I got the HDCAM and Digibeta copies of the movie in. These only exist for the off-chance that we end up screening at a festival. They require these formats for exhibition. This or 35mm, which would be awesome, but I can't afford that yet.
Speaking of festivals, those are curious things. Some really good stuff comes out of them, but a lot of awful stuff does too. A lot of awful stuff. I'll be heading up to Sundance in a few days to get a glimpse at the competitive landscape, but I already know what a lot of the films are like. This will be my 6th and final voyage to Sundance (unless of course I'm accepted in the future).
I saw Tiny Furniture the other day. In a lot of ways it's sort of a sister project to GOS. It was shot at the same time as GOS with a similar budget, cast/crew of friends, with the same exact camera (significant because it's a new workflow, the camera had been on the market for two months when this project was shot) and set in the writer/director's parents house. The director is the same age as me. Their turnaround was much faster though. This movie was conceived in November, shot in December, and finished in January. It premiered at SXSW last year and won the best narrative feature award scoring it distribution with IFC. Now the director is developing a script for producer Scott Rudin (the guy who produces everything) and is working on an HBO series with Judd Apatow...so I saw the film knowing all of that so as to sort of measure our potential in comparison. I couldn't believe how bad it was. I know a lot of people obviously loved it, but I was surprised. It was rough. In the same sense that GOS is rough. There are times when the script is a little sloppy or when the acting is a little off. There are lots of long rushed takes (though in my opinion, much duller cinematography). I just don't get it. I mean granted we still have a long ways to go in our release (we haven't even heard from SXSW yet), and may see much success, it's just weird to me. It's nice to see that something so similar can have such a good run. That people can recognize the potential in a rough but ambitious project from a young filmmaker.
I guess I should be glad that I don't see myself as being very far from these measures of success, but it frustrating in the sense of trying to figure out what's missing. The fact that their project took all of 3 months from start to finish is a bit frustrating. It kind of makes me feel like I should be dishing out more content since I do have this cheaper workflow. And maybe I will. Not that I believe in needing to follow some sort of model. One of my conundrums in trying to pick what's next is trying to decide what kind of project to do. Like the scale of the production. Part of me wants to keep challenging myself with something bigger. Part of me wants to go smaller and really knock it out of the park. And part of me wants to do the same thing again, but with the experience I gained from GOS. Try and master something at that scale.
The tricky thing about making movies is that you always think you've made your best, and you may, but it's the damnedest thing to try and objectively compare your film to others, to gauge your own abilities. And it's difficult to come to the realization that although you put everything into a project, at the end of the day you've got to wake up and do it again and do it a little bit better. It's easy to think in retrospect how success is about a career of consistency and growth, rather than one shot. But movies are very hard to make, and each shot means a lot.
With my luck some festival programmer is probably reading this and deciding not to program GOS because there's a good chance I'll be back with something better. And they'd probably be right.
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