You may have noticed that we are in the midst of the Portland International Film Festival. Unfortunately I had to miss the showing that I most wanted to see, the collection of local shorts.. apparently the schedulers did not contact my soccer team to ensure I wasn’t going to be on the turf during the showing. Oh well, maybe next year I’ll have more sway.

I’ll definitely try to catch the other batches of shorts next couple weekends. Also hope to see some of the Oscar submissions from other countries for best foreign film.

Unrelated to PIFF, I’m also excited about seeing Coraline. I got to tour the set in Hillsboro while the movie was still in production and I saw all these awesome sets and mostly-finished characters. It was a really impressive operation. I tried to see a showing tonight at Lloyd Center Regal but it was sold out. I hope it does well and encourages Laika to expand operations here. And I hope that the 3D is cooler than that segment of 3D in Freddy’s Dead.

As far as WOE stuff goes, I’m editing a short movie called “The List” that I shot a few weeks back. I hope to have that done within the next couple weeks. It’s another short comedy. My friend Jacob, who hadn’t read the script, was stifling laughs while holding the boom, so hopefully that’s an indication that it’ll be as funny as I envision it being. We’ll find out soon.

This was my easiest script to shoot, so I figured I would pick this one to start with to give my equipment a test run. Special thanks to Dick McMahon who recorded narration way out in Coos Bay and Iretsu for use of their song.

Credits

James: Chase Reeves

Kurt: Zach Brown

Narration: Dick McMahon

Music:
Name our Numbers, Numbers by Iretsu

Sound Effects:
www.soundsnap.com

I had my first White of Eye screening! I went to the amateur filmmakers night at Kelly’s Olympian and showed two movies: Storytime Adventures #1 and my recently completed short comedy Documented Roommate (I’ll have that one online soon.) They both went over well.. the singing crabs got a lot of laughs. It was definitely encouraging and I’m looking forward to showing more movies there.

I really enjoyed the movies shown there by Makeshift Contraption and The Free Box crew. Free Box aims to put out a new episode every week.. these guys are ambitious!

Northwest Film Fest Review

So last post I promised a review of the Northwest Film Festival. I ended up watching all three collections of short films plus Great Speeches from a Dying World, a documentary that follows several homeless people in Seattle.

The documentary was good. I liked hearing the homeless peoples’ stories and getting to know the main character. The speech scenes were great. The Q and A afterward was at least as interesting as the film. I thought the director was more.. well, direct, than one would expect. He gave lots of politically incorrect answers and showed a more emotionally detached viewpoint than one would expect from the sensitive treatment given to his subjects in the movie. I thought it was refreshing, if a little jarring, to see this side of the director.

I love watching short films and there were plenty of gems to satisfy me at the fest. Almost all in the first batch were well done.. my favs there were “Career Opportunities in Poetry,” “For You, My People,” “Hello Goodbye,” “Hirsute,” and “Remember that our Skies are the Same Skies.” The other two batches were a bit more hit and miss. Good ones there included “Smile,” “We Three,” “Hollerings/Three Stories in Wood,” and “The Pull.”

I have to give special kudos to “Little Pleasures.” The film consists of a single shot of a girl sitting on the floor. She puts a stick of gum in her mouth and chews it. Then she puts another stick of gum in her mouth. Then another. Then another. Then another. Like 90 sticks of gum later he cheeks are nearly ripping out with a giant mass of gum she struggles to chew. She cries and chokes on sickly sweet saliva filling her stomach.. the audience just wishes she would stop but she doesn’t let up. It is impressive and horrible. This film wins my most memorable film award.

There were less notable features. I’m looking at you 26-minute film with no plot. I don’t care how slick your production is, if you have no discernable story or even suggested general direction to engage us, we don’t want to see it. But I don’t blame you, really, I blame the judges. Please do not make me suffer through another movie like that again. All in all I think we could have made do with just two batches of delicious short films rather than stretching them out to three batches with some tasteless filler. I think we’ll have more success building audiences for the short movies shown at NWFF by showing just the good stuff and filtering out the rest.

Even if that means it’s harder for me to make the cut. *grin*

This weekend is the Northwest Film Festival! I hope to have an entry in there next time around, but for now I will be happy to watch other local filmmakers’ offerings. As usual, I’m particularly excited about the shorts.. there are three rounds of them, each shown twice. I plan on hitting up “Great Speeches from a Dying World” with a buddy who invited me. The description goes:

“On a personal expedition, Linas Phillips (WALKING TO WERNER) befriends 12 homeless people in Seattle struggling with their unfortunate circumstances. Through the artifice of their reciting great speeches from history—from Shakespeare to JFK—we glimpse the nobility in their lives and a new context for the words and ideas themselves.”

Reviews to follow.

I’ve been working on some visual elements for Bombs Into You’s stage show.. the idea is that we would project some video on/behind us as we play and have a different video sequence for each song. We haven’t figured out how to sync up the video with our backing electronic tracks yet, but I at least wanted to get a start on the video part of it.

I put all these together in After Effects. It’s actually a good way to help me learn how to use the program since I’m basically just toying around with effects and bits of footage.

I filmed the bug on a cruise ship going down the coast of Mexico. The thermometer is from the front of my house and the blinky lettering was warning of road construction down the street from me. The fence and wires footage comes from a substation also near my house.