Deia has a ‘natural eye’ for film-making

A FILM trailer created by a Buckie High student has wowed the judges at a north-east awards ceremony. It was time for S3 Deia McAllister to take centre stage at the recent Grampian Children’s Book Award when she claimed the best movie trailer prize. Her two-minute piece was based on the novel 1000-Year-Old Boy by Ross Welford. This was to turn out a prophetic choice of book as it was to be crowned the Grampian Children’s Book Award winner for 2019. Deia attended the ceremony in Aberdeen University’s arts lecture theatre along with three other members of the BCHS Book Group, which gets together in the school library, the group later meeting up with representatives from Elgin Academy as well. One of those delighted with Deia’s success was BCHS librarian Stephen Leitch, who said the youngster had received high praise from Mr Wellford. “He said to Deia that she had a natural eye for film-making, and one of the organisers told her that her video had ‘raised the game’ for future book trailers.
“Deia did all the planning and filming herself including the music.” Compering the event was author Alex McCall, who introduced the Mr Welford and the three of the other five finalists – Alan Gibbons, Adam Baron and Sophie Cameron. Unable to attend were Emily Barr and Susan Wilson, with sections from their books read out. Each author was allotted 15 minutes to talk about their book, themselves and their writing with several also reading extracts from their shortlisted books. For Adam Baron this was a his first foray into writing novels for children. Sophie Cameron commented that the inspiration for her novel Out of the Blue came from an old Lynx deodorant advert which featured angels falling out the sky. “It got me wondering what would happen if that happened now and how would people respond to this,” she added. Mr Welford, as well as performing a magic trick, mentioned that with his nominated book 1000-YearOld Boy, that unusually the title came first for him, and he had to use his imagination to write the story from just the title. Meanwhile, Mr Gibbons focused particularly on how he got the ideas for his shortlisted novel, and during the authors question time that followed, he mentioned that now he writes “…the thing I least wanted to read as a child [books]”, and that music was his inspiration.