Bryce Bartleson's AFC Journey | Filming, Editing, Getting Votes
Hello, my name is Bryce Bartleson,
I have recently submitted a film into the AFC (amateur film comp) and placed 2nd, one place away from victory and getting a one-way ticket into the TFI (topwater film invitational).
This is my journey of how I filmed, edited and collected votes for my AFC film.
Ever since I heard about the AFC, I had wanted to compete but held off because I didn’t have any time nor money to go out and film extra content. 2 weeks before the finalised films had to be submitted Benny Glass said that I really should have a go and he’ll help me out. We figured we needed a plan of attack between a good photographer and location, so we rounded up Kieran Tunbridge and made a game plan to head up to Double Island the following weekend.
7 Days till Submission:
The following weekend came, I got to Benny’s house at 3:45am on Saturday morning and we hit the Road by 4am. On the way, we grabbed some snacks and fuelled up the boat at the servo before we got to the boat ramp at 5:30 am. We launch the boat and have a solid hour and a half punch out to the grounds. The plan was to throw top water most of the day to get some insane Topwater eats on Kieran’s SloMo film camera. Unfortunately, it was slow with only a couple of small tuna getting around, so I took the opportunity to put it on a nomad dart-wing and got some pretty cool top water strikes burning the dart-wing. Unfortunately, the sharks were insane, so we had to go fairly hard on the tuna to get them in. The Topwater grounds soon became dead, so we left and tried to catch some bottom species on the nomad squidtrex’s. Early in the afternoon the wind blew up, so we took the opportunity to see if the wind has rumbled up some Spanish or Wahoo back on the topwater grounds. As soon as we went back to the topwater grounds there were some Wahoo tearing up the surface, so we rushed into fishing and on the first drift, before the cameras were running, I hooked onto a wahoo. After a short-lived fight, the hooks pulled right next to the boat. We then casted our arses off for the next couple hours before the sun went down. We then ran home in the dark with our tails between our legs with only a few topwater eats to show for our efforts.
5 Days till Submission:
Submissions are due at midnight on Friday, so we had to have the video fully filmed, edited and submitted in a short five days, so Monday morning we headed out before school to try and get some topwater Spanish mackerel off Mooloolaba, fortunately the Spanish were playing the game and we filmed some awesome Topwater eats before I had to go to school. After school on Monday and Tuesday Benny and I sat in a room, shooting voice overs to cut up and put bits and pieces into the film.
3 Days till Submission:
Wednesday after school, I went straight to Kieran‘s house and we started downloading all our footage over the past couple of days, so we can hopefully get it all together and start editing the film.
2 Days till Submission:
Thursday afternoon straight from school. I rushed to the SCF office and started making a base cut for my film, turns out it’s a lot harder than it looks. I spent many hours struggling and trying to teach myself how to do it properly and it just wasn’t working out, so I went home around 10:30-11pm to get some sleep and try again tomorrow.
24 hours till Submission:
Friday after school, I rushed out of the SCF office once again and this time, I asked Bonnie to help me put it together. Thank God she did. She smashed it out and did a fantastic job of editing and putting it together. After hours of editing, it was time to export it and upload the final product to the AFC.
We had done it. I couldn’t be any happier I was so happy with the way the film had turned out and could not give enough thanks or appreciation to Kieran, Benny, Bonnie, and everyone else who helps support, including my parents and Dean Jackson. That night I went home with the with the completed Film on a hard drive and rewatched it over and over again. Thinking about how many hours the team and I have put into making this. Thank you to everyone once again.
Getting Votes:
Once I had submitted my film, I was thinking to myself okay well now I’ve got to get people to vote for me. I had a good sit down and thought to myself of ways. I can spread the word to get people to view and vote for my film. I took note of what everyone else was doing and still couldn’t think of a plan that I thought would be good enough to win. I spoke to Lachie, who is SCF’s marketing manager, and he said reaching out to people on Instagram who only follow you doesn’t give a high chance of them paying the money to vote for your film. You need to reach out to friends, family and everyone who you know and have connections with because they are the people that will actually go one further and pay to vote for you.
I then sat down for a good couple of hours, writing down a long list of all my friends and family, I went through my contact list, my mum’s contact list and my dad’s contact list. Most people replied within an instant “I’ll be more than happy to and said that they will spread the word onto their family and friends as well.” From there votes current started flooding in. I can so with confidence that’s where 95% of my votes came from.
I also printed out 1000 flyers that was double sided and had my name, info about me and AFC, what a vote would mean to me and a QR codes straight to my voting page. During the voting period whenever the weather was good, I would go the boat ramp and put the flyers on the windscreen of every car with a boat trailer. I had a number of messages saying “the flyer and video are great” these were manly close friends and family that I had forgotten or accidentally missed when originally texting people for votes.
Promoting your AFC video on Instagram and TikTok, makes it spread like wildfire, but I found the success rate of people voting are very minimal.
With two days to go till the end of voting period, I was very happy with the response I got from my film. My original goal wasn’t to win but get a nomad sponsorship, although I definitely wouldn’t complain if I ended up winning. I ended up putting my AFC submission on all my social media platforms which didn’t work quite as well as a personal messages nor flyers.
Unfortunately I didn’t end up getting a nomad sponsorship nor winning. But I still had fun filming and putting it together. Once again thanks to everyone who was involved, supported and to everyone who voted.
Get ready for next year. 1st place has got my name on it!
Thanks for reading, if you would like have a watch of my 2023 ACF video, click the video below!