The Austin Film Festival is awesome. As with the deadCenter Festival, this was our third year here, first with a feature. And we were nervous. Really, really nervous. Even Cole was slightly nervous, which I excused him for.
Our first order of business: become whores. Super, ultra, slutty whores. We were going to shmooze hard. We were going to go to parties and be confident. Give me a freaking Oscar because I acted so confident you would actually believe I am!
But we took the whoring to a whole new level. Christopher Holland, of Film Festival Secrets, has a great tip in his book, which I recommend to anyone trying to get into festivals (buy it at createspace.)In chapter 5, The Pre-Festival Push, he starts talking about ways to market your film. He makes some great points but 5 and 6 (p. 116) were what gave us the idea for this:
Carrying the casket on Sixth Street. I'd like to say it was fun to do this, but it's not. What we learned is that a) we are not in shape at all and b) everyone thinks someone is inside. Which I guess is natural.
Here we are hanging out at the huge line for "W." This was a major chance for us to pass out fliers and attract attention. It was going well until some Ralph Nader people stood by us protesting the war and people began to think we were with them.
Then, thanks to Mr. Holland again, we set the casket up in the fancy Driskill Hotel, the festival's base of operations. Chris said, "Are you guys going to set it up at the Driskill?" I replied, "That'd be cool, but I doubt they let us." And he said, "Go ask. What does that hurt." And boom sucka, they said yes... after about 15 minutes of confusion on many calls forwarded on to others to answer.
Then the buttons. We're poor filmmakers so we knew we couldn't afford fancy advertising materials. Our fliers were made at Walgreens (100 4x6's for $15!) and our buttons were made by hand. No fancy images. We just thought, "Hey, let's take lines of dialog and paste on them." And if worked. It worked really well actually. We were told the green button there solicited some pretty good debate amongst people.
So it came time for our first screening and I was about to vomit. Were we going to get a good crow? A bad crowd? A crowd?
This was about 30 minutes before the screening. I was incredibly excited and nervous. Cole and Brand sat in the back in some leather chairs and silently worried while I just sort of paced. My parents sat toward the front of the theater and were worried about taking up seats. They wanted to leave so two other people could come in but I told them no. It was very important they be there for this. They were teary eyed at the end. Aw, shucks.
We were told 30 - 40 people were turned away, which is sad because they didn't get to see it but also great. Our tricks worked!
Thanks also goes to the Austin Festival, especially Kelly Williams, for mentioning the film at numerous press events prior to the start of the festival. Without everyone's help, no one would have showed up.
The second screening was also sold out. About 15 were turned away unfortunately. We all sat out in the coffee shop and chatted while the film played.
And, we were told that we should submit to the Oxford Film Festival and we will be heading there in February to screen!
The rest of the festival was spent schmoozing. We went to parties, talked to people, got drunk, gave DVDs of the film to anyone we could, (why haven't you watched it and called me Jake Kasdan?!)
We also were given the opportunity to talk on a panel about low budget filmmaking, ran by Mr. Holland himself. This was a fun opportunity to talk about making low budget films and how to get the word out. We don't really know what we're doing, but we told people what we were doing and I think it really resonated with the crowd. (On a side note, it took Cole and I about two questions before we got out the nervousness and stopped rambling on like morons for too long. We still apologize.)
The best reaction we got was when someone asked us what we edited on. I replied, "With Final Cut Pro on a Macbook Pro." They followed up by asking what that was like. I told them that we didn't have a lot of money and that's all we had. "I mean," I said, "I didn't even have a mouse. I edited the entire thing with a trackpad." There was this awesome collected moan from the audience, then a laugh. I think we won them over at that point.
I cannot say enough about the people who run the Austin Film Festival. Even though larger films were there, we were still treated like real filmmakers, not just a bunch of kids. It was a great honor to screen there and we hope we get to again.
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