Time Lord Film Festival
A wacky adventure journey through time
University of Galway’s Time Lord Society is holding their first ever ‘Film Festival’ on the 28th of February at 7pm in the IMC Cinema in Galway.
The Time Lord Society (Ireland’s only Doctor Who society) was established in 2014 by a group of friends, with the first auditor being River Byrne. Time Lord, a student-centered society, has been producing fan films made by its members since 2022. Focused on the stories of each auditor (their Chairperson and very own Doctor stand-in) as they fight unimaginable evil and pass the torch to the next person to fill the role, set in a backdrop of a pretty wacky adventure.
This year sees the premiere of not one, but three films on the big screen. These films have all been made possible by the wonderful members of the society volunteering their time and energy for these productions. The first is called ‘Far From It’ directed by Dean McDevitt, his third film project with the society. The second and third films, ‘Times Up’ and ‘Chaos Awakening’ mark the directorial debut of Aoife Joyce, the second society member to hold the title of Director. I spoke to Dean and Aoife about film in general, film making, inspiration and of course, Doctor Who!
Dean who is a studying for a master’s in Physics and teaching explained how these fan made films came about,
“It was the summer of 2022. when we filmed “A Timeless Goodbye” and then we kind of accidentally screened it in the IMC cinema, ..we just sort of made it as a laugh and then done it. People showed up and it was fun and it just kind of snowballed from there”
This has nothing got to do with his master’s in teaching in physics, I asked Dean if this side gig was his first adventure into film-making at that stage?
“No, during Covid I had done just little bits and bobs here and there of making stuff and I had a lot of practice with editing and just making random stuff. But my first sort of kind of dabbling with film-making was when I was well maybe 11 I got a part in a short film and then before that I made a tiny little Doctor Who film when I was eight or nine on a little camcorder and that’s lost to time”
Last year, the society screened another of Dean’s Doctor Who themed films with “TIN” for their society 10th Anniversary.
Aoife explained her involvement with the making of “TIN”,
“Dean had given me the role of the assistant director for that which was assistant editor or assistant directing, a bit of everything. It felt like it was being his assistant at times, trying to keep him on track and basically on schedule! I had done a Post Leaving Course in theatre but we tended to hang out a lot with the filming students as well but that was the first time that I was properly on a film set, it was so much fun!”
A trilogy of sorts
In Dean’s new movie “Far From It”, he mentions there is a regeneration element to this without giving away the plot and that the ideas behind these films were to always show one auditor transforming to the next.
Dean explained the trilogy of sorts with “Far from it”, “Times Up” and “Chaos Awakening”,
“You could call it a trilogy of sorts, there a continuing theme through all three. I would say anyway through my three that I done I tried to keep the story somewhat connected and then I would hope that Aoife would carry that on and I think she has done that very well”
Aoife, who is studying a Bachelor of Arts at University of Galway spoke about some of the inspiration she took from that course, especially with the film-making and pioneering french indie director Agnès Varda.
“Well, I first came across her when I was doing visual culture which was one of my modules that I have to do for film and one of the aspects of it was that you were looking at different types of new waves that came out, ..The German, Italian and the French new wave which is still very much impactful. When we were studying the French new wave I was like, hang on ..this is what Dean and I do… we have virtually no budget, we have no effects, we use on location shooting and we don’t have a big green screen behind us or any sort of big movie budget. The French new wave was about taking away the kind of power from the studios and giving it back to the youth. I was like wow, I love this lady and she was like, “let’s make our own films” and “the youth are here, they’ve got great ideas”, I just got a lot of influence from her and I also just felt like this is the kind of thing I do very low budget like virtually nothing…. just your phone.”
Dean also acknowledged the D.I.Y film-making ethos, and talked about shooting his film on a mobile phone, a Samsung Galaxy’s 2O SE
“The lighting rig that we use, we’ve done a lot of outside shots where it was literally just a cheap ring light that you could get from Aldi and I plugged it into like a little battery pack that I had practically sell-o-taped to Scott Boshell’s arm, he was doing a lot of camera work and that was that was our lighting rig for a long time. We had the phone in a little phone holder and then this lighting ring, so it was all basically really cheap equipment that we had lying around. The only kind of complicated equipment we used was a drone. Setting it up for about an hour and a half, I had to wait for the rain to stop of course in the middle of a drone shot and I think it’s on screen for 1.6 seconds! So it was pointless but it’s all about a crack. Really cheap equipment just kind of held together a double-sided sticky tape and prayer”
For more, from Aoife and Dean you can listen to their full interview on the Flirt FM Mixcloud playback page for The Tardis Tapes podcast… Allons-y!
