So for our penultimate event of 2014 we were lucky enough to be invited over to Belgium to host the closing night party at the great Razor Reel film festival, which was an opportunity to good to miss. We’ll go anywhere to show stuff if someone wants us, so the idea of heading off to another country to share some video weirdness with a totally fresh audience is always way too tempting to pass up. Main man at the festival Thierry had seen our FrightFest party and wanted a little Duke action over in Bruges as well, so Friday afternoon found us all gathering at Kings Cross to head over there on the Eurostar.
Also coming along with us for the weekend was Spencer from Death Waltz Recordings, who was going to help host the night, plus DJ in the bar afterwards. We had a great time on the Friday night in Bruges where we also met up with FrightFest legend Alan Jones, who was there as part of the film jury for the festival. After a long dinner we ended up back at the main cinema to have a look around and enjoy a few drinks, the cinema itself is fantastically stylish and features a very big 300 seater screen. The foyer of course features a huge original In Bruges poster and also lots of vintage 35MM projectors lined up as you walk in, so let’s say we felt at home straight away.
Saturday morning and Evrim was presenting a filmmaking masterclass along with James and Russ from their production company Ne’er Do Well Films. This was great fun to see them talk for 60-minutes about making the great Daddy Cross web-series and brought back a lot of memories of running around Soho trying to get shots for the films. The rest of Saturday daytime we explored as much of Bruges as possible, which meant trying to find the best chocolate and beer shops in the city, of which there are plenty to choose from.
Then it was time to unleash The Duke on an unsuspecting Razor Reel crowd, our show was going on straight after the closing festival film What We Do In The Shadows, which was playing to a packed house. Luckily for us a lot of those people stayed to check out what we had lined up for them, so we kicked off with one of Spencer’s favourites, the Beyond Re-animator Move Your Dead Bones music video! From there we kept up the audio visual assault with a string of of classic finds, of course including the greatest music video of time: .357 Lover’s Event Horizon, a video that none of us every get tired of seeing. We had a great night and it’s always so much fun to screen our footage to an audience, plus there’s something so great about having a huge cinema screen to play around with.
After the show it was time to hit the bar where Spencer was DJing late into the night, a lot of people had stayed to drink so there was a great atmosphere, which is exactly what you want after having just done a show, it’s always hard to go back to normality after doing that. Once things started heading close to 2PM Russ took over being the DJ and promptly managed to earn himself the name DJ Wrong Speed by playing several records at the wrong speed! But it was a great night and we had such a good time there, we all felt sad having to head back the next day. So we’d love to say a big thanks to Thierry and all the team at Razor Reel for inviting us over and for being such great hosts, plus a big thanks to the fantastic audience we had on the night, we hope to make it back there one year!