It's pretty neat that warming is still making "the rounds" -- it's been almost a year since I actually submitted to any festivals without being solicited, but thanks to the exposure that it's gotten in festivals such as Short Shorts and Planet in Focus, I've been getting lots of festivals requesting screener copies. I haven't been sending to all of them (since I'm really not focusing on warming any more in terms of getting it "out there"), but there's definitely some interesting ones that I have sent copies to.
To correct myself from my last post, Next Floor is actually a Canadian film, and a very good one at that. Also at the AFF I ended up seeing two other feature-length animations, Waltz with Bashir (an astoundingly animated and hard-hitting film about the casual terror of war as told by a former soldier) and Sita Sings the Blues (a mish-mash of styles brought together to tell the story of Sita, accompanied by blues songs and a storyline about the filmmaker getting dumped-- which wasn't always successful -- but was a charming and funny film nontheless).
Also I was luckily able to see all the animated shorts program -- kudos to Mark Flindall for programming the excellent FrameXFrame programs. The new Docs section this year of FrameXFrame was especially enjoyable, and featured the world premiere of i am so proud of you, Don Hertzfeld's latest piece. There were definitely some people in the audience who were expecting it to be another Rejected (did they somehow miss everything will be OK?), and guffawed loudly at everything until it became evident that the tone of the piece was a lot more sad and serious than they had expected. The Canadian animation Passage (not to be confused with Passages, which was also a remarkable film) was a somber black and white rotoscoped piece about the filmmaker's trials at the hospital during the birth of her daughter. From the regular FrameXFrame screenings my top pick was Procrastination, a hilariously true and expertly told RCA grad film that I think most people can relate to (or I can, at least). Plus if you click on that link I think you can actually watch it!
It definitely feels weird to be using this as an actul blog versus a "remind myself where my film has screened so I can look it up later" notepad to myself, which is kind of what it has been for the past year. So yeah, these winds of change that are blowing? They are totally called "next film". Today I dropped off my submission to the One Minute Film Scholarship at AFCOOP. More on that later.
