Film Contest Final Ranking and Screening

So, we got 10th. They called it 9th, but two people tied for 8th.

'Die Bugs! Die!!!' was excellent. Great acting, lots of great lines, amazingly high production values. (I would swear they were using a dolly for some shots, if that wasn't so unlikely. Maybe very good steadycam work.) 'Clan Wars' had a muddled plot that didn't really go anywhere, but it had great costumes and settings, played with interesting lighting effects, and generally just reeked coolness.

The other 7... weren't so good. Mostly just a series of cheap laughs, poorly edited together. The first place movie was 10 minutes of people impersonating the Simpsons comic book store owner wrapper around one middling clever idea, a handful of good jokes and hideous production values. (And they were inexplicably mixing Trek, Tolkien and generic medieval fantasy, which offends me much more than the characterization of my social group does.)

Lessons? Humor sells. 'Clan Wars' was the only other top 10 entry that was serious. Capitol-I Ideas don't sell. While I haven't seen a breakdown of the scores yet, I have to assume the judges are interpreting the criteria much differently than I do. Or maybe our fear that they wouldn't know what a passion play was turned out to be well founded.

The righteous bitterness of a misunderstood artist aside, the trip was all kinds of fun, even the wacky ferry mishaps in both directions. We (vixyish, corivax, cow, datavore, ilmarinen, art_geek, myself) all made it in plenty of time, we all got good seats, and we got to wander around the town for a bit. Port Townsend is a great place, and I'm always up for roadtrips with friends. I'll try to post pics later.

Film Contest Post Mortem

That last post was rather bitter. And while I am a bit bitter, it's stupid to focus on that. So here is the important stuff:

The good: Last night was my first viewing since I turned it in two weeks ago, and The Grace of Tears stood as a very strong entry in my eyes. The acting is fabulous -- it was a pleasure to work with jhitchin and datavore. I was able to make good use of nonverbal interaction, instead of just talking heads. I was only forced to use a less-than-perfect clip in order to work around bad takes a handful of times. The editing is smooth and mostly unobtrusive. We were aiming for a quieter, more subtle movie, and I think we succeeded admirably. The subject material makes it slightly challenging, but not in an incomprehensible way. I think I can claim that I am a filmmaker now without feeling like a hopeless poseur.

The less than good: Intriguingly, nothing jumped out at me as woefully needing fixing. Most of the problems I did see were due to it being a 48 hour film, not because of fundamental issues with our movie-making process. Now that the standard room-tone audio issues are resolved, we need to work more on keeping the mic a consistent distance from people between different takes. I still need to master the art of the well-balanced montage. I need to buy more instrument voices for my composer. I'm still only a mediocre camera operator, with too much footage shaky and too little of it artistically interesting. I need to bring the old dolly-ne-wheelchair back out and experiment with it some more -- my shoots are too static, and I just can't walk smoothly enough to get lengthy dolly shots even with modern image stabilization.

Seeing the darn thing: I need to set up a screening party locally. Would sometime this coming weekend be good for people? I have a real media encode ready to be put up on the web, and the Midgard Studios page has a page ready to receive it. I'll get that up soon, honest. October 13 is the next Open Screening at 911 Media Arts Center, 8pm. I'll take TGoT down for that; people are welcome to come along and see what the response is like. (The standard open screening caveats apply.) The contest people claim they are putting together a DVD of all the winners. I'll do my best to get copies for everyone who helped out who wants one.

The future: I think TGoT is our first piece worthy of being submitted to film festivals as a stand-alone short piece. I'm going to be working with xiadyn to redo the scoring and really nail the feeling I was going for. The white-out torture sequences will be redone to make them much more abstract and closer to the original idea. With a few small changes like that, I think TGoT has an excellent chance of being accepted somewhere. That means IMDb credits for the cast and crew.

TGoT kind of kicks ass. Thank you to everyone who helped out in one way or another. I'm still not sure why you put up with any of it, but this certainly wouldn't happen without you.