AUCB Student in BAFTA Win for The Hurt Locker
A BA (Hons) Film Production graduate from the Arts University College at Bournemouth is celebrating today after The Hurt Locker, on which he worked as boom operator, won six Orange British Academy Film and Television Awards. The film was awarded Best Film, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Editing and Best Sound at the annual ceremony in London yesterday.
Simon Bysshe, who graduated from the University College in 2006 and went on to work with The Hurt Locker’s BAFTA-winning sound recordist Ray Beckett, is delighted with the film’s success. He commented “It's fantastic! The Hurt Locker was a true international collaboration and it is great to have British technicians going up to collect the BAFTAS for Best Sound and Cinematography. Ray Beckett lives in Dorset and many of the other crew are also British.”
“It’s very exciting; The Hurt Locker is a great film. We were filming in Jordan for 10 weeks and had a lovely time but it was really, really hard work. The film is a series of seven or eight vignettes, which all build up to a sequence of haunting stories about war.”
The film has also been nominated for nine Oscars, including the sound mixing and sound editing awards. Simon and Ray both visited the Arts University College at Bournemouth last month to tell current students about their successful careers and, after a special screening of The Hurt Locker, the audience were invited to ask the sound experts about their experiences working on the film.
Head of the University College’s School of Media, Kavita Hayton, commented “We are very proud of Simon’s success. Our Film Production course continues to produce well trained, specialist producers, directors and technicians of great value to the UK and international film industry.”
Simon’s impressive CV also includes The Boat that Rocked, Nowhere Boy and the forthcoming re-make of Gulliver’s Travels, starring Jack Black.
