Film Debt...PAID!

Not two minutes ago, I scheduled the final online payment for the loan I took out in 2007 to make Purgatory Comics. This last payment was made possible by another juicy tax refund for Warm Milk Comics Inc. So in the end, the movie cost approximately $25-grand and over $12-grand came back to me in returns the last two years. Yummy.

It will be nice to have once less bill each month. It's also nice that if this thing turns out to be a terrible mistake, at least I'm not paying for it anymore. I remember initially I was doing a lot of research on investors and even knew a guy that expressed some interest. But now I'm so happy I didn't go that route. Okay, off to the Post Office I go to mail out 4 more festival screeners.

Film Festivals, Withoutabox

Over the past few weeks I've been submitting screeners of the film to various festivals. Last weekend I joined Withoutabox, which is an online resource filmmakers can use to find and submit to festivals. It's also cool because you have special deadlines and in some cases, discounted submissions. And on this site, it's real easy to find a load of festivals that your particular project qualifies for. So if you're a filmmaker with a finished film on your hands, check it out.

I've been really busy with this. When a festival requests a fullblown presskit, that's some work and expens on my part. But I'm pretty proud of the presskit I make; it's gotten great compliments.

I'm mostly submitting to Long Island and New York City based festivals right now (with the exception of one California submission so far). That's all you're really going to hear about that on this blog; I'm not going to list where I submitted, so you'll just have to hope I win some. The bad news is that a lot of these festivals don't take place until later summer or even fall, so it'll be months before I hear anything for a lot of them. So, I like to make a screener/kit, send it out, and basically forget about it. If you know of any that you think I might be interested in, shoot me a message!

Online Training

I'm known to be a "Jack of all trades, master of none." I know the basics of video editing, graphic design, web design, and related things ... but I really never knew more than enough to get by. The exception is writing; I am a writer. That's my thing. But I would like to be more knowledgeable in the other stuff.

Up until now whenever I needed to learn something, I'd scour youtube for tutorials, or web forums for answers. I decided now to take a web course instead, and I found a really good one at lynda.com. It's not free but I'm trying out a month and today alone I've watched and taken notes on dozens of videos. They have in-depth courses for Photoshop, After Effects, Final Cut, and a LOT more. Right now I'm focused on becoming really kickass at Dreamweaver because all my sites could use much better web pages. The video tutorials are awesome so I recommend this to anyone like me who wants to go beyond knowing the basic stuff for creative programs.

Plus, this: there are a lot of writers who don't know much video/graphical work. There are a lot of graphic people who don't know writing. The people who truly know both are a dime a dozen. In fact I'm not sure I've ever met one person who exels at both. If I could be that person, it would be very good for me.