Shane Meadows worked his way up from an ex-thief to one of the most known short film directors. After realising that he wasn't going to be a criminal mastermind, Meadows voluntarily worked at Intermedia Film and Video LTD in exchange for use of their filming and editing equipment.
Meadows used his friends and family in his video experiments and once he had completed a few short films his friends and family were impressed by his work and became enthusiastic about appearing in Meadow's work.
Eventually Meadows had a big collection of short films and with the help of his friends he set up an event called ‘Six of the best’ This was a way for Meadow’s and others short film work to be screened because prior to this event, there was no other outlet for short films to be viewed by the wider public. In time ‘Six of the best’ became very popular and became an international video festival called ‘Flip Side’.
‘Where’s the money Ronnie’ is probably Meadows’s best known short film and the one that gained him the interest of the film industry. The short comedy led the path for Meadows to make a channel 4 documentary about Bartley Gorman – a bare knuckle boxer friend of Meadows.
Eventually Meadows had made enough money to create ‘Smalltime’ a short following a gang of small time crooks. This was a perfect example of Meadows’s working philosophy – He stuck to what he knew and this gained the attention Meadows needed to make his first feature film ‘Twentyfour Seven’.
The popular film ‘This is England’ created by Meadows in 2006 was recently made into a small drama on Channel 4 which shows that Meadows is still relevant and developing as a filmmaker. Meadows continues to ‘stick to what he knows’ by returning to short films and focusing much of his work on his friends so that ‘can’t go far wrong’.
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