Festival premiere, and time to reflect

It's been a busy week or two in the world of Saberfrog, but first another flashback:

Three years ago today, I met Liz Mariani, the Buffalo-area poet who played Laurel. This was the most difficult role to cast, and I'd sent casting notices out through my filmmaker contacts in Rochester and Buffalo. Liz responded, and also mentioned in her email that she would be performing some of her poetry at the Merriwether Library in Buffalo. This was a Sunday afternoon, so I decided to simply attend the reading to get a sense of what she looked and sounded like (though I think she'd sent some photos by email). She struck me as a good fit for the role, so I introduced myself and we arranged to meet at a future date to discuss the project and role in more detail. We met up at a couple weeks later at a restaurant called Kuni's To Go, where we went over the character and some scenes from the script and she said she was interested. And the rest is history.

Back to the present …

On Monday of last week, I got hit with a massive cold (possibly stress-induced) that laid me out flat. However, I was scheduled to be interviewed for the film for a public access show, and this had already been rescheduled several times, so I managed to suck it up just enough to take part. I tried hard to disguise my lack of energy as modesty and restraint, rather than the illness it was.

Saberfrog has been a huge part of my life for the last few years (I started working on the script around this time in 2006), so after all that time I don't have much trouble answering off-the-cuff questions about what the movie was about or how it was made. I must have performed well, because a member of the TV crew told me afterwards that the interview was good and that she was very interested in seeing the film.

Six days later, this past Sunday, Saberfrog was screened at the Buffalo Niagara Film Festival. This was the first festival to accept the film, and I'd been looking forward to this big event for two months. I had planned to do much more publicity this time. I'd even hoped to have merchandise to sell; I'd started to write the first of the fictitious books mentioned in the film, hoping to have it completed in time.

Once again, though, I completely ran out of time and energy. Although the film was finished, the workload at my day job prevented me from expending much creativity on anything else. Although this should have been the most important screening yet, I found myself doing less publicity than ever. I did at least manage to get news coverage, which is a first.

Attendance at the screening was modest – the people who came to see the film were all friends of people who'd worked on it. I'm fine with this, since this was the third showing of Saberfrog in the Buffalo area and anyone who really wanted to see it had probably had their chance. (And the couple other BNFF screenings I've attended so far were no better attended than mine.)

But every time there's a public screening of Saberfrog, it always seems to come at the end of a big struggle. As a result, the film's final scene always gets to me, because it marks a point when the protagonist has survived a painful crisis and is ready to move on.

About nine years ago, I had an unpleasant experience that forced myself to reexamine how important filmmaking was to me and whether it was worth jeopardizing other aspects of my life. At that time, I decided that the world of film was taking too great a toll on me and that it was time to focus more on the career path I'd stumbled into in my day job – a life in corporate America, developing software and other products. And for a while, I was happy, believing I'd escaped a life of instability and madness. Suppressing my old artistic ambitions eventually took a toll, though, and that's how Saberfrog started forming.

Saberfrog is about many things, but one of the big themes is the conflict between a worldview based on emotion and intuition and doing what you feel like, and a worldview based on knowing what the rules are and learning to work within them. On one level this is a conflict between youth and maturity, but on another level it's a conflict between my dreams of being an artist and my efforts to survive economically in the digital age.

I've felt myself shifting back and forth between these two states, like a werewolf. And Saberfrog reflects that internal struggle. But one side or the other has to win, and I'm starting to feel that history has made that decision for me.

As a filmmaker, I'm a 70s kid at heart. All of my artistic heroes saw art as a means of self-expression, a way to exorcise their demons and to communicate with the outside world. In their day, making art wasn't something that everyone did; it was something you had to go to school for (as a filmmaker, that might be the only way you could even get access to the tools). You had to get away from the boondocks and head for urban areas that had a better concentration of people who shared your interests. Art was put on a pedestal; you experienced it in galleries or darkened movie theaters, and people who were capable of artistic creation were regarded with admiration.

Obviously, the culture now is very different. For better and for worse, there's a much more irreverent attitude towards the arts nowadays – partly because the last twenty years have seen so many pompous snake-oil salesmen in the art world as well as in Hollywood, and partly because modern tools allow pretty much any self-willed person, anywhere, to make a film or self-publish a book or write a blog.

While I've been chasing the dream of being a filmmaker since I was a kid, up until recently my dreams were always based on the old standard – get the film shown in theaters, and get a distributor to pick it up and make you famous. I've known for the last couple years that the distribution part of that dream is dead, but I'm started to think that the theatrical part of it might be dead too. Showing the film to an appreciative public audience is the filmmaker's dream, but I'm no longer sure how interested people really are in the theatrical experience when it comes to indie films by unknown directors. People seem content with watching films at home on their computer. And the love of full-length indie features may not quite be there anymore either. Maybe shorter work is the way to go.

Also, to make yourself stand out in a crowded marketplace, you really need to be a relentless self-promoter, which I really haven't been so far. Digital tools allow the indie auteur to be a one-man band, but sometimes you do need help from other people whose strengths are different from your own. Any future project I embark on will have to be more of a team effort.

Which brings me to one other challenging aspect of the modern digital culture. When I first started to go to indie film conferences and hear about “transmedia”, I understood this as a fancy term for “franchise.” But I've read essays and blog posts from people disputing this; the sexy aspect of transmedia seems to be that it is interactive. It's not just an artist dispensing material from on high; the audience is invited to take part as well. That's where my old ways of thinking break down – for me, creating art was always an alternative to being social, not a means of being social.

I have plenty of ideas left in me about Saberfrog and the world it takes place in, some of which seem to suit the new digital world fairly well. I have other stories and concepts in me that might have similar potential. But I'm thinking that the time has come once again to reevaluate my priorities. I can't do it alone anymore.

I have few regrets about making Saberfrog. I learned a lot, I raised my game enormously as a writer-director, and I made several new friends who are eager to work with me again. But I need to rethink, and recharge, before I embark on such a challenging creative project again.

Catching the Express, an RIT film I acted in recently, will be in the SOFA Emerging Filmmakers program at the Rochester 360|365 film festival. The show is Saturday April 30, at 2:30pm at the Little, screen 5. So life goes on.

Submitting to Festivals, Part 2

The holiday season, plus a large and stressful project at work, have kept me busy during the past couple months. As a result, there were several festivals that I originally wanted to submit to, but could not. There were fests whose deadlines I missed entirely, and others whose late-submission entry fees were too high for me.

I'm now getting caught up, though, and in late January I submitted Saberfrog to several more film festivals.

As I mentioned previously, I'm mainly going after festivals whose theme might be a close fit for the film. For this reason I declined to enter either Sundance or Slamdance this time around, figuring that the competition would be too high to make submitting worthwhile. (Plus, an early cut of Saberfrog already got rejected by Sundance a year earlier.)

I badly wanted to submit to SXSW – John Karyus felt that Saberfrog would be the perfect fit for that festival – but the deadline had already passed by the time I got my act together. I also missed the deadlines for Big Muddy, the Talking Pictures Festival , the Seattle True Independent Film Festival and the Boston Underground Film Festival (anything with “independent” or “underground” in the title sounds like a good fit).

There were other festivals that Saberfrog simply didn't quality for. Like many festivals, the deadCENTER Film Festival and the Sidewalk Moving Picture Festival didn't accept work that had previously been shown elsewhere. Also, I was desperate to enter The Mississauga Independent Film Festival, since Mississauga plays a role in the film's plot. But the festival only accepts Canadian films – d'oh! Other festivals that sounded good only accepted short films, or had other restrictions on what type of film they wanted.

So much for the films I didn't submit to. As for the films I have submitted to ...

Fantastic Fest (a sci-fi/fantasy film festival in Texas), the Atlanta Underground Film Festival, the LA-based Dark Comedy Film Festival and the Chicago Comedy Film Festival all sounded like good fits, based on their themes. The Tumbleweed Film Festival sounded fun based on its title alone (though it takes place in the state of Washington, and not the Southwest as you might think).

I've submitted to the Rooftop Films Summer Series, which I discovered while attending an IFP event in NYC last year. I also submitted to another NYC-based film series, NewFilmmakers New York.

I want to get the film screened in Canada at some point, so I've submitted to the Nickel Independent Film Festival in St. John's. (I plan to submit to festivals in other, closer cities like Toronto and Ottawa later in the year.)

The Illinois-based Route 66 Film Festival “accepts any length and genre which should feature some kind of journey--physical, emotional, or intellectual.” Saberfrog covers all those, and is thus the festival I'm most hopeful of getting into.

Add to this list the festivals I already submitted to a couple months ago (360|365 here in Rochester, the Knickerbocker Film Festival in Albany, and Sci-Fi London), and I have now entered Saberfrog in more festivals than I ever submitted my last movie to, so I think I can relax for a few weeks.

I will continue to submit to festivals throughout 2011 – at least until the fall, which will be the one-year anniversary of completing the film. But for me, there will be no more chasing late deadlines. From now on, I submit by the regular deadline (or the earlybird deadline, if possible) or I don't submit at all.

And if there's any festival I really want to submit to, but fail to … well, there's always the next movie, right?

Submitting to Festivals, Part One

Phase Two has officially begun. I have started submitting Saberfrog to film festivals.

Three upstate screenings, two major holidays and a serious case of burnout prevented me from sending the film out before now, even though it's been officially finished for three months. This meant that I missed some sweet deadlines, including Slamdance (which would have been a long shot anyway) and SXSW (which bothers me quite a lot, as Karyus said several times that the film would be an ideal fit).

But with a new year upon us, and the birth pangs of the movie finally subsiding, I have no more excuses. Time to send this sucker out.

Today I sent the film to 360|365 (formerly High Falls Film Festival), the most prominent film fest in the Rochester area; and the Knickerbocker Film Festival in Albany, which I hadn't heard of until a friend from that area suggested it to me. The UK festival Sci-Fi London has been bombarding me with email bulletins since the last time I submitted a film to them, so it seemed only fitting to send them a copy of Saberfrog (that'll teach 'em).

This time around I'm going after more interesting, off-the-beaten-path film festivals. Getting into the likes of Sundance, TIFF or Cannes used to be the dream of every independent filmmaker, but it's a new and more fragmented film world now, and I've already popped my first-public-screening cherry anyway. Going forward, any other festival that gets a copy of Saberfrog will have to meet one of three criteria: 1) cheap or free to enter; 2) has a theme that indicates a good fit for the movie; 3) has a wacky name.

Wish me luck!