Alien Invasion or Illegal Immigrants? is Brenda Smith's entry into the What's the Story? short film competition at the 2024 Rathmullan Film Festival.
Smith reflects on the motivation behind her short film:
"Telling a bizarre story, highlighting both the ridiculous and dangerous aspects of ‘fake news’, in an understated way, how history can be rewritten in propaganda form to sway/manipulate opinion.
The archive material was relevant to recent important historical events in Ireland - content broadly varied so enabling many options for interpretation,creativity and development. I considered three options. My final choice was influenced by tech problems due to power cuts but fitted my intention to focus on the concept of fake news.
I drafted a short story using a comedic clip, interspliced with clips edited from two different pieces of military archive footage, to strengthen the story- explained in a self recorded, overlaid misleading commentary- designed to imitate a TV news report. I used Video Pad software as a beginner."