Oh right, the press kit
For reasons I can’t quite figure out, until tonight I had neglected to put together a press kit to send out with the movie. Straightforward enough, just some basic information, stills, etc, all packaged together in .pdf form for easy reference to anyone be they film festival judges or reviewers.
I’m going to be adding to it, things like cast/crew bios, and a longer, more detailed synopsis, among other things. I’ll post it soon, right now I’m having some server issues.
And I know I keep saying this, but the DVD will be dropping very soon. Promise. Tell all your friends to hold their breath.
Watch The Lionshare on Openfilm
The Lionshare is now available to view online, for free, at Openfilm.com.
The site showcases a fast-growing collection of high quality live-action and animated films displayed in high resolution. Openfilm provides a venue for users to watch premium video content, as well as for filmmakers to exhibit their works.
If you happen to watch, please leave comments! And/or click on an ad or two. Like, if you want. Just sayin.
Bronx Independent Film Festival Screening (Updated)
UPDATE: Apparently there was some mistake and the movie is actually screening on Saturday, June 20th, not Thursday.
I was notified by email very late last night that the movie has been selected to screen as part of the Bronx Independent Film Festival. It will be screening on Thursday, June 18 Saturday, June 20 after several short films beginning at 7:30. (By my calculations, The Lionshare should begin at approximately 9:30. But don’t quote me on that.) Here are the details:
WHEN: Thursday, June 18 Saturday, June 20 at 7:30 PM
WHERE: The Lovinger Theater at CUNY Lehman College
250 Bedford Park Boulevard West
Bronx, NY 10468.
Here’s the listing on their website: http://www.bronxstage.com/html/films/the_lionshare.html
Sure, a lot of it’s wrong and/or incomplete, but it’s up there!
The Lionshare wins an Indie, plus DVD news
I was notified the other day by mail that The Lionshare has won an award from The Indie Fest. Very cool to win an award for something we all worked so hard on. The coolest part to me, though, is now I get to plaster this little logo to the left on everything in sight. When you win something you tape it to your face, or something like that. This also comes just in time for the DVD packaging, which I am about to begin designing. Speaking of the DVD…
I’ve been chugging along on getting the DVD finished. I’ve been working to make sure that there’s as much extra content on the disc as possible so that people will really get something special when they buy it. I recorded a commentary track last week over a few glasses of wine, and aside from realizing that I smack my lips way too often, I think it came out pretty good. Commentary tracks are one of my favorite features on DVDs, and I’ve listened to my fair share, so I was very excited about getting the chance to record my own and I wanted it to be a good one. Though I have to say I think it owes a lot, in tone and style, to Ronald D. Moore’s podcast commentaries for Battlestar Galactica. So thanks, Ron. (Did I ever mention that he mentioned me, by name, in one of those podcasts? Apparently I started a trend of gifting him scotch and cigarettes.)
But anyway, yeah, all I have left are the chapter sub-menus, finishing the subtitles, and designing the packaging. One of the cool features, I think, is a short featurette about BitTorrent and the future of media that I culled from the free footage made available by the makers of Steal This Film. Here’s that, also available in HD if you follow to the YouTube page:
reviews and mentions
The movie has only been publicly screened three times, so there aren’t that many formal reviews floating around. At one of the Harpur Film Society screenings there was a critic from the Binghamton Free Press who I hear wrote a very positive review. Unfortunately they haven’t updated their website with the latest issue and I’ve yet to get my grubby little hands on a copy, but I was texted some choice quotes:
Binghamton alumnus’ ‘The Lionshare’ is the perfect way to end the year
and
‘The Lionshare’ has the capability of becoming a quiet college sensation.
Pretty fucking cool if you ask me.
I attended a screening of Ryan Andrew Balas’ new film, Carter, last night at the Aeon Logic Gallery. I mailed him a screener and he was nice enough to do a little write-up of the movie on the One Way Community blog:
I enjoyed the film, and thought it was beautifully shot. I was surprised to find out that it was scripted, because the dialogue was so casual and the performances were so natural.
Take a gander at the rest.
Today and yesterday I’ve been putting together the menus and features for the final DVD, which I hope to have ready very soon.
goings-on
Sorry for the lack of updates. Several things have happened since my last entry. Firstly, we screened the movie at Binghamton University, both mine and most of the cast and crew’s alma mater. That was something to be in the lecture hall where we spent years watching other peoples’ work, come to show our own. Russ took some pictures of the event:
I am rendering the final-final-final version of the movie as we speak. I thought I had it finalized last week but upon viewing I noticed a glitch that I fixed this afternoon. I feel like the movie will never be truly done, but this should be it. For real this time.
Also, we got accepted into the NewFilmmakers 2009 Summer Series, which screens at, of all places, The Anthology Film Archives the night of August 26. More info on that here. We should be hearing from more festivals starting next month.
Subtitling
My aunt, uncle, and two of my cousins are deaf on my mom’s side of the family. In preparing the DVD of The Lionshare, I realized it would become necessary to create a subtitle track so that they would be able to watch it.
A quick google search revealed to me all the ins and outs of subtitling in DVD Studio Pro. I decided to play around a bit and see how it might work out. It was then that I realized that there are a million issues at play here.
Firstly, the obvious (or maybe not-so-obvious) stuff. As someone who has seen plenty of foreign films subtitled I thought I knew the basics. Text should appear in a sans-serif typeface with a black outline to stand out against the picture. When characters speak the text should appear relative to their location on screen. It occurred to me that maybe there are some kind of standardized rules for use of italics, dashes to denote different character dialog, etc. I decided to look it up. Not only do I want to do a good job for the benefit of my extended family, but now I was interested.
In the US and Canada there is a distinction between subtitles and closed captions. Closed captions assume the viewer is hard of hearing. Subtitles assume the viewer can hear but does not understand the language of the program. So closed captions would not bother translating, say, the text of a sign. Subtitles would, because the sign (presumably) is in another language. Closed captions make note of sound effects and music cues; subtitles do not, because there’s no language barrier there. Interesting stuff.
Another technical difference between closed captions and subtitles is, traditionally, closed captions refer specifically to a sub-signal of text broadcast concurrently with programming. You used to need a special box to decode the signal for captions, but today all TVs have it built in. Also, the ‘closed’ part of closed captions refers to the option to opt-in or out of the captioning. IE, it’s a closed system. So, technically, that means the subtitle track on a DVD is also ‘closed’.
For my purposes, I am going to combine characteristics of both for my subtitles. I am going to include text for sound effects and music, because I assume that if you turn on the english subtitles for an english language program, it means you are deaf or hard of hearing. Come to think of it, that’s probably the norm. But I don’t really know.
I was looking for some kind of guide for caption/subtitle etiquette. In other words, is there a standard usage for italics? If there is, my deaf family would be familiar with that, and I don’t want to confuse them. Turns out there really doesn’t seem to be a definitive approach. One guy says you should only use italics for off-screen dialog, such as narration, and nothing else. But I’m pretty sure I’ve seen it used to indicate the speech of a second character. I was also confused about the use of dashes to denote different character speech in the same shot. There doesn’t seem to be a ruling on this. There seem to be some strong opinions about what is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, but it seems like no matter what I do, it’ll break somebody’s rules.
But here’s where things get really interesting. In transcribing my own movie, I have the opportunity to recontextualize it. I can subtly alter the language of the dialog. I can place more emphasis on certain points or phrases. This is almost unconscious. I can choose to indicate certain sounds and not others. This is not as straightforward as you might think. Because of the loose style of the movie, there is a lot of overlapping dialog, colloquialisms, grunting/muttering, etc. Stuff that doesn’t really have consequence. But shouldn’t I include it not matter what? I mean, it’s there, and I want my deaf family to have as close to the same experience as hearing people do as possible. But there are instances when I feel including certain ‘non-dialog-dialog’ in the captioning would give it weight it wasn’t meant to have. It’s just there because it sounds natural, but when it appears in text, it’s given more importance and changes the meaning. So it’s not so clear-cut.
Strange things come up, like whether to spell ‘cum’ like the porn sites do it or like ‘come’ that seems to me like some strangely sanitized explicitness. Is it equally as shocking to read ‘come’ as it is ‘cum’? But do I want it to be shocking? There’s a lot of control in that subtle difference.
Plus there’s the issue of sound quality overall. Because this was a production with extremely limited resources, some of the sound recording isn’t the best. Some dialog has a different quality than in other scenes. Some lines aren’t as loud or clean as I’d like. But for my deaf family this is a non-issue. The lines will appear as clearly as everything else. Sound, which is what separates the men from the boys in film production, is a non-issue for them. It will not weigh into their reading of the film at all.
Basically, there’s a lot more at play here when you start getting down to it. I’m sure deaf people are caption-saavy, and they know how to interpret the different conventions in use in captions and subtitles. So I’ll just do my best and trust that their smarts will make up for my deficiencies as a transcriber.
Short Synopsis
I’ve been struggling with writing a synopsis for festival submissions, press purposes, et al. Here’s the 250-word version that I wrote yesterday:
The Lionshare is an exploration of the connections we make with music, movies, and other media. Through Nick, his roommate Matty, their musician friend Bracey, and the girls in their lives, we see how music and movies inform our interpersonal relationships. How we identify with particular songs, particular stories, and the experience of sharing them with others.
We live in a world where creativity is currency. Such strong personal associations with media give us a sense of ownership over ideas and creative works both personal and implicit. We participate in a cultural conversation through these works and they allow us to interact with the world. This sense of ownership, however, is not always a legal one. The speed with which memes and ideas travel via the Internet have outpaced the bounds of the law. But this doesn’t cross our minds when we want to make a mix tape for a girl or connect with a distant father by watching the latest James Bond movie. Yet we’re still annoyed when an inside joke with friends spreads to someone who wasn’t in on it.
Our characters relate to each other through their media, some theirs, some not. They consume without thinking, and produce when inspiration strikes. When inspiration is not there, they consume more to fill the void.
The Lionshare was made in this spirit. Shot with consumer equipment and an honest, improvisational style, writer/director Josh Bernhard has produced a movie that is a product of all that he has consumed.
a few words
Here we are, the night before the premiere of the movie, arguably the night before the movie is “real.” I’ll explain what I mean by that in a second, but first I need to mention that, in a perfect instance of bad timing, I am recovering from a nasty bout of the flu. “You should have gotten a flu shot!” I hear you say. Well, I did. Apparently ‘influenza A’ didn’t get that memo. I’m feeling much better, but since I decided to leave a bunch of last minute details to be done, well, at the last minute, I find myself with less than 24-hours to go and I am currently rendering the final final version of the end credits.
About a week ago I attended the premiere of Sujewa Ekanayake’s new documentary, Indie Film Blogger Road Trip, at the same theater at The Anthology Film Archives where we’ll be tomorrow night. Truth be told, I hadn’t really been looking forward much to our premiere until that night. Seeing the theater, seeing his work on the screen, and realizing that we were going to be there in short time. I realized, perhaps a little late, that for the longest time I’d been ignoring what is an essential part of the filmmaking experience: sharing it with other people. I always had some vague notion of that part, but in the thick of things I was primarily concerned with just getting the damn thing done. But what I’m realizing now is that premiering this thing tomorrow night for a room full of people will be the cap of my own personal journey making this movie. There’s a reason why I’ve felt strange and numb when people ask me how it feels to have finished a movie. I guess because I won’t be finished until tomorrow night.
It’s hard to express what this project means to me. I feel accomplished, I feel proud of what we did, but I don’t feel the way that I thought I would. It’s not all smiles. I feel like a literally birthed this thing into existence and am now experiencing some kind of bizarre post-partum depression. I have an intimate perspective on this movie that no one else has. That includes recognizing its flaws. I’ve accepted them. But the point I’m trying to make is that no one else is going to see this movie the way I do, and thank god for that. I wonder what everyone is going to see tomorrow night.
I hope they like it.
THE LIONSHARE Premiere
The date is set for the unveiling of the movie: Monday February 23rd at The Anthology Film Archives. Seriously. I made a Facebook event and everything. I threw together a little movie poster one-sheet for all the Facebook stuff, and I actually really like it. I’ll just have to figure out how to create something similar since the screen captures, while being 1920 x 1080, aren’t high rez enough to print anything larger than about 8 x 10. I mean, I guess I can make little lobby cards or something. Anyway, here it is:
