First Festival Acceptance!

"Borderline" has been accepted into the 2008 Durango Independent Film festival. While small, the Durango Film Festival is known for treating their filmmakers like royalty, and brewing a special beer made especially for the festival.

Click here to check out the website for DIFF

Post-Screening

The screening was a huge success. Friends, family, and friends of other friends all gave me great feedback on the film. It was tremendous to see the film print projected on a big screen. I can't wait to do it more.

So now begins the submission process. I dropped off my film to the Sundance office last week, and this week I will submit to 3 festivals. It's only the beginning. Again, there's excitement and nervousness - I am learning that this will never stop.

Keep your fingers crossed.

1 Week Countdown

With one week until the Sundance Deadline and 9 days until the Screening, I feel like I have a semi-good handle on things...

After a messy couple of weeks dealing with sync issues in my Dolby mix, and a missing fade to black at the end of my film, things are just about finished...

I have to get my final print onto video so I can get DVDs made. The Sundance deadline is on Friday!

Screening Month

It's so close to the screening and I'm very nervous. Not so much about the screening because I'm pretty sure I'll be able to get all my ducks in a row for that. What I'm most concerned about is getting my film onto DVD so I can send it out to Sundance by the September 21st deadline.

Anyone have a grand or 2 laying around? I could use it to make the dvd house whip those up a lot quicker.

E-mail me if you're interested in donating a little more, K?

Just kidding... Not really... Just kidding...

Sam

Home Stretch

This weekend we finally completed the final mix of the sound. It has been a long process with a few late nights and technical problems. But both me and my mixer/ friend Raj are very happy with how it all sounds.

Which takes me into the home stretch. The movie is edited, sound mixed, and color timed, which means all of the major creative work is done. Now all that's left is the technical jive that gets the movie ready for viewing.

So the next few weeks are moving the film and sound from one production house to another, transfering and such, and then the screening on the 23rd.


But now my biggest goal is to raise a little more moolah, and get the film out to Sundance (The deadline is on the 21st of September).

Color Timing

I saw my film projected on a large screen for the first time today. I have been seeing it on tiny computer screens and low resolution DVDs for the past year. It was incredible. Every scene looks fantastic and the ones that I had been thinking "maybe it's too dark" or "maybe it's not warm enough" we were able to fix.

I'm very excited about finishing.

Sam

I'm starting to get excited about the screening in 2 months. This is what the poster may look like.

It also has the new tagline.

Screening Date

We've chosen a screening date. It's official. More official than the last time I said it was official...

Sunday, September 23rd!!!

Kisses,
Sam Lem

Picture Locked & More

I've finally finished editing BORDERLINE. I'm happy with the movie, though I could have said, "I'll edit just one more day" for the rest of my life. The final cut is about 9 minutes and 30 seconds and will be about 11 minutes once the credits are done. That's a good short film length. From what I've heard, a lot of USC shorts usually turn out to be 15-16 minutes and they don't get into many festivals because festivals like to put a bunch of 8-12 minute shorts in a program instead of just a few 15-25 minute shorts. So I feel good.

But now a new door has opened and that is the post editing process:

negative cutting
sound editing
titles
scoring
color timing
printing a print to screen

All this shit is new to me and all of the above tasks rely on each other to finish. Timing this process is so tedious and confusing. However it's a GREAT learning experience and I'm very happy to be doing it. A lot of money that has been sitting in my Borderline account is now being spent and it's almost all gone. But it's going to things that I have never known much about and so it's ok to see the money go.

POSSIBLE SCREENING DATE: END OF MAY/ EARLY JUNE

My co-producer and I are both finishing our thesis films at the same time and we're planning on screening our films at USC for friends/ family/ faculty/ and other people some time in late May/ early June. I will keep those interested posted on this website and once we lock a date, I will be sending out mass e-mails and snail mail invites.

In other news I was in Berlin last week because a very good friend of mine from USC got his thesis film accepted into the Berlin International Film Festival. In Europe the top 3 film fests are Cannes, Venice, and Berlin - So this was a big deal and I went to join in his festival experience while visiting Germany. His film won 2nd place (The Silver Bear) and he got a lot of press and attention. It made me very jealous, but also made me excited about getting Borderline done so I can start sending it out into the festival fray.

That's all for now.

Sam Lem