I'm Finally Making My Own Movie - "PAPER PLATES"

IndyFanChuck said:
Any updates? I’m excited to see this man!
Click to expand...

The movie is currently fully graded and edited, and essentially picture-locked. I'm going through it for the upteenth time doing my initial sound mix. It's been a slow going process so far as the more corrections I add to each frame and the more the project just grows in data, it just completely kills my video card trying to process all of this. I'm waiting on a new GPU to arrive so I can swap out my old one to speed it up.

Once that's done, I have to send it off to have it post-mixed to correct the many issues I'm sure it has (I'm slightly hard of hearing). I've got a list of 185 festivals around the world that I think it would be a good fit to play at, if it's accepted to any of them at all, but out of that number, I figure the actual accepted submissions to play would maybe be around 30.

The issue, as always, is money. I'm coming up on my deadline to have something to send to my sound mixer but as hard as I've been trying, I don't have the complete funds to pay her fully to work on it. I had spent everything, including my reserve for post-production, on principal photography just rushing to get every shot. We did, despite my disappointment of how some things turned out just due to the limitations we had, but it sapped all I had to do it.

On top of paying my sound mixer, I still need funds to secure the license for the one song I've used in the picture, and I know I can raise the money for the festival submissions by at least January.

So, I post this again, to get anything I can; any and all support would be great: my GoFundMe for post-production.
 
I've been submitting this to festivals (30, at this moment) for the last month with the hopes of getting it seen. Just this past week, my little movie won a monthly competition for Best Comedy Feature.

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It really doesn't mean much of anything but that's one notch in my belt of what is, I hope, to be more coming soon.
 

A Recap of My Misadventures in Hollywood​

PART I​

To anyone that didn't go to the Beyond Hollywood International Film Festival: Thank goodness! It being my first film festival wherein my debut movie is accepted, I had to attend on grounds of ceremony even if I wasn't all that financially equipped to do so comfortably. This was a trip that started out dripping in ill luck, and I was to be completely drenched by it by the end. All in the span of three days!

I must make it clear that I have nothing against the organizers; they were genuinely some of the most decent and nicest people you could hope to meet. Like an independent movie itself, the whole event was put together with limited resources by a group of very endearing and sweet people; its ambition charmed where it elsewhere lacked.

I couldn't attend the first day of the festival, but I had booked my flight so I might be able to catch some of the latter half of the second day, and attend the remainder of the days. I couldn't afford a straight flight to L.A. so I had to settle for a flight with lay-over in Dallas/Ft. Worth to grab a connecting flight to make the festival. Then, the first sign came. My initial flight to Dallas was delayed by four hours due to inclement weather in the region.

I've still yet to find the cause of it but American Airlines cancelled a number of flights and had left me and a couple hundred people stranded at Dallas/Ft. Worth for a good 10-12 hrs more upon arriving. They sent me 10 notifications, one after the other, about the delay pushing back my departure time by the hour. Ultimately, they rescheduled all missed connecting flights to the nearest available and reimbursed those stranded with hotel, travel, and meal vouchers. All to be used that day. Unfortunately, every hotel they listed available to redeem these vouchers were 10-12 miles away, had limited to no shuttle service; all meal vouchers for them were locked behind booking the hotel first, and meal vouchers were only 12 USD (and you only got one if you chose to redeem the others), and there are now hundreds of us all rushing for the same places at the same time.

My rescheduled flight was at 6:50 AM on the 27th. I arrived in Dallas on the 26th of April at 9:40 PM, and I was stuck hopping gates waiting for an ever-increasingly late flight that ultimately never came, only to wait in line for two hours to talk to the customer service reps for AA. I had no money to cover extra costs that the vouchers didn't cover, I only had enough for my flights and the rental car to drive to my aunt and uncle's house to stay the remaining two days. I had to be at the festival at 11 AM on the 27th. I got two food vouchers and a wish of good luck from the rep about not missing my 6:50 morning flight and sent off. I was going to spend the rest of the time staying at Dallas/Ft. Worth.

I was fortunate enough to get acquainted with two others while complaining in line at the service counter, a traveling neurosurgeon and a mother on her way to visit her daughter at SCAD, and latter invited me to join her and a friend for a late dinner at an Italian spot in the airport that was only open as long as there were patrons at the bar. She was kind enough to even cover my meal because she had a flight at four AM and wouldn't be needing her two vouchers.

If anyone is curious, the Chili's at gate C35 closes around midnight and doesn't open again until 4 AM. They turn the lights off but keep the rock station on the entire time. If you've ever wanted to know what it feels like to sleep inside an airport Chili's, I've got a pretty good idea.

The flight, thankfully, isn't delayed and I make it to California with a little bit of time to grab my rental car, drive to my aunt and uncle's house and share a meal with them, before taking off again to make the 11 AM opening. They're playing my movie at 1:20 PM. I'm still in the clothes I was wearing two days ago, unbrushed, unbathed, and extremely tired having listened to the greatest hits of 70's-80's soft rock all night.

I'm twenty minutes late to the festival due to L.A. traffic. There's a coinciding event later in the day that people are prepping for at the center across the street from the Downtown L.A. Regal. It's a Laker's game, along with some kind of fight. It's 40 dollars to park in the nearest parking garage without getting it validated. I forgot to get my parking validated.

The chain movie theater is still an operating movie theater. There's two screens blocked off for the festival's use and they're on the uppermost floor, tucked in the furthest corner of the room, and the festival is ran by, maybe, seven people: two at the door to greet and the rest scattered around doing whatever else.

This is a small festival, and it's the festival's third year, but there is no one attending this event. The only people there are the film-makers that can attend, and one random guy off the street. Because it's small, they have to screen the short films back-to-back in long blocks and overlap them with features. Everyone has to pick and choose what they want to see and none of the film-makers there are going to not support their own film. The short films play with the most people in them, only film-makers in the audience, and there's no one for the features beyond the attending crew (one or two people representing). Luckily, my film was playing in its own dedicated block following the shorts in the next screen.

I missed two shorts I wanted to see in the shorts block when I had arrived, but I got to see the remainder. It was an embarrassing affair. Most of the shorts I caught were either flat-out awful, or uneven; nothing in-between. The best thing I saw there was a documentary on Darius Brubaker, one of Dave Brubaker's sons. It was something one typically sees playing on PBS. A competently made documentary on a fairly minor (and slightly uninteresting) musician. It kind of lost me at the end when it started implying that his involvement of teaching jazz to South African college students was part in parcel for ending apartheid.

Unluckily (or luckily, depending on how much of an optimist you are), PAPER PLATES screens for a crowd of four. Myself, the random guy, and the director for a CG feature that played at the festival with his girlfriend. My movie plays with the sound out of sync. It was so embarrassing that the director and his girlfriend get up and leave out of embarrassment for me 30 minutes into the movie. I want to kill myself at this point, I'm so dreadfully embarrassed. My movie was the only one that had this hiccup. I rush out of the screen and try to work something out with the organizers but the theater manager, a girl in her mid-20's at the most, tells me they do tech screenings beforehand, and while they said they caught something wrong early on during their projecting, they skipped around the movie and saw that it wasn't an issue (implying they didn't do a full tech screening to see if their projector needed calibrating or if there was something wrong with the DCP file and ran it anyway).

I know PAPER PLATES is a good movie. It's not the movie I fell in love with in my head, but it's as close as I could get with the resources I could muster on my own. The head man that organizes this festival only saw thirty minutes of the screener and had to include it into the festival. A few of the other organizers also compliment and kindly reassure me that they watched the whole thing before the theater screening, and both liked it and thought it was a really good movie. To have this be the movie's first accepted festival play and have it be under these conditions, I was seriously considering walking into oncoming traffic. It was an appalling situation to endure.
 
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A Recap of My Misadventures in Hollywood​

Part II​

My movie was played out of sync, the theater couldn't do anything about it without it cutting into the times of the other movies playing there, so it played flawed to a crowd of one. The one random guy that showed up as a paying attendee couldn't catch the last 20 minutes of my movie because he wanted to catch two shorts playing at the next screen. I didn't have the temerity to face the rest of the other film-makers at whatever else was playing for the rest of the day, despite my interest in seeing the rest.

Instead, the remainder of the day was spent in company conversing with the one random guy that attended the festival. He only had found about what was going on at the Regal that day, and out of curiosity, decided to watch what was screening. Much to his disappointment, unfortunately; he hated everything he saw that day. He thought most of what he saw was uneven, pandering, exhaustingly amateurish, embarrassing, and all extremely similar in subject matter and tone. Of all he saw that day, he liked two things: an animated short about two married dogs on their honeymoon, and PAPER PLATES. The former appealed to his tastes, and the latter, he thought was the most impressive and watchable thing played there.

His candor was absolutely refreshing and I spent the rest of the festival talking to him, picking his brain about what he saw, and who he was and what his interests were. It turned out that he is a amateur "movie-maker" himself, mostly doing small shovel-ware games with minor name actors out in L.A. to fund small shorts. He also kind of looked like a mash-up of Mike and Rich from RLM. He really harped on the CG movie he had seen (from the guy that attend my movie and walked out in embarrassment); he called it dull and horribly written, acted, and animated, saying it resembled poor PS2 cutscenes. As much as that made me laugh hearing him dog on everything, I had to take his opinions with a grain of salt though, as he proudly showed me some of his work and they were no better than what he saw and criticized. In any case, he was a pleasant enough man and I enjoyed our conversation.

I found it hard that day to really engage in conversation with people as, 1) Almost none of the filmmakers attended actually saw many of the things played there, and 2) There was this insincerity in the air as no one wanted to come off as rude or mean acknowledging what was played and the condition of the event, so there were multiple elephants in the room that day and that atmosphere almost felt choking at times. It wasn't snobbery, but it bordered mass delusion in how everyone kind of ignored these glaring flaws and went about their endless pleasantries.

The rest of the night was spent in the company of my cousin, sharing a meal, catching up, and smoking his marijuana. It took a bit to calm me down. I was considering not attending the final day for the closing ceremony and waste the day before flying back, but it was my cousin that finally convinced me to go (although, I was in another state of mind). He gave me a joint to take with in case I needed to calm back down before or after the event.

The closing ceremony was pleasant enough. There were some familiar faces that I saw attend on Saturday, and a number of others from the Thursday screenings I didn't get to meet. There were some minor 'celebrities' there as special guests and speakers. I couldn't help shake a certain kind of stand-off-ish-ness that pervaded the event from the other attendees, despite how welcoming and kind the organizers were.

They handed out awards that night, and despite my technical issues, PAPER PLATES was nominated for Best Debut Feature. It lost to the PS2 CG movie. In fact, he won twice that night. I'm not bitter, but multiple injustices were committed that night as, clearly, none of these people had taste. I'm only partially joking about that.

As much as I tried, I couldn't help but feel like all of this was a huge was of time and limited resources coming out to the festival. Smoking my emergency relief spliff afterwards only crystallized the feeling. The flight back home only made it more adamantine. If anything, suffering oblivious self-indulgence and humiliation was only worth it to have a story to tell. The experience of suffering was more entertaining to regale than to endure. In fact, my favorite story of the night, possibly the whole event, was this:

During the final days' closing ceremony, I became briefly acquainted with an Australian actor representing his short film in the official selection. He seemed to be the only one to appreciate my humor that night. A slightly older man, he moved to L.A. as an actor but wound up living State-side as a working psychologist. His movie was nominated, and lost, for a category but I was still bitter about my outcome to properly remember what it was. After the closing ceremony, I found it more beneficial to just go outside and smoke alone than to cavort with people I'm likely never to see or collaborate with. I wound up talking with a young man who had his short played at the festival and, despite being the only inebriated one in the conversation, I found him slow in conversation and easily confused. He was pleasant enough though.

At the moment the conversation was winding down, my Australian ex-pat comes out in the company of one of the filmmakers at the festival, a short I wanted to see but missed; a girl of around 24 years old with a shock of long, curly, red hair. I overhear him wanting to get drinks together. I'm inebriated, so while I recognize what's going on, I don't care. I bother to interject to wish him well. He ignores me twice before finally acknowledging me with a handshake and return well-wishing. He's on the make and wants this over quick.

I had wanted to express how much I wanted to catch the girl's short once I found out who she was, but before I could get to that conversation, she starts with how much she dislikes her mother, how she has to baby her, even though her mother has a PhD in psychology. It hit me: an older male psychologist, a young red-headed girl with mommy issues; a shark smells blood in the water.

I make a dumb quip to prevent myself from saying what I just wrote, something like, "That's like a dentist that can't fix his own teeth." The ex-pat gave me a laugh but I don't think the girl found it funny. In any case, that was my cue to go. As a friend once told me, I need to stop scaring the hoes.
 

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