A Marlow filmmaker will be ‘crossing all his fingers’ after submitting his short movie trailer in a national competition.

Matt Sears, who works for the Marlow-based film company, FST, entered the Artlist x Artgrid contest, ‘AGeditChallenge’, which encourages budding filmmakers to either create a music video, a 30-second advert, or a 90-second movie trailer using some of the company’s archived footage.

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The filmmaker called his entry ‘The Gate’, with the plot focusing on drilling and exploring the surface of Mars in 2087, but the explorers are stunned to see what is in the big, red, planet.

Matt told the Free Press: “You couldn’t really go into the competition with an idea and try and find the footage because it wouldn’t work, as there is certain footage available for you to use.

“And if you do something that is future based, you run the risk of not connecting with people as it is so far into the future.

The trailer to 'The Gate', which Matt created over the course of a month

“But I think at the moment with everything being so doom and gloom and stressful, it is nice to see that people have responded to the trailer in a positive way.

“This is great because when you put so much time and effort into something, it’s nice to see the positive response.

“I get stats on all on my YouTube videos and out of all the videos I have released, this has done the best out of all of them in the last week, and I think this is down to steady growth of the YouTube channel.”

The competition winners will be announced on October 5, with the winner will receiving top-of-the-range film equipment such as cameras, lights, and drones.

This is what pushed Matt to spend nearly 70 hours working on the project over the course of a month.

And following the trailer being made, it has since been viewed over 6,000 times on YouTube and has accumulated 558 likes.

It also shared in the Marlow Life Facebook page where it received critical acclaim.

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He continued: “I did it outside of work hours and in the week of the deadline, I was getting up at six, working on the trailer for a couple of hours, going to work, then coming back and doing it in the evening.

“Overall, I put about 60/70 hours in, and in that last week, I was working from six up until midnight to get it done and done right.

“I’m also in the process of upgrading my kit and that costs a lot of money, so if I were to win, that would be great.

“But there is a lot of competition out there, so I’ll be crossing all my fingers up until that point.”

To watch the trailer on YouTube, click here.

Matt also boasts just over 30,000 subscribers on YouTube.