You might have seen a video countdown by Indiewire critic David Ehrlich pop up in your social media feeds at the end of each year. Well, Filmyear is my own version of these. I was inspired by Erhlich's 2016 countdown to create my own video as an easy way of sharing my favourites from that year to my friends. I've continued to craft these countdowns every year since, including a redux video for 2015, and see them as practice for my editing skills and a testing area for techniques and ideas.
The basic structure of each video is a brief prologue, followed by a montage of everything I've managed to watch that year, and then the main event of the countdown itself. All music used in the videos has to come from the soundtracks of the film slate of that year. The various hurdles of international film distribution mean I'm hamstrung by UK release dates, meaning some films fall by the wayside and don't get the spotlight (for instance, Poor Things was held over from 2023 until 2024 in the UK, and by the time it came to cutting Filmyear 2024, it had lost a bit of its lustre).
Naturally, I live in fear of copyright strikes, but so far, things seem to be okay.