Students follow in the footsteps of movie legends

A group of Coventry University media production students have recently returned from filming a spaghetti western inspired short in Spain’s famous Tabernas desert.

The ‘Blueridge film’ group are currently in their final year of Media Production at Coventry University and with help from the university’s International Experience and Mobility Service (IEMS), chose the legendary area in Spain as their primary filming location. The desert is steeped in movie heritage having been used in countless Hollywood movies including Sergio Leone’s spaghetti-westerns and Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones amongst many others.

The film called Black Hill is set in the civil war era American West and revolves around an injured confederate solider forced to confront his racism after his preconceptions are shattered by a life changing encounter.

Director Jim Peakman says “We wanted to explore contemporary social issues around racism within a different perspective and setting. We liked the idea of a realistic western, not the typical cowboy gunfighting type so the two seemed to fit well together.”

Jim adds “Many westerns that have influenced me as a film maker have been shot in Tabernas so we thought it would be a great opportunity to use the same location as these films, its the only true desert in Europe and visually its a perfect match to double as the land of the American west.”

The team are now back in the UK and busy working on the post-production aspects of the film, continuing their crowd-funding campaign and preparing submissions to a number of international film festivals. Producer Tim March concludes, “Filming abroad was definitely a huge challenge, particularly with the logistical aspects of production and filming with a Red Epic for the first time, but ultimately we feel it helped push us to produce our very best work”

To find out more about the film, visit www.blueridgefilmgroup.com, or follow them @blueridgefilm to learn more about current and forthcoming projects.