Pitch Your Film In 15 Seconds

CineWomen is a cool networking organization for women filmmakers in New York. This month, I am going to “Pitching in 15 Seconds!” a CineWomen workshop that will be given by Laura Allen, co-founder of 15 SecondPitch (and a good friend of mine, she even plays a cameo in my film). She will be custom designing this workshop to teach women how to pitch film projects. Laura is a huge inspiration to me and I’m really looking forward to this. 15 SecondPitch also has a free online network where you can practice pitching and learn more about marketing. Here’s a link to my page to see an example.

“Pitching in 15 Seconds!”
March 2007 (now being re-scheduled)
7:00 – 9:00 PM
NYWIFT Conference Room,
6 East 39th St., 12th Fl
New York, NY

Here’s the description from the CineWomen website:

“What’s your project about?”
It’s the first question anyone will ask.

Your 15SecondPitch™ lets you answer with confidence and get them interested in learning more. Workshop leader Laura Allen has developed a set of techniques to which help you craft your pitch and market yourself and your work more effectively.

Laura also has a bi-weekly networking group, 7 MINUTE MARKETING, for women in New York. It attracts some awesome women and is a great way to get ideas for your freelance business or a new job search. During last year’s networking group, I got a lot of support and help making my film. The next 7 MINUTE MARKETING meeting is February 15th. If you’re interested in signing up for that, email me at explodingtoad@gmail.com for more information.

XOMBIE!

(Illustration by James Farr from Xombified.com)

I’ve been enjoying XOMBIE (a self produced animated series) by James Farr for a while now, and I’m excited to learn he has his first book out based on the series. I can’t believe the dude is only 27 years old! It’s impressive. Anyway, XOMBIE: DEAD ON ARRIVAL is going to be available by the end of the month and you can pre-order it on Amazon. If you go to his website, you can check out his animations online from there. The animations are very well done, it’s hard to believe its the work of just one solitary guy. He also has some awesome T-Shirts for sale.

It’s really inspiring to see people with great ideas just independently producing content. As he says on his website Xombified.com:

“Xombie is a one-man operation, written, funded, storyboarded, animated, edited and published by me: James Farr. I do everything but the voices.”

Also, the News on 6 KOTV (I guess he lives in Oklahoma) has a news interview with James Farr here.

He also has an ingenius idea for raising donations to help him continue to work on his animations/books and other projects. Depending on the amount you donate, he thanks you in different ways. The most creative one is at a $250 donation, he will draw a zombie in your image as part of the story. What a brilliant idea!

Super Deluxe, Yeah!

Thanks to Nichelle from Chicks and Giggles for telling me about Super Deluxe, this very cool website dedicated to comedy online video shorts and series.

I uploaded CHEW on it last night. If you get a chance and haven’t seen my film yet, please check it out there and send me a wonderful comment there to pump up my ego! I’m also excited that CHEW has hit 333 views on You Tube so far.

Also on Super Deluxe, check out Dave Foley’s awesome online vid series, CAN’T SLEEP WITH DAVE FOLEY. Remember Dave? He’s the Kid in the Hall that looked the hottest in drag back in the day. He found a really creative way to do an online video talk show. Don’t wanna spoil it for you, so just watch!

I also liked the animated short series I AM BABY CAKES by Brad Neely. Seriously twisted and fun stuff. I am an instant fan!

THIS FILM IS NOT YET RATED Documentary

I just rented THIS FILM IS NOT YET RATED from Netflix.

I’ve been looking forward to seeing this ever since I personally had to deal with the MPAA when creating a film poster for a film that got a PG 13. The process is long – first you have to get the exact wording of the rating for the film along with the logo for that. Then you have to have the poster itself approved by the MPAA before they can be used. I guess the images on the poster have to match the rating it was given. Otherwise you’d have the possibility of naked copulating cartoon characters for kids’ movie posters I suppose? It’s a strange procedure. You can’t email them the proof of the poster, you have to actually mail them a physical copy and then you only get a letter that says that they conditionally approve the poster. Once the client has spent a bunch of money printing out the posters, you then have to mail another copy of the actual poster to them. So they have the power to pull the plug on your design even after it’s been printed. I bet they have a big movie poster collection – maybe they Ebay them off later.

Anyway, THIS FILM IS NOT YET RATED is about the more widely known film ratings board that sets the ratings for movies. I don’t want to give away the plot, because it’s very clever. Let’s just say, they make the MPAA look very silly and they use their own language against them. It’s a very interesting commentary on censorship with some great interviews, notably John Waters and Kevin Smith, who both have a great sense of humor about all the sillyness involved.

See My Short Film, CHEW

Just posted my film, CHEW on YouTube! It’s a dark comedy about the worst date you’ve never been on.

CLICK HERE to see it!

New ‘Boards Issue & Psyop

The free issue of ‘Boards magazine for February are out, horray! (I think you need to join their mailing list to get invited to see it). They are a great source of information about the commercial production. You can look at their magazine online or download it as a PDF for later.

I was looking over some of their favorite picks for last month and they were making references to Psyop’s “Crow” themed work for MTV HD. I guess it’s been out for about a half a year, however since I don’t have HD TV, I hadn’t seen it yet. Check it out…I’m glad I went to the trouble of finding it right away. Here’s the direct link from the Psyop website.

I found a great article about the making of this animation at dexigner.com which includes interviews.

Psyop is a cool studio in downtown NYC. I got a chance to check out the Psyop office as a part of RESFEST’s Studio tour and it was an impressive place. Their animation is seriously amazing. Still, my favorite ad is the one they did for Bombay Saphire. I remember almost falling out of my seat the first time I saw it on television – it was so damn beautiful! I found out at the tour that they did the Bombay spot for a lower budget than most of their projects, the trade off being that they could have more creative freedom. Projects like those help them showcase their abilities.

New Toy I Want

In the category of stuff I want but don’t need is this awesome Andriod 8 vinyl toy of “Rustboy”. I’ve been so inspired by Brian Taylor’s awesome website documenting the progress of his animated film at www.rustboy.com. I think I first became aware of his website from a web design award he recieved and have since liked to check in periodically with it to see how he’s doing with the project. Latest news is he is talking to people about making it into a full scale movie. I really hope so! So inspiring.

Re-mixing Open Source Movies

Last week I went to an incredibly cool breakfast and networking event put on by NY:MIEG (New York: Media Information Exchange Group). In the process of researching all the speakers prior to the event, I went to Dina Kaplan’s blip.tv website to find out more about her company before the event and found a few cool video podcast shows I hadn’t seen before.

One of them was Rob Parrish’s “Next To Heaven” series These are these surreal videos which cleverly uses open source old movie footage, re-edited (sometimes called re-mixed) into strange surreal films, usually quite dark.

That made me curious to see if there are places online to find these usually hilarious old educational/newsreel films. I did some research and the most extensive and interesting website I found was Internet Archive: Moving Image Archive. Not all of the films are truly open source in the sense you can edit them and then distribute, so be sure to check the links to the creative commons licenses.

There are some interesting old footage to be found, whether you’re looking for atom bomb explosion, whistling grandmas, kids pullling the shoes off Daddy as he reads the paper, a baby crawling race or just simple wholesome reminders of how to live every aspect of your 1950’s life.

(Some charming images from old footage downloaded from Moving Image Archive).

Dolphin Love

I’m working on animation in Erik’s film. Here’s a sneak peak of one of the stills from the storyboard. This is a touching flashback scene in the film where a glass of water sparks the dolphin character to pine for his dolphin girlfriend and the ocean.

See Storyboard Page 1
See Storyboard Page 2