Bournemouth Graduate in Oscar Win for the Hurt Locker
The Hurt Locker
A BA (Hons) Film Production graduate from the Arts University College at Bournemouth is celebrating after The Hurt Locker, on which he worked as boom operator, won six Oscars at the 82nd Academy Awards. The film was awarded the highest accolade of the night, Best Picture, as well as Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Film Editing, Sound Editing and Sound Mixing at the ceremony in Hollywood last night. This follows a phenomenally successful awards season so far, with the low-budget film collecting six BAFTA awards in February, including Best Film, Best Director and Best Sound.
Simon Bysshe, who graduated from the University College in 2006 and went on to work with The Hurt Locker’s award-winning sound recordist Ray Beckett, is delighted with the film’s success. He commented “It's fantastic! The Hurt Locker was a true international collaboration and it is great to have British technicians collecting these awards. Ray Beckett lives in Dorset and many of the other crew are also British.”
“It’s very exciting; The Hurt Locker is a great film. We were filming in Jordan for 10 weeks and had a lovely time but it was really, really hard work. The film is a series of seven or eight vignettes, which all build up to a sequence of haunting stories about war.”
Simon and Ray both visited the Arts University College at Bournemouth earlier this year to tell current students about their successful careers and, after a special screening of The Hurt Locker, the audience was invited to ask the sound experts about their experiences working on the film.
Head of the University College’s School of Media, Kavita Hayton, commented “We are very proud of Simon’s success. Our Film Production course continues to produce well trained, specialist producers, directors and technicians of great value to the UK and international film industry.”
Simon’s impressive CV also includes The Boat that Rocked, Nowhere Boy and the forthcoming re-make of Gulliver’s Travels, starring Jack Black.
