The Runners 'Runner' - guest blog by Stuart Hale, owner of Sheffield running store, Accelerate, about why he's so chuffed to be introducing Charlie Spedding ahead of his talk at the Sheffield Adventure Film Festival at 17.30 on Saturday (10th March). "I took the pace from 5 minutes per mile up to 4 minutes 47 seconds, and suddenly it was hurting.  After so many miles of waiting for the attack to come, it was a magnificent feeling to be the...

It’s a funny old world. Last week my Dad made a photo book with an online publisher. It was simply for him and my Mum. A single copy. Within minutes of the book being ‘published’ I had an email in my inbox telling me about it. No, I wasn’t logged with the publisher. It’s a little but more sinister than that. I have signed up to Google Alerts so that whenever the word ‘Heason’ appears on a new webpage anywhere on the net I get an...

We've been pretty blown away by a couple of emails that we've received in the last week. One from somebody in the States asking which airport we recommend flying into, and one from Sweden from two guys asking some questions about the programme as they are planning a trip over. We obviously replied to each one and offered as much information as we could, and will do for anybody else who gets in touch. However it occurred to us that it might be...

Last week I blogged about the popularity of the 2012 ShAFF trailer (produced by Alastair Lee of Posing Productions). It’s currently had 66,780 hits. Phenomenal, and with the festival still over a month away it looks set to be significantly higher. We are obviously chuffed to bits with the trailer, but what’s been even more gratifying is some of the comments we’ve received in response to the film. First email landed about 2 minutes...

As director of ShAFF one of the things I like to promote is the number of trailers that we screen in any given year. Obviously a true premiere is something that has never been screened in public anywhere in the world. It’s fairly common for film festivals to advertise a UK Premiere, or even a European Premiere for a film that’s already played in the States for example. It was always pretty easy to differentiate between such geographical...

Late on Tuesday evening we posted the 2012 ShAFF trailer to Youtube. It’s a cracking film, edited by award winning filmmaker Al Lee of Posing Productions. Al was juggling editing and packing for an imminent trip to Venezuela (another film project so watch this space…). When I saw the video on Wednesday morning it had received a few hundred hits overnight. I was pleased enough with this. Then something strange happened. Despite the Youtube...

So it's been a long haul this year, choosing the films that will screen at ShAFF 2012. I've watched in the region of 200 of them and had to whittle that down to something a little more manageable. The current short-list is 73 films long. That's a few more than the last few years, but is largely due to the fact that the average film length has dropped significantly, from around 35 minutes to 21 minutes. We still have a similar length programme...

 In the light of criticisms levelled at the BBC for the fact that there are no women on the shortlist of the Sports Personality Of The Year this year I thought I’d take a look at the films submitted to ShAFF for 2012 to see how well women are represented. Of the 200+ films there are 127 that could reasonably be examined (others I either haven’t yet seen, or they are animations, time lapses or have other non-people based subject matter)....