Archive for October, 2007

Now that the short is being seen by more and more people, I’m starting to get contacted by various folks asking what I’m up to next.  A few of them have asked about my interest to direct an animated feature.  We all know the answer to that.  Of course I’d like to do that someday.  We’ll see how that goes.

In the meantime, I’ve gone back to working on some stories that I had been developing off and on for many years.  Since I’ve been invited to show my properites to a few investors/producers, I needed the material.  One of those has a working title of “Brothers”.  Just in the last few weeks, the script was completed.  That and a second script from another writer are being shown around.  So far, the reaction has been good, but since I’m not one to sit around and wait, I’d like to finish up one and possibly two more scripts in the next (I don’t know how many) months.

Lastly, I’ve been asked to write the script for an animated television series pilot.  This isn’t something I can talk about yet, but I’m excited about the potential of the project.  It is very different from anything that I’ve written before.  When I can say more, I will.

Still no word on when the short will play at its next festival. I’ve heard back from a couple that my short was not chosen. This can be a hard pill to swallow. Especially when you want your short to play everywhere. The reality is, at least what I’ve heard from others doing the same thing as me, that shorts have a high rejection rate.  I’ve even heard that filmmakers should expect only a 10% acceptance rate.  Boy, I hope it isn’t really like that.  If so, it means I could be in for more disappointment in the future. I guess I need to be prepared.

Coincidentally, while I was at Palm Springs, I attended a panel discussion of festival programmers. There were guests from several festivals across the country, large and small. One of the things they talked about was why films are turned away. The reasons were vast. Everything from, it is too long for the time they have remaining, the story doesn’t fit into the theme they are trying to reflect in the festival or a particular showing, or a plethora of other reasons. It was very sobering.

With that said, I expected this from the beginning and there are tons more festivals out there.

Even though all of this took place a few weeks ago, I just haven’t had an opportunity to write anything until now.  If you recall, there were potential problems with the audio at the Palm Springs International Film Festival.  I was concerned that the Digibeta dub may of had the audio recorded at too high of a level and therefore caused distortion.

A local animation studio was nice enough to allow me to come in and check the tape on their Digibeta deck.  I’m not sure they want to be mentioned, so I’ll refer to them as XYZ.   After going to XYZ and watching/listening to the dub, the audio levels were fine.  The loudest portion of the short was just bordering at 0db, which is the upper limit for digital audio.  Technically, that shouldn’t cause problems.  The editor at XYZ told me that generally it is good to have the levels at -10 or so, just to give some extra headroom, but he seemed to think that the 0db level shouldn’t be cause for distortion.   Which suggests that the problem was the equipment at the festival.  Or possibly a combination of the equipment and the audio having a very dynamic mix.  The suggestion was to make note for future projectionists that they need to be aware and check it prior to playing.  There is nothing technically wrong with the audio recording.