September marked the return of the ever popular DepicT! competition, which challenges the international creative community to make distinctive, imaginative and engaging short films that are under 90 seconds long.

At the Awards Ceremony at Encounters Short Film and Animation Festival, emerging filmmaker Daniel Chisholm picked up not one, but two DepicT! Awards for his excellent short Nati, an honest portrayal of a 90 year old man living and (still!) working in Liguria, Italy.

Nati, which was chosen from just under 600 entries from 49 different countries, scooped both the DepicT! British Special Mention Award and the DepicT! Shooting People Audience Award, and won Daniel a whole host of career development opportunities with BAFTA, the National Film and Television School and Shooting People - isn't it time you saw what all the fuss was about?!

Daniel took some time out from filming in Italy and teaching here in the UK to share his thoughts on his experiences since his DepicT! win and to tell us a bit about what he's working on now (a feature length version of his award-winning short no less!). Watch Daniel's winning film and read more about his filmmaking journey below.

DepicT! '14 Two Months On - by Daniel Chisholm

It's been nearly two months since I won the two DepicT! prizes (DepicT! Special Mention and DepicT! Shooting People Award) and I'm still buzzing from the festival - what an amazing experience! The festival was awash with great films, interesting and friendly people, and a brilliant pioneering spirit. I'll definitely be back for more next year!

In the meantime of course, reality has kicked in again, with lots of low-budget corporates and teaching at film-school to pay the bills taking up most of my time.

I'm very excited that I am going to meet my hero and director of such great films as Warrior and Senna, Asif Kapadia, through BAFTA, as part of the DepicT! Special Mention prize. I will definitely report back on how that goes.

Also, winning at DepicT! will hopefully help me get accredited for the Berlinale, where I hope to make more contacts and do some more much-needed networking.

In the meantime, I continue to put any free time into the feature version of the film I submitted at DepicT!, Nati - it's slow going, but great fun! The characters are unique and there are some brilliant moments in the footage we have shot so far. Now it's all about condensing the footage I have so far and deciding what to shoot on the next trip to Italy. I feel really privileged that I can take my time over this project and really delve deep into the interesting stories of these people who live such hard, yet rich lives. I can't wait to go back!

While editing the long version of the project, the idea is to do a series of portraits of the individual characters in the film, similar to that of Nati. Who knows, maybe one of them will make it into next year's DepicT! or even the competition proper at Encounters Short Film and Animation Festival...

One of the farmers I am interviewing in Liguria is Alessio. He loves to talk about his olive trees and nearly gave me a heart-attack when he climbed a really tall one without a harness or any other safety features! And this is an octogenarian! I think he will probably feature in one of the portraits in the run-up to releasing the feature-length film.

Right, time to get back to the edit - I will be back to give another report in a couple months!

Watch Daniel's winning DepicT! '14 film here.

Find out more about the DepicT! challenge on depict.org.

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