So, made it out to Celebration V, but didn’t win a bloody thing at the fanfilm awards. It’s hard not to be biased, and to avoid letting poopy pants cloud your opinions. Maybe, take a look here at who won what and tell me what you think.

I thought I’d be able to post some tips about going to the convention or entering the fanfilm awards. Turns out I can’t. The convention felt… I dunno… distant. Maybe I’m not a con guy or a Star Wars guy anymore. As for the awards, well, this is the advice I would have given…

Make sure your film is submitted on time.

Not such a big deal actually. Turns out I didn’t really need to go those last two days without sleep (for a bunch of reasons). Due to mix ups, ours didn’t get submitted until 4 hours after the deadline and still got in. The Solo Adventures, which won an award for Best Animation, was submitted 4 whole days after the deadline. So, I guess, take your time.

Ensure your film is under 10 minutes.

They make it pretty clear in the guidelines that they’re looking for films under 10 minutes, and preferably under 5. And rightly so. Fanfilms over 5 minutes are always kinda iffy. But then they had 4 finalists that were well over ten minutes, and gave awards to two of them. I was worried when Myth & Legends was over 5 minutes. Feel kinda silly now.

Try to make your film fit into previous award categories.

It makes sense that if you look at the winners from previous years you can see vague common trends in award categories. The problem is that some admin guy who was presenting the Cinematography award straight up said that they just made up categories each year to fit the films they want to give awards to. He wasn’t kidding either. The Best Sequel Award was kind of stretching it.

Make sure you show up to the awards.

If they know and cater to who they’re giving the awards to, you figure they’d want to make sure there was someone there to accept it. All of the finalists got offered passes to the convention and were asked to RSVP. Still, three of the seven award recipients weren’t there, and the people they had handing out the awards seemed surprised every time. Bottom line. It’s not a big deal if you don’t go. They’ll mail the award to you if you win one.

They also called the passes they gave out VIP passes, but they were really just passes (which is still kinda cool). The fact that they had Lando on them should have been a big clue.

Become part of the community.

For Whedon’s Evil League of Evil Submission contest, the internet was all abuzz. Folks made their guesses and talked about each others’ entrees non stop. In fact, the most comments I ever got on this blog was in response to my ELE predictions.

Now, that was Dr. Horrible, but this is STAR WARS. Whether you agree with it or not, there really shouldn’t be any comparison. Still, for whatever reason, there was never really a community for the fanfilms or the awards. Comments, either on the Atom.com Contest group page, or on individual film sites were almost nonexistent. And there certainly didn’t seem to be a buzz anywhere else on the net. I don’t get it.

Social Market to get votes for your film.

Specifically for the Audience Choice Award, finalists are let loose to pimp the heck out of their videos. The one who gets the most online votes gets the award. Not sure about this one. At some point it stops being about the quality of the work. Some of the fanfilms actually had marketing teams working towards this goal. The guideline finalists used to attempt to gauge the secret votes was the number of times their video had been viewed. I just can’t pretend to understand how online voting works. The film that won (Renaissance – Redux) only had the same 1,500 – 3,000 views most of us had, compared to the 10,000 for A Light in the Darkness and a whopping 40,000 cranked out for The Impossible Peace.

So, all in all, I have no real advice on how to enter the Star Wars Fanfilm Challenge. I guess the best I can muster is don’t put too much effort into it. Just have fun. If your planning to put that much of your life into something, maybe make it an original production. Create something of your own.

It’s advice I wish I could stick to and remember, but things like the Evil League of Evil Submissions and this Star Wars thing have been powerful and lengthy distractions. Despite the headaches, they’ve been fun. Still, I’ve got two projects that should have been done ages ago, and it’s embarrassing that they aren’t.

I haven’t done a bit of advice in a while.  Here’s a gooder.

When it comes to indie film (especially zero budget video), it’s over-the-top important to always take care of your locations. It’s important, not just to your production, but your community as well. It sounds obvious, I know, but once you get filming you sometimes start to forget things or certain immediacies knock your priorities out of whack.

But here’s the deal.

Whether you attained these locations through family or friends or money or begging or whatever, you doubtlessly got them for a song and a fraction of what you should be paying. Don’t start thinking you’re entitled to the location. You treat every inch of it as if it was your own (or better), clean up after every shoot, and maintain steady communication. Just like the talent involved, you have to make the owners of these locations happy that they became involved with your project. If you can do that, they’re more inclined to help you (or another filmmaker) out in the future. Some folks say that the worst thing you can do in an indie shoot is “burn a location” or somehow tick off the owner in a way that turns them off any future productions (although actually burning a location down would have the same effect). This limits your potential down the line and seriously hampers the creative community.

I’ve approached locations in the past where they’ve declined my requests because they’d had unnecessary trouble in the past, and it sucks. No matter what your intentions are, you’re automatically seen as a nuisance and a troublemaker because someone before you dropped the ball.

Now, here’s my sad confession… I’ve burnt a location.

While using an old church for Magellan, I bust my ass to keep it tidy and clean. I would sometimes take trips out of town to double check on things. I might have been a little nuts about it, but to heck with that. You should be nuts. I was running myself a little hard, and during a shoot one night, I got hit by the flu. Pretty bad too. I can remember fighting it, all sweaty and messed up that whole night. Once we were done cleaning up, stumbling out last in the dark, I took a fall and dropped my car and church keys which I promptly locked inside. We popped the hinges of the front door and retrieved them, but I went from bad to worse on the ride home. That flu knocked me out for four days. I was a delirious mess. However, my relief at coming out of the other end of it was short-lived, as I got a call from the none too pleased church owner. Mice had gotten into the garbage bags (because there was food in them) and made a pretty big mess.  Then, once you see one thing that makes you mad, naturally you see some more. He was miffed and had every right to be. As soon as I hung up the phone, I rushed out there, cleaned the place, caught a bunch of mice, and mopped. I cleaned it far more than it had been in a decade, and did everything else I could to apologize, but the damage had already been done. The owner let me finish up my shoot over the next two weeks, but there’s little doubt in my mind what his opinion of me must be.

I screwed up. I don’t care how sick I was. I should have been out there (or found someone else to) the next morning (like I was every other shoot) to gather the garbage and double check things. It was a horrible mistake that still bugs the hell out of me over a year later.

Take it from me. Don’t burn locations.

I’ve done a couple of indie movie making panels at conventions, and I’m always a little surprised at what I hear there. I’ve sat beside directors who treat their project, cast, and crew as if it were a professional production. This is usually followed by stories that range from disagreements all the way to entire cast and crew overhauls. I keep my mouth shut at the time due to equal parts respect and utter confusion.

Making a no-budget movie should be nothing like a professional production, and should never be treated as such. I don’t care if the world lets you (and it sometimes does), and I don’t care if that’s how film school says it should be.  Don’t do it.  Making movies should be fun and rewarding. They’re an amplified and amazing outlet for stories and creativity. As the director soaks up the lion’s share of this fulfilment in a no-budget production, it’s their job to make absolutely certain that everyone else involved is having a blast. In a professional production, everyone is well paid to cater to the director. There are things like schedules and contracts that all revolve around money. Lots and lots of money. If no cash is involved, why would a person have anything to do with a project that isn’t fun? Ego? I dunno, maybe.

Personally, I don’t want anyone helping me unless they want to and enjoy being there. You make sure everyone’s watered and fed. You accommodate every personality quirk and take every hit to the schedule with a smile. If you have to occasionally have a crappy time to make sure everyone else is happy, you shut up and do it. Does this mean the project suffers? Sometimes a little, but I couldn’t imagine the problems and grief that would arise with an unhappy cast and crew. If everyone involved has a good time, the productions runs smoother, it really shows in the final product, and everyone is eager to come back and help the next time around.

Persistence is by far the best advice I can give to any aspiring writer or filmmaker. 

Holy Cow!  I’m usually a pretty tidy guy, especially when it comes to work spaces.  Sure things tend to clutter up after a while and paper gets everywhere, but I try and stay on top of it.  However, I haven’t been paying enough attention to my computer cleanliness.  I’ve been taking some time to work on Magellan, Mosquito, and book promotion, only to find that my computer hard drives had become a mess!  There were video files all over the place that my editing software was blowing a gasket trying to find, and the different sketches and versions of the webcomic stuff were a disaster.  I’ve spent the last two days basically attacking the clutter and making damn sure absolutely everything is backed up on one of my external drives.  So, my advice today (regardless of your creative outlet of choice) is to set up a file system before you start a project and take the time and discipline to stick to it.  You’ll keep things organized for the future, and stop yourself from losing anything important. 

I keep things external since I share my machine with my wife and three year old. 

So, here’s the “Big Damn Inside Joke.”  Folks who are big time Browncoats’ll already be aware of the “Bellflower” and “Into the Black” fanfilms currently under way.         

Indie productions are HARD.  Real life has a way of fighting you on them every step of the way, and many projects end up in limbo during post production for any number of reasons.  All I can tell the folks involved (as a fellah who’s been locked in the post production of Magellan for seemingly ever) is to keep at it.  Even if you break down and lose confidence, if you keep plugging away at it, you’ll eventually get through your slump and rediscover the spark that brought you to the project in the first place.  

And remember that even movie shorts take time.  I know we did Mosquito in 5 weeks, but I also know that the chances of things coming together so smoothly on anything else I ever do are so remote they’re barely worth mentioning.

I read Raymond E. Feist’s Flight of the Nighthawks and Into a Dark Realm this weekend. His original Riftwar Saga was a huge deal for me. Feist’s earliest books were just as influential to my young creative development as Star Wars (it’s hard not to image a connection between Feist and Lucas if you read Faeire Tale). Even with the bad taste in my mouth left from Feist’s clear borrowing of the Empire of the Petal Throne, his books have helped shape the stories and worlds I create today.   

Anyway, I’ve been signing the last handful of Feist books out of the local library (something I almost never do) because I can’t make myself buy them anymore. The brief glimmers of cool characterization and alluded to echoes of past greatness, surrounded by a sea of disappointment, remind me of watching Ewan McGreggor play Kenobi. I’ve given it some thought, and my son is going to be raised to believe that there were only three Star Wars movies and three (if you count Magician as a single book) Feist novels. If any kid tries to suggest otherwise, I might give Aid the okay to clock them.

Welcome to the Emerald City Storytellers Blog, where the laws of physics and grammar seemingly cease to apply, and you’ll find downright riveting information on such topics as…

 …the humorous young adult fantasy books by Nathan Town (that’s me), Ned Stapleton and the Wrath of the Death Gods and The Oldest Game of All (see the ‘Books’ link over on the right), including signings, appearances, and what not…

…the online serialized retro sci-fi noir, The Magellan Affair (that’s the ‘Movies’ link over there), with updates, production notes, and indie movie making tips. The first chapter is so very close…

…the new Mosquito webcomic (you’ll never guess which link on the right this one is) based on our Firefly/Serenity fanfilm (back before the world at large destroyed my faith in humanity by deciding that Big Momma’s House was more deserving of a sequel)…

…other unrelated nonsense that you usually find on these things, like how cute my cat is…

…if I thought you’d care…

…or I had a cat…