End of semester 1 « Where the lines blur

End of semester 1

10 05 2009

As the semester winds down to a close, the weeks have been filled with screenings both on and off campus for me. The Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival selected Go To Kenny as part of program 3 of “Love, Loss, Longing” and I’ve been hopping from one screening to the next, enjoying all the access I got as a badge holder. It was nice seeing some familiar faces again. Hopefully by this time next year, my FEATURE documentary will be selected at this festival (and at others, hopefully). I also realized that the closing night feature, Departures, the Academy Award winning film, was screened at USC a few weeks before with the director present. That completely made me realize how I shouldn’t miss these on-campus events. Some people would have paid a lot of money to be there.

As for on-campus screenings, our class set up a date last week to showcase the project we selected (between either project 1 or project 2). I chose to show my project 1, “Raider Nation” because my project 2 is still not ready for public scrutiny. My film was selected to go first out of thirty something films. I’m so glad I went first, even with the aspect ratio mayhem (there was nothing that important on the sides anyway, aside from my name in the credits) because by the time it was over, people were so emotionally drained. I mean come on, we were forced to feel something completely different every 5 minutes. It was like living an entire life time in 4 or so hours. I wonder if that’s what happens when you enter heaven and you see your life’s movie played in front of you. I’m sure it slows down in the parts where you’d rather have skipped through it though.

After the screening, we headed over to Joe’s house, where the afterparty and the awards ceremony took place. I was nominated for the most prepared to be sued for using copyrighted music and NFL product placement. Joe, who produced the Jurassic Park, The Musical, also got nominated, along with Josh’s movie. Of course, I won probably because every frame of my movie had either something NFL related or featured a song from the sports jam cd.

I’m so proud.

We also met with our next semester’s faculty and I’m pretty excited. I got to see two 508 sections’ screenings so far and I must say that the people who studied under my future faculty members had much tighter movies than the other section. There are still two sections that I haven’t seen but so far, I’m really excited about making three awesome films. My film is about my grandmother, and my two partners are making films on zombies and a homeless man.

I have to email a logline for my film to my faculty by next week. I’m still thinking about it but it will most likely be something like “A girl comes to terms with her grandmother’s death through her dreams.”

So far I’ve seen the 547 documentary screenings, which were really well-made and inspirational, and two 508 screenings. Tomorrow, I plan on attending the next two 508 screenings as well as the 546 narrative screening at night. The following week I’ll watch the tv show screenings and the thesis films. What a great way to end the semester!

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