.

So here it is then - from December 3, the New Zealand Young Producer Shorts 2012 will be broadcast on BBC Knowledge - that channel which used to be the ever-so-excellent Documentary Channel on Sky.

The NZYPS invites producers with youngness - they must be under 30 - to tell New Zealand stories that are intelligent, informative, innovative and sometimes irreverent.

Younger people are better at those sort of concepts.

The elderly are more likely to be indignant, intransigent and irrelevant - not to mention incontinent. I am.

The great thing about the New Zealand Young Producer Shorts 2012 is they have locality.

No, that's not right. They have localness, or localosity perhaps.

They are local.

They include a short film by some young fellow from Wellington about men who are professional drag queens. There is another by a young lady from Auckland about four young (again) New Zealand comedians heading to the Melbourne International Comedy Festival. The most local is Steep Street by local film-maker George Dawes.

George Dawes has a history.

Last year he was involved in the documentary Three Little Pigs: A Curly Tale, as part of the Otago Centre for Science Communication course in science and natural history film-making.

His film is about Baldwin St, the fellow who runs up and down it, a bus driver and four French gentlemen with hangovers. It will be broadcast on December 6.

Then there is Lost and Found, by Joey Bania.

Lost and Found is a short film about Blair Somerville, an unusual artist who makes odd things somewhere southern and strange called Papatowai, in the Catlins.

Blair uses do-it-yourself techniques to create strange sculptures that move. He also surfs, but there is no reason to hold that against him.

Bania does fun things with animation, enjoyable stuff with sped up and slowed down film, evocative lighting, and other unusual techniques that bring the enjoyably weird subject to life. He has clearly spent a lot of time on his film. He has spoken to locals, even, and filmed them in that way that makes them look very local.

His film has intelligentness, informativeness, innovativeness and irreverentness.

It gave me happyosity.

Watch it on December 4.

- Charles Loughrey.