And now the real work begins…

Greetings from the submitting-to-film-festival-front.

In regard to the documentary we just finished (explained here), I wish I could say the expensive part is over.  Well, I suppose the really expensive part is over, in a manner of speaking, but pimping a film, especially a low budget thing like this, to the point where people see it other than like my mom and the Nella (actually my mom hasn’t even seen it yet), well here’s how that works.

There ain’t much money in documentary; that we know.  Very, very rarely do people turn a profit on these things, especially with short docs.  But you can build a career for yourself, and you can also draw attention to the subject you’re making the thing about.  Hell, look at how “going green” exploded after An Inconvenient Truth came out.  Granted that was a feature. Starring Al Gore.  Anyway!

Conventional wisdom says that pretty much any independent film needs to go through festivals.   This is the first film I’ve made that has a shot at getting into big name festivals and actually being seen by people (ya know, besides the Internet), but not knowing where we’ll premiere or where we’ll be accepted, basically the plan now is to submit to as many festivals as we can.

Each festival has different submission prices, ranging from around thirty bucks to a hundred, depending on the festival and how late you’re submitting it.  Seattle cleaned me out at about $80.  LAFF and Edinburgh FF came out to another $100, which was donated by Ritvik.  I want to submit to two more before this round is over at the end of the month, but I am clean wiped out, as this is turning into a rather expensive ordeal as I have another twenty or so in the pipe.  I thought I could do another push to the Internet for fundraising, but realized I don’t have anything of value left to sell! (Hell most of what I hocked last time was nonsense).  Nothing, save perhaps the movie.

We finally have a copy of it to make screeners for festivals, although we are NOT allowed to put the thing online yet.  If I ever do, it’ll be after next year’s Oscar season.  But I know a lot of people have contacted me out of interest of seeing it, so assuming there is interest out there, I think I have a way to fundraise a bit more and still stay at least in a legal grey area.

For anyone out there willing to donate $15 or more to my paypal link here, I will mail you a screener.  In the donation note, include your name and address. It won’t be fancy; just something I burned off my Macbook, but it will be a screener you can show to friends, family and colleagues but NOT put up on the Internet. Again, this isn’t my bidding, I do NOT own the copyright to this film.  If you put any of it online, you will get the hammer of the University of Southern California’s wrath.  But everyone I’ve talked to about this film from the Internets, including some people who ended up IN the film, have been really super cool, so hopefully we won’t run into any problems here.  To make this clear, if it goes up online, I won’t get in trouble. You will. I’m not losing anything if it does go up online, and believe me, it’s not my rule.

I can’t thank you guys enough for all your help and support in making this thing; no way I could have done it without you.  Y’all are the bomb diggity.a

And as for us getting our asses to the festivals if we were to get accepted into a competition, well, we’ll cross that bridge when we get there.

Disabling the link for now- sorry!

EDIT: International people, I can ship to you through media mail!  Just throw in an extra few bucks to get through the customs and whatnot.