Pink & Ain't

I found out today that both Fried Ham and I Must Destroy You are official selections of the San Fernando Valley International Film Festival.  Yay me!  In theory I’ll hear soon if I’ve been nominated for their animation award.  So anyone who’s in the LA area between March 17th and 26th should go to the festival and cheer me on 🙂  (they haven’t posted a schedule yet, or I’d tell you a more specific date and time)

How rockin’ is this: I Must Destroy You, my first-year film from UCLA, has just been accepted into its first festival!  It’s going to be in the Faux Film Festival in Portland, Oregon in March.  I hope all my rockin’ Portland peeps can go see it.  Here’s the rockin’ acceptance email I just got:

Well, I did it. I just applied to a bunch of film festivals. Total submission fees: $630. Yow. Just in case anyone’s interested, below are the festivals I submitted my films to. I submitted I Must Destroy You and Fried Ham, my two most recent films. I mostly looked for local LA-area festivals, European festivals (which often have no entry fee (yay!)), and dedicated animation festivals.

I submitted both films to:

– San Fernando Valley International Film Festival

– Golden Star Shorts Fest

– Silver Lake Film Festival

– Starz First Look Student Film Festival

– WINNIPEG International Film Festival

– Audience Choice Film festival

– California International Animation Festival

– Edinburgh International Film Festival

– Malibu Int’l Film Festival

– SouthSide Film Festival

I submitted only I Must Destroy You to:

– Faux Film Festival

– Beverly Hills Fine Arts Industry Showcase

– Hollywood Film Festival

– Action/Cut Short Film Competition

– SCI-FI-LONDON: The London International Festival of Science Fiction and Fantastic Film

Now I just have to send out DVDs to all these festivals, making sure to label them all exactly as specified for each festival. That’ll probably be my big task for this evening. Then I’ll take them out tomorrow and get them postmarked (many have a December 31^st postmark deadline).

Animation is a lot of work. My friend Cory thinks I must have OCD to be able to sit there and draw the same picture over and over. For some reason animation works for me. I’ll sit there for hours on end drawing, tracking frame numbers, filling out exposure sheets, tweaking animatics a frame at a time, etc. etc. blah blah blah. I don’t get bored with it. I think I even find it relaxing in a way. Or maybe it’s like meditation.

Still, that doesn’t mean I automatically sit down and do it all the time. Like any work, sometimes I have trouble motivating myself to actually sit down and start. I guess that’s been happening some lately. I was way busy in the week or two leading up to Christmas, so I genuinely had too little time to work on DFtS, but since getting back in town yesterday I could have worked on it a number of times. Deep down in the sub-cockle area of my heart I’m a procrastinator.

It’s the same way, only a million times more, once the film is completed. You’ve created your magnum opus; now what? The answer, for most independent filmmakers, is to submit it to festivals. Today I registered on withoutabox.com, a web site where you can enter the information for your film once and then submit it electronically to lots of different festivals. Real easy, right? Yeah, it is, but there’s more to it. I still have to pay the submission fee for each festival (which ranges from about $15 to $60 for each film submitted to each festival) and send them the actual film on physical media (most accept DVD, which is good because it’s really easy and cheap for me to make one of those). So I have to make a financial and time commitment for each festival I want to submit each to, not to mention decide which festivals I want to try for. If I had money unbound I’d just go through and submit to as many festivals I could. It might even be easier that way, since then I could send out my DVDs in huge batches.

So I was sitting there in front of my computer, having entered the information for I Must Destroy You, one of my recent films, but I just couldn’t make the commitment. I looked at a few festival listings but I just felt overwhelmed. I don’t really know anything about any of them, so it’s kind of hard to click to button to give them $30 so that they’ll look at and probably reject my film.

See, that’s another problem. I don’t have a lot of confidence in this process. I submitted my first film, Pink & Ain’t, to a two or three festivals but I didn’t even hear back from any of them. I thought it was a pretty good film but I guess it wasn’t good enough for those festivals. Really I should have submitted it to more, but I couldn’t get the motivation up.

Looking at it rationally, though, I think I can get into and even win some festivals — I just have to try. I have to make myself believe it’s worth the time and money to get my name out there.