Thursday, May 23, 2013

Screening Night

It has arrived! Tonight is the night we screen Finding June for an audience here in Hollywood at El Cid bar and restaurant. El Cid is an classic Spanish-style dinner theatre venue, and we get to make use of their gorgeous interior stage and screen for our showing. I wish each backer could come to watch with us tonight, and celebrate the making of something important, and the contributions that all our backers have made. Our thank you list will be long tonight. I will update with photos from the pink carpet once we get them back from our photographers! I'm excited to share this on a big screen!

Other important news: Lunafest. We did not make it to the final 10 films. My view, though I wish we had made it, is positive. Lunafest received 925 submissions. Yes, nine hundred twenty five films from all over the world. Finding June made it to the very last cut which consisted of 40 top-choice films. That means a panel of real filmmakers, festival launchers and industry know-alls watched our film and rooted for it all the way until the very last round! That's something I count as a small victory, as this project was a first in so many ways and was successful on a budget that IMDB sent warning messages about, for fear I had left off one zero when I entered the amount. (Where I live, "low budget" means a few million bucks). I'm happy with our film, and I'm proud of everyone involved 1,000%. It's possible that the Bay Area hosting of Lunafest show our film anyway as a local guest spot film.

The primary concern for Lunafest seems to be the length. Most Lunafest films are 10 minutes long, and a 20 minute film was not fitting well with the program they were shaping. Also, several people commented that the Pink Wings paper we see during June's breakdown had a lot of information and it as easy to miss the most important parts. Other comments included that the timeline around the interpreter/Farsi woman argument in the parking lot was unclear to some. We have deleted that parking lot scene between the Farsi woman and interpreter (sorry Sara and Lindsay!), and it flows much more smoothly this way. We also re-shot the Pink Wings brochure with a new page design so it is obvious what the audience is intended to read. I think this makes the story and the ending much more clear. We will upload a version of this to Vimeo as well.

We have submitted to several festivals, and are still waiting. I get almost daily updates from the submission site and we are carefully reading through the festivals and selecting whic ones fit our film, our audience and the rest of the festival portion of our budget.

Something that I've said to a few people about hearing from Lunafest, and something I truly feel, is this: All of those people involved with that judging panel saw our film, and that means that each of them the next time they are in a coffee shop or at a bar or shopping and they see someone using American Sign Language, they will have a different perspective than if we had never made this film at all.

1 comment:

  1. The only reason I'm even reading this is because I saw my dear old friend Lexi comment that she was on the red carpet for your film. :-) Best of Luck from Houston :-) ( I'm originally from Orange County and attended University HS in Irvine.)

    ReplyDelete