So I personally feel like I have a lot to thank so many people for.  This film has absolutely changed my life in a positive way.  Here’s how.

1.)  Fests:  Heartland Film Festival (Primary Goal Achieved, EXTREMELY positive experience), Cleveland Int Film Fest (First Professional Award garnered, and a happy one at that, huge street cred, won back half of my investment),  Big Island Film Festival (took me to a place off-continent finally, and we made some great film friends).
2.)  Noteriety:  Our website has breached the 10,000 hits mark, not too shabby.  Peaks occur right after fests.  There’s a ton of people who actually know who we are in Indy as well, including several peeps from the 48 hr film fest.  Google our film in quotes.  You’ll see us on a ton of movie review blogs.  Very fun.
3.)  Professionally:  The company I work for, was able to sell a huge job to one of the biggest clients we could ever hope for, due directly to the success of our film.

And the ride (hopefully) isn’t over yet.  We’re waiting to hear back from Amsterdam, Feel Good Film Fest, St. Louis Film Fest, and Harvest Moon.  I still plan to submit to Cannes, Tribeca, and with Cinequest and Slamdance, I plan to re-submit there.  We plan to sell the film to raise funds for the next film, and after we hear from all the fests, we’ll finally post online publicly and notify every major movie blog about it.

Thank you, the blog reader, for reading and supporting our filmmaking efforts.  Without your support, your viewership, this wouldn’t be art.  It’d just be a bunch of people making fast-moving pictures together.  : )

View from our room… you could literally walk out to the hottub (left) or ocean (right).

VIP Reception

Chilling with Stuart and Tracey, the stars of Tick Tock, at the VIP Reception.

During the festival there were several showcases, and I was able to attend a few.  There were a some films and filmmakers I was very impressed with, and I want to highlight them below…

La Isla Edena

La Isla Edena was your classic fairy tale, and gave me a The Fall feel, so needless to say I was very into it, as that’s my favorite film ever.  The angles and lighting were spot-on, I couldn’t have shot it more perfectly.  The cast was dynamic and believable.  And of course most importantly, the story was compelling and rich.

I got a chance to meet Daniel Nietz, Director, at the VIP reception.  Cool guy, and I found out he was a composer as well, so obviously I’m stoked to snail-mail him a copy of “best part” (as it’s mostly-silent… which means little dialogue and mostly music).  I expect great things of him and this film.

4 Pictures

4 Pictures was a heartwarming tale of an offbeat house-girlfriend, her and her boyfriend’s lives, and how they work things out together.  It was far from conventional, which I really appreciated.  The narrative was jointed, but not entirely… it gave me a 100% Amelie feel for sure, sort of quirky, with vivid colors and an enthusiastic collection of characters.  Apparently it was all shot on a Sony z1u in Pal, then converted to 24p(i)… I’m really going to have to give that a try, as I do like the camera, just not the 29.97 framerate.

I got a chance to meet stars Dawn Bartley, Phil Sholtes, and Director Mike Madigan at BIFF 2010.  They were cool Detroit cats, and I’m a fan.  More info at www.fivecloverfilms.com.

Dark Horse

Dark Horse was indeed a very dark yet very powerful film.  I felt very lucky to have seen it.  It follows a lonely taxi driver and a girl with some serious issues, and to me, it spoke to the power of human connection.  It’s one I’ve dwelled on a few times since the fest for sure.  I’m very much into this film, and I hope to see it win many festivals… I’m surprised it didn’t place at BIFF.  It’s made by FG Entertainment, Directed by Marc Furmie, and I found some details about it here.  To those involved: bravo.

So yeah, that’s it for this post.  Thanks again to Big Island Film Fest for such a warm welcome and time!  Mahalo!

Mark your calendars, because “the best part of my day” will be screening at 10 AM on Friday, May 14th! There will be members of the crew present at the screening, including Ben, so if you are there please find the group and introduce yourself! Any questions or comments about the film are always welcomed and encouraged.

The BIFF celebrates independent narrative filmmaking with five days of events on the Kohala coast of Hawaii Island. This marks the fifth year for the growing festival, and there are a lot of great events and films on the schedule this year. For more information about the films being shown, the sponsors, recent years, or the festival in general, you can visit the Big Island Film Festival website. You can also find a schedule there of all of the films being shown this year!

So let’s recap. You can see “the best part of my day,” a huge selection of other great short and feature films, and the beauty of Hawaii over a span of five days of fun…

Have you booked your plane tickets yet?

This is monumental.  I can’t begin to thank everyone involved at the CIFF for awarding us this honor, we’re truly touched.  More details to come on this exciting award and the Big Island Film Fest in the next post!

This is HUGE news for us.  CIFF has a great reputation for being a diverse film fest, featuring some of the best films in the world.  And for that matter, it’s a festival close enough for us to drive to, and you can’t knock that.  Check out this link for some great stats on the fest.

Needless to say, we’re pretty excited.  It’s always lovely to put another laurel on the mantel, after all!  I look forward to sharing the film with yet another large audience!!  Hello, Cleveland….

Getting “the best part of my day” made was by far the largest personal achievement I’ve realized in a long time.  It was a blast to conceptualize, to prepare for, to film, to edit, and to share.  The response the film’s garnered from the Heartland Film Festival and limited showings has been overwhelming in a fantastic way.  It’s honestly very fun right now, because cmon, when is it not fun fun going “look what I made!”, knowing you’ll elicit some form of reaction?  That’s simply what any art is all about.

All that said, there were definitely some trials to this production.

I actually wanted to produce the film a year earlier (2008), however I faced two debilitating factors.  One, I had no money.  Truthfully, “the best part of my day” was produced more as a pitch-in production than anything – it was very “Hey I have a camera”, “Oh yeah? I have lights”, “Really, well I can act”, “Hey let’s all do this together!”  So the budget was indeed low.  But without any money, with absolutely no budget for food, tapes, rentals, expendables, and film festival fees, this simply couldn’t happen.  Two, I simply didn’t know enough people yet.  I did what networking I could, but my circle of filmmaker friends has doubled in the last year, which of course I’m endlessly thankful for.  It was very hard, but I had to wait for the right time, and 2009 yielded the right time.

The biggest challenge to the production for me was the experimental nature of the story.  Exactly 70% of the story is told from one camera angle, utilizing only music (essentially becoming a silent film).  That’s a lot.  Not only did we have to find ways to visually move the story and hold interest, but we had to simply figure out the mechanics of using one angle…  questions filled us at conception, like “What happens when we have to move the camera overnight?  What if we have reshoots?  What if the weather doesn’t cooperate?  What if we break continuity?  And, heck, what’s our backup plan for all this?”

Well, to figure all that out, we had 4 test shoots.  We tested completely breaking down the camera and putting it back up, and learned to measure correctly from landmarks and our own marks.  We tested exposure at different settings on the camera to figure out what to do in inclement weather, so that we could color correct at least a bit in post.  We found that reshoots could happen, providing we take extremely detailed notes during produciton (shoutout to Colleen Walker, Trish Holmes, and billy Fulton on that).  We found that jump cuts would be our best friend in the whole world.

And we learned the most important thing you can in test shoots – this could work and be as amazing as it was in our heads.  When you hit that moment, it becomes clear that there’s no turning back.  It would be hard, but this had to happen, the story had to be told.  The possibility of a success was too great, and the risk of a poor investment of resources was, to us, too small.  Granted we’re a bunch of twenty-something never-say-die’s, but anyway…

Test Shoot with billy Fulton

From a Director’s standpoint, my biggest challenge was refining my vision for the marriage of the  experimental way we told the story, and the story itself.  From the beginning I had Kirk Young, Co-Producer and Assistant Director, as my right-hand man.  We’ve been friends for years, and he probably knows my style and strengths better than anyone.  Whenever I’m developing a story, I always remember Friedrich Nietzsche’s quote:  “A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.”  It’s always good to check yourself against someone you trust, and having Kirk on crew achieved this.  It obviously goes without saying, but in filmmaking, collaboration is absolutely necessary.

The other large challenge was post-production.  We took 4 too many takes for every set-up, so there were a lot of takes to go through.  The performances were always stellar, so making the call on which one to use was also a challenge.  Music was a nightmare, and Joe and I worked closely for two weeks straight getting it finalized.  But, again, we had several “aha!” moments, and when we finalized the score, it literally gave me a lump in my throat… another “this is going to happen” moment.

I sincerely hope that whoever you are, you enjoy the film for something.  That maybe you identify with Al’s failed attempts at wooing Janey, or his awkwardness, or Janey’s inability to shed the troublesome Ex.  I hope that it gives you as much joy as it gave us making it.

I think that’s a swell place to end this long article.