Wrapping up my year at the LFA May 29, 2008
Posted by joost in : LFA, film, producing , comments closedSo much catching up to do!
I totally forgot to tell about the 4th film we did in February… This short film was based on a script called “Checkmate” that I wrote and then further developed with the director. Quite an intensive three weeks of rewriting, and then 1st AD-ing the two day exterior shoot in Battersea Park. Really cool, it was a period piece set in the 18th century, pre-French revolution, with a peasant, bourgeois, king and queen, all dressed up and ready to fight each other verbally or with a pitch fork, sword or knife.
In March I finished “Rule 2″, and before I took a break and went to Amsterdam for the Amsterdam Fantastic Film Festival, I worked on a couple of LFA related film shoots. People that I worked with before and/or knew through the LFA were doing some short film shoots and I worked on those. Great since they all shot using HD cameras (because shooting on film is too expensive on a small privately funded budget). I was camera assistant on a handful of shoots, which meant some hands-on experience with these cameras, lenses and how it looked (lightwise) on HD.
On one entirely different and wacky shoot called “Valley of the Dommes” I was 1st assistant director. How to describe this 48 hour short film competition madness? Judge yourself and watch the trailer of the resulting film on youtube. Yes, this film will be big, very big, very VERY big…
April and the start of May was a transitional period in time. I finished “Rule 2″ in March, but still had plenty of things to do for the film, in particular the promotional side. In order to send the film to festivals you have to have a logline (one line summary), a synopsis, the full credit list, biographies of cast and crew, the complete dialogue with timecode (subtitles), selection of still photos, etc etc. Not very creative work but it needs to be done, and this dragged on for a while. Luckily I finished all of this at the end of May, which means the film will be sent to festivals worldwide in the coming months.
For the film that I produced, “Sculpted”, I already have some experience with festivals. So far we haven’t been successful getting it into festivals 
The competition is fierce, sometimes more than 4000 entries of which 40 get screened during the festival… We are now trying to focus our efforts on festivals that could be a good match with the film, in particular gay & lesbian film festivals.
This wraps up my year at the LFA. The inevitable question is: now what..?