Felpham youngsters send Robin Hood into the future in new film

A time-travelling Robin Hood is all part of the story in Hoodwinked 3: This Time It is Personal, a new film from a group of Felpham-area youngsters.
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Sally Wagter who has overseen its production is delighted with the results which recently enjoyed their premiere. The film was written by her 16-year-old son Tim who also wrote ten of the songs and all the film music and edited the whole thing at the end: “It all started with the fact that about a year and a half ago he started writing a film script,” Sally explains, “and it took him four months to write. As he had put so much effort into it, I said to him ‘OK, let’s make this film’, and we got about 20 teenagers together. We did quite a lot of revising and then we filmed in nine different beautiful West Sussex locations including Bognor Museum and Bognor Pier and Dover House.

“We filmed it in September, October, November last year. It took us about two months, but it was pretty much ten to six every Saturday and Sunday for a long time. It finished the actors off! They were all working so hard and were all so dedicated. We had a professional videographer, and we did it all on a budget of under a thousand pounds. We just asked for favours from people! We were always asking ‘Could we possibly do this?’ or ‘Could we possibly do that?’ and everybody contributed. We did the premiere at Bracklesham Barn. We were originally wanting to do it in a cinema, but it was too expensive and it had to be in a certain format. We just literally had an amazing quality projector which was attached to the apple mac… and we showed the two-and-a-half-hour film.

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“There were two purposes to the film. One was to make a great film and also to give the children as much experience as they possibly could. We didn’t want to cut anything out. If somebody had worked really hard on a scene, we kept it. It was more for the experience of everyone being able to develop friendships and to work together and to learn things. I had never made a film like that before. I oversaw the whole thing, and you learn so much about things like continuity. You have to be thinking ‘What was your hair like?’ and ‘What were you wearing?’ It was so hard. It was like a massive jigsaw puzzle that we were putting together. We filmed the last bits at the beginning and then the first bits at the end, and we had to make sure that nobody had their hair cut in between! But all the parents were brilliant.

“But things go wrong! It hadn’t rained for a week and we got all the things down there to start filming and then it started raining, and we had to abandon it the moment we started!”

“The film is the Robin Hood story where he is about to get married, but the Sheriff has got a feud with Robin Hood and commits a crime and frames Robin for it. When they discover what has happened, the Sheriff blasts Robin Hood into the future.”

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