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October 15, 2005
LSGL teaser kicks off 2005 H.P. Lovecraft Filmfest
by sven at 6:08 pm
Last weekend (Oct 7-9) we attended the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival at the Hollywood Theater. My one-minute teaser for "Let Sleeping Gods Lie" was the very first item in Shorts Block One... Thus, kicking off the festival! (Or so I'd like to think. There were three screens, after all.)
Thank you Laura G., Leopoldo, Michael B., Philip F., Alex R. for coming to the show! --And a special shout out of apologetic gratitude to Jacque & Mari who came, but got turned away at the door because Saturday night sold out. I appreciate your support!
The teaser showed three times: twice on the upper left screen, and once on the main screen (Saturday). Getting to have something on the big screen -- even if it was just a minute long -- was a dream come true for me. During the third screening, the sound system was wonky; but I didn't care. It was great just to be shown -- and every night, the theater was packed. Here's a photo of the the blizzard sequence actually playing on the upstairs screen:
Going into the fest, I was most worried about how the colors would turn out. Happily, they worked out just fine. The super-saturated red can be problematic on a regular television screen -- but projection dulled it down just enough. ...Color-wise, I think I had one of the prettiest clips in the show.
I talked to five or six of the other filmmakers and gave away freebie copies of the teaser DVD as good will gifts. They're excited to see the final product when it's done, and commiserated with/lauded me regarding the insane time commitment that producing this animation requires.
A few reviews of the shorts block have gone up online. Here's the feedback I'm getting... Folks are confused about what kind of animation they're seeing. [It's a variety of rotoscoping.] They're wondering how long the final piece will be. [Between 7 and 15 minutes.] One commented that the lavamen effect could get pretty old pretty quick... Which makes me think that I really need to make the "body heat fading away" sequence at the end sing, as a payoff for my strange visual premise. Folks said that the teaser was really too short to be able say much about it.
My big worry now: My notion that I could merge experimental art film with gothic horror might not make sense to a lot of people. This idea that the creatures are eternal, thus more real, thus photo-realistic -- whereas the ephemeral humans are blurry -- also may not communicate. There's not a lot I can do about it now; I'll just have to make my peace with the potential for blank looks. But me -- I still think it's a really cool concept. And in the end, since this isn't particularly a money-making venture, that's what counts -- right?
Oh, I almost forgot to mention: I spent the two days before the fest doing promo materials. I made two t-shirts (see photo above), a new sticker-label for the DVDs, and seventy snazzy little business cards / flyers. All of the flyers were gone by the end of the fest. And I think I gave away about 20 DVDs. ...Now that I've figured out how to use Disk Utility to burn .img files, it only takes about 15 minutes to produce each disk. I had a frenzied little DVD factory going on in the studio... [Thanks, mph, for the last minute iChat help with the software!]
posted by sven | October 15, 2005 6:08 PM | comments (6) | categories: exhibits & events, let sleeping gods lie, movies
Comments
Congratulations. This stuff looks Tony-the-Tiger GRREAT. But do not forget what I have said re: what I did not just hear you say. I WILL repeat myself. Never fearing for repetition. Repeating. Whatever. I'll do it.
SERENITY = franchise. MirrorMask = one-off. Choose wisely. Your entertainment future is at stake.
P.S. I haven't seen MirrorMask and it may well be the better picture; I'm willing to stipulate that; but we must wear the Brown, Sven, or face a dire future where we only see bad Phil Dick adaptations and videogame "transfers" as our basic summer fare. And what we want, is basic Summer Glau, orchestrated by Joss, focused on mayhem, and not sweating small stuff like box office returns. We want SERENITY. Gorram it.
Okay. End plug.
Congratulations, again. I wish I could have seen it large.
Posted by: Carl Caputo at October 15, 2005 8:18 PM
Off-topic plug noted. (Nods stern acknowledgement.)
Now, as I was saying...
...I wish you could have been there, too.
Posted by: sven at October 15, 2005 9:05 PM
well, considering you were -in- the gorram trailer, carl, you totally -should- have been there! we'll fly you out for the full-length feature premiere. :)
can't we have BOTH serenity and mirrormask? do we have to choose? :P
Posted by: gl. at October 15, 2005 9:26 PM
Off-topic, cont'd (sorry, Sven):
Sadly, we may not even be allowed to choose, not as a mass audience, anyway. They'll be "cult" pictures both, and perhaps indicative of a trend toward self-chosen audiences who merit and receive work they appreciate, regardless of the works' appeal to mass audiences. Here we're speaking of the difference between audiences of a few hundred thousand and audiences of millions or tens of millions, I think.
Posted by: Carl Caputo at October 16, 2005 6:01 PM
So you gotta post the trailer man, now that's it's shown - for those of us that couldn't make it to the fest.
Posted by: Mark Myers at October 16, 2005 8:01 PM
ha! that's what -i- said offline. i did not pay markalope to say that just now, either! *slips mark a $20 under the table*
Posted by: gl. at October 17, 2005 12:35 PM