Big Screens

Been a little while, been kinda busy. Nothing related to the movie, not directly at least. Just helping out a bunch of students with their first short films over the last few months, which cumulated into a film festival the other night. I've been to enough of these to where my nerves have dulled to the response from the audience to work I tangentially worked on. Even the awards elicit no real emotion from me, you get used to the mysterious judges honoring one film or another with first place despite your disagreement with the outcome. Though I suppose it should be said that I become so close to the various projects and their directors that I don't have the impartiality to argue with the choices. In any case, nowadays I sit in the back of the theater and chuckle while knowing there will be outrage, as there is nearly every year since the school began to award prizes. Not my problem anymore. Over the course of the last semester when working with these guys and gals, when the topic of prize money or what have you is broached, best I could do was to try and get across that first place is arbitrary at best, seemingly spiteful at worst. You serve no one by attempting to appeal to these arbiters of taste, so don't bother and just make the movie you want to make. Hopefully that got through, though I expect it didn't click for most until the night of the festival. At least the movies looked great on the big screen.

So how does this relate to my own movie? Not really sure, but I'll give it a shot anyway. Well, I've hit the point where I'll have to start digging into my wallet and start entering my work into a few festivals. Putting That Thing's feet to the fire, as it were. I told myself when I started making this thing that I wouldn't care about the festivals, that I would just toss this thing online and be done with it. Work on it long enough though, and I guess the goal has changed a little. A bit selfish maybe, perhaps egotistical, but I would very much like people to watch the entire thing now. The whole seventy-something minutes of thing there is, in one sitting. This movie, it's actually a movie and not a collection of shorts, at least in my mind. There's an arc, a message, a statement, a lot of things that would be lost if it was simply put on YouTube in pieces without context. So I gotta get it out there, see if any of these judges see what I see in it. Honestly, I don't really expect it to have much success, I don't know if That Thing is the kind of thing that would fill seats. But that's not my decision to make. There's nothing left to do except to start tossing disks in padded envelopes and tell myself that there's no chance, if only because it's a lot easier to accept defeat when you're not expecting to win in the first place. Hey, if I somehow do get accepted, then cool, I'll be ecstatic, it'll be nice to watch it on the big screen. But until then, I don't know. I'll probably enter a half a dozen or so, and if nothing comes of it then I'll cut my losses and move on to whatever's next.

Meh, not a very good entry, too much rambling that goes nowhere. I'll try harder next time.