Indie Gathering Day Three; or It's Been Swell, but the Swelling's Gone Down

I’m at the airport as I write this; my plane is scheduled to leave at 5:45 am. I’ve collected my award - the only one from my category to show up, though thankfully some of the other filmmakers showed - and the event is over. One group I know was there didn’t show up for their awards. Weird.

I maintain that this is one of the strangest festivals I’ve ever heard of, been a part of, or been to. It’s not open to the public and yet it is...it was badly organized and I don’t understand how awards like their Viewer’s Choice and Best of Fest is going to work considering how few people were in the screening rooms for a lot of the films I saw. I’m including their apparent judge, who I saw firmly entrenched in screening room A. (Tip: You may not want your judges to sit in the audience with their paperwork in front of them...I’m just sayin’.)

I didn’t get to see the other films in my category, with things running either ahead or behind in most of the screening rooms I was afraid of missing my own screening which was when the others were playing, but I did not see one film that was inspiring to me in anyway. There was no “Even” here, no “Excised,” or “Creepers” (that short is still chilling to me) or “AM 1200” or "Apathy Breeds Contempt" -- all films that I saw at ShockerFest last year that were wonderful. There was nothing at Indie Gathering that was in any way inspiring. My mom would stop me here and remind me that my flick played, but I’m not talking about my flick, I’m talking about the films I watched, which is what I was there for.

I mean, there were a lot of films that showed me what I DON’T want to do...so I suppose the festival part of the event did serve a purpose, but I’d prefer to be inspired, to think, “Man, those people are awesome, I HAVE to meet them!” and not “Okay...Troma looks like Universal Studios next to this guy...and he’s on a panel giving a lecture?! He’s on MORE THAN ONE PANEL?!”

Don't misunderstand me, I am grateful for the screening and the award. The medal is very nice, much nicer than I was expecting, to be honest. But the point in any screening is to have your work seen and I can’t help but wonder how different the festival part of the event would have been with better organization, or maybe more attention paid to the material presented.

It’s not that it’s a bad event. It really isn’t. It’s that it’s not as international as it would like to be and it’s less a film festival and more of a Ohio / Michigan based martial arts / stunt extravaganza. If I still lived in North Canton and happened to find my way into film, I think I would have loved this festival as it really is so region-specific. As it is, I’m gunshy about coming back next year because there was no audience for so many of the films...probably just as gunshy as they may be about having me back considering how I’m blogging about their event. If you live near there, it’s great, really great, for making contacts in the Ohio film industry. If you don’t, approach it with the knowledge that it’s about action films, stunts, and martial arts and not so much about the films.

I’ve got CenFlo coming up in a couple of weeks. I’m really looking forward to that one as there will be more people watching the flick than just myself and the very nice projectionist. I also have a bunch more festivals to hear back from.

Forty five minutes until the plane is scheduled to depart. It’s still dark out so I’ll be watching the sun rise from the window of my plane as I head back south, back home.

Random thoughts - the Indie Gathering

Before I go on a trip like the one I’m currently on, I tend to download a few new songs. Usually, one song will stand out and remind me of the trip, though it may not have anything in particular to do with the trip itself; last year it was “This Boy’s In Love” by The Presets. This year, it’s a song called “World Coming Down” by Ashbury Heights. I’m not even done with the trip yet and I know which song will remind me of it.

This year, I also downloaded Carrie Fisher’s Wishful Drinking from iTunes. I love Carrie Fisher. She’s such an amazing writer and she is the one reading her own book which adds a wonderful element of awesome to the proceedings. It’s like you’re sitting with her and she’s telling you about her life, which I would love -- to sit with Carrie Fisher and listen to her talk. True Fax: as far as I know, the first time I ever saw Carrie Fisher wasn’t in Star Wars, it was in The Blues Brothers. I can just about guarantee that I was the only child ever to say, “Hey, that’s the lady who tried to kill Elwood!” when Princess Leia came on screen.

In the mornings, I’ll fire up iTunes and listen to all my Goth stuff whilst finishing up the previous day’s write up, doing Yoga, and getting ready for the day’s screenings. At night, I’ll begin the write up of the day while the television is going in the background, then start that day’s write up before going to bed. Don’t want to forget stuff, you know?

I don’t want anyone to get me wrong about this event. I love the martial arts and martial arts films. I just wish I knew that was what this event was all about, martial arts and stunts. I would have approached it differently, I think. I probably would have still mostly watched movies as that’s why I’m here, but I would have made a more concerted effort to check out some of the fight stuff, like last night’s stunt demo. It’s good for filmmakers to check stuff like that out, to see what they’ll be putting the stunties through. Strangely, I was the only filmmaker in the stunt demo last night, too. Well, there was one other person, but he left before the good stuff started and I had to leave during the good stuff for the last film. I should have either stayed to watch the stunt demo or gone to the film that “stars” Brinke Stevens. At least she gives a solid performance.

Indie Gathering Day Two

I’m up super early today for no other reason than my flight is super early tomorrow and if I want to have any hope of catching some Z’s before take-off, I need to be tired tonight.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned about this particular event is that it’s mainly a martial arts convention and tournament that happens to have a film competition, but the film part is secondary. It’s also like a huge audition for martial artists. I mainly attended films yesterday, you know...as if it was a film festival. Often, I was the only person in the screening room with the exception of the projectionist and a couple of people who floated in and out. I never met a filmmaker after their film, though some of them were here. I met three guys here for their flick and instead of sending even one into the screening room, they sat at their table in the convention room to chat with each other and sell their movie.

During my film, it was just the projectionist and I and one guy who came in with ten minutes to go until the end. The projectionist really liked it. Really, really liked it. The guy who came in during the last ten minutes said he liked what he saw so I gave him a copy of the flick and told him to enjoy it. I also gave the projectionist a copy of the flick and my card. So it’s good to know that people who see it really like it...but they have to SEE IT in order to like it...it’s gotta get past the selection stage and into the screening stage. Like a colleague once said, the selection process is so bloody random; one viewer might say it’s a must have and another viewer might say it totally stinks.

I toured the convention a little, bought a couple of movies from filmmakers. I haven’t watched them yet and for all I know, they’re poo. I don’t know, I was feeling supportive, I suppose.

Anyway, here’s a rundown of what I saw...

No One Island: Actually, I was on time to see A Jersey Christmas, but they’d started screening films and not telling people who were waiting in the hall that they were starting the movies so they had to restart one and lost it from there. I missed the first ten or fifteen minutes or so and was lost. It doesn’t help that the rest of the flick was vague and performed like a missing episode of Twin Peaks, but not in a good way.

A Jersey Christmas: This was about a group of people who don’t celebrate Christmas working at a Christmas store on Christmas Eve for a guy who can’t control his gambling habit and owes at least one organization $45,000. It was cute, but not laugh out loud funny so I was disappointed. They had a lot of potential for touching hilarity and it was squandered.

Hanging by a Thread: This was about a married couple whose therapist has them filmed by a reality television crew to sort out their problems. Pretty good. Well written and to the point.

Becoming Roman: This is about a left hand who wants to become a right hand and then aspires to be the person to which the hands belong. It was like a bad version of Clive Barker’s “Body Politic.”

Stuck: A man and a woman are stuck in an elevator. Short and to the point, it was okay.

White Radishes: This was about an obsessive compulsive man who helps a young woman who was trapped in her house by her mother. To go further than that would be to spoil it. It was really weird, though not in a way that makes me happy, but it was definitely original.

A Hammer Fell in Jerusalem: Anathema: I loved it, but that’s not really news. I still love everything about it, though I’m at the point now where I’m picking at the flaws, but I don’t want to change anything. I love this flick, what can I tell you? And even though no one showed up, I know people have picked up a few of the posters and postcards so at least they’ll look it up. Or use them as notepaper, but I prefer the other idea. ;D

Life, Passion, Death: I tried like hell to stick this one out, it was the film that came on after mine and I had nothing else I wanted to see for three hours, but I just couldn’t do it. It was about a Spanish woman who falls in love with an American man while she’s on vacation in New York and just thinking about it makes me want to fall asleep. I’m sorry to the lady who spent so much time on it, but I had to leave.

At this point, I left the festival / convention to get dinner and came back to watch some of the World Stunt Association’s demo / training thing. The first part was the organizer of the event telling the aspiring stunties how to audition for roles and then he brought up the pro stunties to start giving these people, including quite a few children, the basics of stuntwork. The kids should learn how to punch before they learn how to not hit people, but that’s just me I guess. The organizer was very quick to be gender inclusive for the actors and stunties, but not so much for the directors, producers, and writers.

There were a few other issues I had with the organizer’s spiel, but I won’t go into them. To each their own opinion; though I don’t agree with what he was saying, I understand his point of view.

And, finally:

The Sky Has Fallen: The world has ended, its population infected with a mysterious virus, and the survivours are seeing black figures that take the dead bodies away to experiment on them and reanimate them. One dude, and a woman he helped, set off to kill the leader of the black figures. (The revenants did look like something out of a Fulci film, so that was pretty cool.)

This was a big disappointment. It had an intriguing premise, great cinematography, a great score, and great special effects, but it was destroyed by ham-fisted direction, bad performances, and a terrible script. Almost every other line of dialogue was a question and they spoke in circles so much that they made no forward progress and actually reversed something they’d said only a couple of minutes before. It was rare that a character spoke more than one sentence in a row and the editing followed suit with talking heads. Most of the film was made up of intense, vacant close ups. And what action there was was boring.

I almost walked out, but it was only an hour. And I was the only one there and felt really bad. The film just before it was empty, too.

That was the last flick for the day. Today is the last day of the festival and includes the awards ceremony. If there’s time after the awards, there’s a flick I’d like to check out and a seminar on special effects make-up for low budget cinema I’d like to attend, but we’ll see. After that, I just have to make sure everything is all packed up and ready to go for my early-ass flight home. Needless to say, I did not attend last night’s networking party and considering how early my flight is on Monday, I will not be attending tonight’s either. I do feel a tiny bit better, though, so that’s good.

Alright, more to come later as I wrap up my time in Cleveland and at the Indie Gathering.

The Indie Gathering: Day One

Pretty much as soon as I got back to the hotel from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, I got wrapped up in the first day of the festival. It wasn’t supposed to start until 6 and I got back at five-ish, but I went ahead and got my fest badge (on which I’ve since written my name and the name of my film), and hung around the general festival area until the first film started, a Mongolian flick called Jinjiimaa. I did come back up to my room to wash my face and grab some posters for the poster table.

The thing you should understand about the first day of any festival is that it tends to be kind of low key and a bit of a slow start. There were maybe fifteen people in there and the filmmakers, of course, weren’t there. But then again, none of the filmmakers for last night’s films were there. The film that had the most people in the auditorium was The SEED, a short film by one of the Linkin Park guys.

I missed the fourth film in favour of getting something to eat. I thought it would be kind of distracting to the rest of the audience to hear my stomach grumbling. Then I returned for the second to last film and didn’t watch the very last. Like I said in my Hall of Fame post, I wasn’t feeling all that great, in fact my throat’s kind of sore this morning, so just came back to my room, started writing the Hall of Fame post, and passed out around 2 only to be awakened when I thought my clock read 1:30...in the afternoon. Yeah, it was 7:30 in the morning, but the top bar of the seven wasn’t showing up. The first film I want to see isn’t until 1:15 pm so I have some time yet.

Jinjiimaa: The organizer of the festival said that this film was actually in the festival a couple of years ago, but he liked it so much that he wanted to bring it back for the opening night. I think it needed some work in the cinematography, sound, and editing departments (coincidentally, the editor is here to give a lectures about editing and producing), but the performances were fantastic across the board.

It’s about a woman who lost her hearing after an accident when she was a child and was raped by a town leader when he grew up. After the act, when she shot him, the man she loved and who loved her took the blame and did the time for her. When he’s released, she goes to pick him up and introduce him to her child from the rape. They all get along well for a while, right up until she finds out she can get a surgery that will cure her deafness. The man sells all of his cows to pay for the surgery and she takes off. The town leader she shot, who is still alive, tries to take the child away saying that the man can’t take care of the woman’s child, and through an accident, their hut burns down, presumably with the man and child inside.

Fast forward fifteen years: the child is grown up and the man had taken her away because he thought the town leader set the fire on purpose. They’d been unsuccessful in finding her mother, who we discover is now a famous activist for women’s rights. Apparently not famous enough, though, because it takes the characters forever to reconnect. And there’s one more tragedy at the end which I won’t reveal, but it’s tragic.

Forgetful Not Forgotten: This is a documentary about one man’s father and his journey through early onset Alzheimer's, from pretty early on right through to the bitter end. The filmmaker, Chris Wynn, was afraid that he was showing signs of early onset Alzheimer's himself so it also chronicles his trips to the memory clinic and his struggle to decide whether or not he was going to start a family with his girlfriend. The one thing that lifts this doc above the rest is that it’s unflinchingly honest about his father’s decline. You watch it as it happens, pretty much. Utterly heartbreaking.

The SEED: This is the flick by the Linkin Park guy. He pumped a lot of cash into it, too, but it’s only twelve minutes. If you’re going to put that kind of cash into a project, make it a feature. It probably would have served the story better to be a feature anyway. It was shot on film and in scope so not only was it shot on film, it was shot on super-35.

The flick’s about a possibly crazy, possibly homeless guy who has a cloaking device in his brain and he fights some hockey-masked baddies with his mad martial arts skillz, then he takes the corkscrew end of a Swiss army knife, drills into his own head, and pulls out the SEED and now he can see spaceships. I suppose it was a “what if the crazy homeless people aren’t crazy” type deal, but more of a story would have been appreciated. It was well shot, well edited, and had good effects. The acting was okay.

After this there was an intermission in which I came back to my room, grabbed my hoodie, then got some food, and then waited for the last half an hour or so until the last feature started so I missed Ghengis Blues.

Hampshire: A Ghost Story: This flick is, as the title pretty clearly states, about ghosties. The Busy Bistro, which has since gone out of business in real life, is just an average restaurant with some very dangerous ghosts. People go completely missing, completely mental, or both. And the spirits follow you, driving you mad and killing everyone around you.

I make it sound more exciting than it actually was because outside of some great cinematography, good set pieces, and some pretty good acting, it really wasn’t scary. There was so little tension that whatever tension there was was broken with the use of overly dramatic music cues or silly classical selections. And the end song, which was performed by the twins in the flick, was a blatant Manson rip-off. It was an okay flick, but it could have been so much better, especially when it had so much going for it.

After the flick, there was one more short, but I decided to head over to the bar where the networking party was and get a bottle of water. Moments after arriving, though, I just went ahead and came back to my room and settled in for the night. I don’t want to be sick, especially not for my own screening. My throat’s still a little sore and I’m tired...not a good combination, not when I’m in Ohio anyway.

More to come after today’s festival goodness!

Film Festival business!

Whew! Gotta get out my Swiffer, this place is all dusty! It's tough to try and keep a blog when you work every shift by yourself and are pretty exhausted by the time your days off roll around. In fact, this will be my ninth day in a row without a day off, but with good reason: I'm heading to the Indie Gathering the day after tomorrow! I'll try to post more both during and after the festival...I'll have so much to say and so much I'll want to remember! It is, after all, the first trip back to the homeland in 17 years and my first trip to Cleveland ever! What a way to go back!

In other news, I've got my trailer in a contest at the Vampire Film Festival in New Orleans! The film isn't about vampires, but they accept all dark materials and this film is certainly that. In their categories, I would classify it as Goth which works out because on the IMDb, the film is listed in the top thirteen Goth shorts! How that works, I don't know, but it's there and I'll take it. :D Maybe it's based on the use of keywords...whatever.

Anyway, the contest is on the festival's youTube channel. To vote, simply click on the stars and, if you feel so inclined, leave a comment as to why you feel that way. You can access my trailer's page directly by clicking on this sentence. I DON'T want ANYONE to click one star on any other trailer just to give anyone a boost! Please be honest! I know I can't expect the same from others in the contest, but I can hope for it! Besides, how are we to learn how to make stuff better without honesty?

In other news, I have made up a few DVDs to give away at the festival so if anyone reading this is actually going to Indie Gathering, or CenFlo or any festival for that matter, and wants a copy, come on up and find me after the screening ('cause, you know, you should see it before wanting it! ;D) They're homemade so a little rough, but made with heart and that's what counts when you don't have cash.

I think that's enough of this for now. I'll try to not be so absent in the future...I can't promise much when the bill-paying job is so tiring, but I can try!!