First Local Screening

I had a screening of Pictures On the Wall Tuesday night at the Substation, and I guess on the whole it went fine. It's really too bad the room was so tiny, more people couldn't come. Another unfortunate aspect was that the sound system was so completely shitty, all the amazing things Crotty did with the sound design were lost. No high ends, no low ends, clipping in loud parts, basically everything you expect from a pair of cheap-ass computer speakers. That was pretty disappointing.

Overall, the two other films were also disappointing. I'm not begrudging them for lack of funds or sophisticated equipment or anything like that. I'm begrudging one of them for lack of focus, both in a metaphorical sense and in a physical sense (how can the background in a 2-shot be in focus but not the subjects? And it was shot on video, so you can actually see what's going on while you're shooting it). The other lacked a punch and also lost its focus, story-wise, here and there. However, in comparison, it fared better than the former.

Of course, the majority of student film I saw at NU was shitty too, so no big surprise there. However, I consider myself lucky to have been involved with so many grant movies and stuff like that, so hopefully that means my standards are a little higher.

Does that make me sound like an arrogant film snob? I hope not. Even though I can be an arrogant bastard a lot of the time.

Maybe it's just me, but I feel everyone, but especially a director, has to go on set knowing exactly what he wants, and knowing how to get it. Even if it is going to be improv, he still needs to have some idea of what exactly is going to be needed, and what is to be discarded. You can't go in blind or partially blind and expect to get anything good out of it. There's a word for this. I think it's called "Professionalism".

A good ol' Q&A session followed the screening, and I'd like to think I handled that pretty well. Questions ranged from decent to completely inane to absolutely ridiculous. An example of a ridiculous one: This guy asked why we shot on our respective mediums, claiming that to him, film and video looked almost the same. I sighed inwardly, dumbstruck. I don't know if I was giving him too much credit by assuming initially that he had a film/video background, or at least I assumed that before he voiced the latter part of his question. But I mean, I try to give everyone the benefit of the doubt, at least until they reveal themselves as completely fucking incompetent. So I guess that was really an "Umm..." moment for me. I then launched into a short impromptu lecture on the differences between film and video - look, response to light, fps, etc. - and tried my very best to refrain from being nastily sarcastic.

In a one-on-one conversation later, someone compared my movie to Tarkovsky. Another "Umm..." moment, since (a) I hadn't seen much Tarkovsky at all, and (b) it's a little ridiculous to compare a student film to a Russian Master, I think. But whatever.

And it's kinda funny but sad at the same time, for it seems that about half the people who asked questions were foreigners, and almost all who hung around to inhale my secondhand smoke later were non-locals. Was my movie really that alienating just because it had American actors and was set in the US? I'd like to think grand, lofty Themes (insert self-deprecating joke here) like Life and Death are kinda universal, no? Oh well, whatever. I guess I'll have to be an unappreciated Artist (insert another self-deprecating joke) in my own land.

Overall, good feedback, I guess. And I can't really do much to change it now either way.

I think I should get off my lazy ass and start submitting it to festivals again. Maybe I'll be able to get some free air tickets off the Singapore Film Commission that way, if it gets accepted.