Paint Drying

Paint Drying (2023)

A static shot of paint drying on a brick wall.

Date of release
2023-11-10
TMDB
7.3 / 10 (6)
Runtime
10h 7m
Genres
Documentary
Director
Charlie Shackleton

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Budget: £5.9K
  • Filmed in: Archway district

Paint Drying is a 2023 British experimental protest film that was produced, directed and shot by Charlie Shackleton. He created the film in 2016 to protest against film censorship in the United Kingdom and the sometimes prohibitive cost to independent filmmakers which the British Board of Film Classification's (BBFC) classification requirement imposes. The film consists of 607 minutes of a static view of white paint drying on a brick wall.

Production

Charlie Shackleton (known as Charlie Lyne until 2019) is a British independent filmmaker. He has written, directed and produced several independent films, such as his essay-style documentary films Beyond Clueless (2014)—his directorial debut—and Fear Itself (2015).

Paint Drying is a protest against both film censorship in the UK, and the unfair cost to independent filmmakers imposed by the BBFC's mandatory classification requirement. According to Shackleton, "this project [Paint Drying] is the culmination of a decade spent aimlessly railing against the BBFC—a decade that began when I was 13 years old".

In protest against the BBFC's per-minute rate for film classifications, Shackleton stated that the average cost of an age classification for independent filmmakers could exceed £1,000, which would prove to be a heavy financial burden on most independent filmmakers. According to Shackleton, the BBFC certificate for his debut self-distributed film, Beyond Clueless, cost £867.60, which was roughly fifty per cent of its distribution budget.

Shackleton initially shot 14 hours' worth of footage of white paint drying in 4K resolution. He chose the colour white because of its "certain Tom Sawyer charm". The location of the wall that was painted was initially not disclosed. On 16 November 2015, Shackleton opened a Kickstarter campaign to make the film's released length as long as possible.

It had raised £961—worth 2 hours and 1 minute of footage—by 18 November, and an individual unaffiliated with the campaign created a website that tracked in real time how long Paint Drying would be. By 20 November, the film had raised £3,147, which equated to more than seven hours of footage. By 23 November, Paint Drying hit £4,000.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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