January31
Today, by the grace of craigslist and a man named Mark, John and I managed to score tickets to the sold-out Science Fiction + Fantasy Short Film Festival. I’ve gone for three years now, and it’s been interesting to see their submissions evolve. A good third of the first one was just about full-on terrible, because a new festival didn’t attract the best-quality filmmakers. It was worthwhile even then, though, and it’s gotten markedly better year after year.
Still, I found myself more critical this year, and I think I really enjoyed fewer than I usually do. However, being in a script-writing state of mind, I found myself pulling lessons from them. Such as:
The length of a short film’s credit sequence is nearly always inversely proportional to its quality.
There are some film and animation professors out there erroneously giving well-intended advice to people. Other innocent people do not necessarily need to be subjected to your Introduction to 3D Modeling project. Learn, get graded, and move on.
Bickering is not the same as character building. Furthermore, bickering is not cute and serves only to make the viewer hope all of your characters die.
Many storytellers find female characters necessary only when they need a lady to move their plot along, i.e. someone needs to get knocked up so some plans can get derailed, or a male character needs some kind of vague, briefly explained motivation.
What feels good shouldn’t be fled from; actually, something that feels really lovely, a story that reassures you on some base level, is enough to justify a story sometimes.
Just as with full-length features, there is a point at which an inflating budget can not only not help a lifeless story but can actually make it worse, because the audience feels sad that good money was thrown after bad for a terribly written script.
And this, I admit, is my own damage:
I hate fanboy humor to the point that watching it for more than a minute makes me physically uncomfortable. This is my problem, based on a past relationship, but that knowledge doesn’t make my reactions less potent.
So, when not entertaining, at least educational. That’s good.
I’ve been painting and drawing a lot this week. Here’s one I finished last night.
Bring on the bizarre Google searches!
I’m looking into making art prints, so I’ll be posting far more pictures once I have a means of getting them to people.
I love your new drawing and chuckled at your keen observations.