It’s been a few weeks since I’ve posted and it seems that I’ll be posting less frequently until I get confirmations from streaming channels that my movie was purchased for streaming. When I first submitted my film to the distribution platform, they altered the images I created to fit their submission guidelines but I was completely shocked with the quality of the graphics! It was out of brand and I was really taken aback as to why anyone would alter the graphics for the movie instead of just rejecting the assets and have me do it again. Instead, the rep for the platform decided he wanted to make graphics for my movie himself?? I complained to him and set up a Zoom meeting to fix it but the dude cancelled on the minute of our meeting like a total pro. I was so pissed!
The following week, he messaged me to say that any changes I request at this point will cost me $50 and I was like, ‘Oh hell nah!’ First the guy messed with my graphics then flaked on our meeting, now he wants to charge me for changes?? I was infuriated so I went on LinkedIn to search his name, found him, then looked at this post activity, found out he just started 3 months prior and included his new boss on his post. I messaged her and told her what happened like a real Karen. Lo and behold, he messages and tells me that he’ll waive the charge and fix the issue, thanks to his manager’s direction. Sometimes, being a Karen is the best thing to do. Just let their managers deal with them.
But now, the movie has been sitting idle on the queue and there hasn’t been any channels that picked it up for streaming. I was told I have to wait up to several months. I guess I’ll be patient for now. Meanwhile, I will be releasing the official music video for A Lesson In Trust, featured on the soundtrack album. Please subscribe to my YouTube channel and hit the Like button because every single thing counts. Thank you!!
I’m so stoked to announce that Love Letter Templates – The Movie was officially selected for screening by Arizona Underground Film Festival and will show at The Screening Room in Tucson, Arizona on September 24, 2021 at 10:15 PM!!!! I AM ECSTATIC!! This is another major milestone and I can feel it coming in the air tonight!!
I’m also happy to receive notice of an official selection for Berlin Art Film Festival in Germany! This means we will screen online and will be entered into a competition toward a theatrical showing later this year. If we do get picked and travel safety permitting, let’s have our passports ready!
I am humbled and realistic about all this, if you are wondering. Yes, I am all air-guitars right now but I also know that the road is long and there is so much work to do. What I do know is what I remember my mother telling me when I was young. She said, “there is nothing worse than never getting the opportunity than to have it come and not be ready.” Thanks mom. I’ll keep improving!
Welcome everybody. There’s been a lot of progress happening in the backend that I wish I can share with you, but much of it have been in talks with certain people regarding business prospects. So I don’t want to spoil anything by talking about it ahead of time.
Festivals submitted today Thursday, August 12.
The road itself has been very rewarding and I just want to share with everyone that I’m moving forward with sending more submissions to festivals that I believe will help the momentum for this film. For example, I’m not just doing what they call spray-and-pray where you just submit it to every festival that you can hoping that somebody would respond or you’d get in. In this case, I’m doing more of a targeted approach where I would look for the billings that would most likely have people that would relate to the type of achievement that I hold in my hands. It is very amateur in the sense that I had used only what I could use at the time. I did not have the funding to get the RED camera. I did not have the funding to pay everyone to do the rotoscoping individually and doing all the multiple renders. I just had to do it all on my own for a certain point.
Thankfully, Final Cut had a plugin come out where I could actually start to use the rotoscoping method a lot faster. Cause it would render much faster. Whereas before I would use Adobe After Effects to basically create the rotoscope look and to be able to vectorize it for the purpose of taking 240 P very granulated footage from old phone cameras and old DV cameras and vectorize it so that we can pull it out to 1080 P. Of course now there are technologies that would up convert a lot of these footage, using artificial intelligence or algorithmic fixes where they would actually insert new pixels and I’m hoping to eventually be able to do something like that for any of the footage that I still have that were recorded in VHS tapes or something like that.
But, at this point, I am keen that there are some folks that would see the effect that I had used throughout the film as overused or outdated and for those people, I would say, you know, they’re not my target audience, if they don’t get it. That’s all I’ll say. You know what I am looking for people that would watch this film and enjoy it for the multiple layers that I offer in it. Yeah, there is a surface highlighted in much of the marketing and the branding but once you watch the film and really dig into it, you’ll notice that there are multiple layers of stories that go deeper as you watch more. So it is a film that you may have to watch a few times and I’m hoping that it would be because you’re enjoying it.
SPARE CHANGE
Volume 1 Chapter 8
We just started working on the augmented reality comic book with one of the original producers of the chapter Spare Change, Ryan Garcia, who I found on LinkedIn after posting about the unknown actor. Eventually I was able to track him down because his name and only his first name was on the slate in one of the outtakes of the capture footage.
And I knew he was like, Ryan. Like couldn’t figure out what his last name was until eventually we found each other on LinkedIn. And we reconnected and have talked about doing some collaborations in the capacity of his interest and that is mainly in the realm of 3d visualization and graphic layouts. So welcome Ryan Garcia. He’s on the team to collaborate.
Another person who recently reconnected is another former student of mine who also became a very renowned director and cinematographer in his own right who I know is also a musician and very interesting fellow by the name of Egan Kolb. He is a very talented motion graphics designer who I tried recruiting before for a different company. One thing that I like about his work is the diversity, a spectrum of his capabilities, and his branding ability. So I touched base with him again on LinkedIn. I was like, “Hey. Are you still freelancing, blah, blah, blah.”
He eventually responded. We started talking about collaborating and so that’s also another thing that we’re doing is a. VJ remix edit of one of those songs, one of the featured songs in the movie, as well as the soundtrack. So we’ll see how that develops in the coming weeks. Hopefully we can have something ready before the September 30 screening online.
Thanks everybody for listening. I just want to review that we did submit to five more festivals, including California Indies, San Francisco Independent Film Festival, Slam dance Film Festival, San Francisco Another Hole In The Head Film Festival, and the Berlin International Art Film Festival.
Submitted to 15 festivals and cleared quality control.
We are now submitted to 15 film festivals all over the world primarily in the United States and in Europe, and we’ll be submitting to more festivals in Latin America as well as South America.
We are also looking to expand out to Asia Pacific, primarily in Japan, Hong Kong, South Korea, and The Philippines once we have the localizations completed.
