Minneapolis/ St. Paul International Film Festival

Here's a pic of me and Natalie, ny Minnesotan girlfriend.

Borderline Wins Tote Bag

Hey,

So it's no Golden Bear or Academy Award, but "Borderline" won an audience award at the KCET/ PBS Fine Cut Student Film Festival. "Borderline" was selected out of all the USC student films from this last year to show on KCET as a part of a program highlighting Southern Californian student filmmakers. The program aired last month and now is online (See link below). But there was a kick-off party before the series started airing and they had an audience award ballot at the screening and Borderline won!

So I won a tote bag with some shwag and met some of the other filmmakers. It was pretty fun.

A Few Festival Acceptances

In the last few weeks Borderline has been accepted to the following Festivals...

Nashville International Film Festival
http://www.nashvillefilmfestival.org/

WorldFest Houston International Film Festival
http://www.worldfest.org/

Rochester/ High Falls International Film Festival
http://www.rochesterfilmfest.org/
http://www.highfallsfilmfestival.com

LA Screening

March 29th
2:15pm

Borderline will be screening at USC's First Look Film Festival - a medley of all the thesis and high end short films made in the last year. Click the link below for more information...

http://www.evite.com/pages/invite/viewInvite.jsp?inviteId=PFYFDDZNJFPPRHUMOCZD

Palm Beach International Film Festival

Borderline has been accepted into the Palm Beach International Film Festival!

Borderline to Air on TV!!!

Borderline has been selected along with 2 other shorts from USC to air on KCET periodically over the next 2 years. It will be a part of "Fine Cut: KCET's Festival of Student Film." It will begin to air in April.

Below is a description of the 2006 festival:

"Each year the many top notch films schools that populate the Los Angeles area book the Directors Guild of America Theatre on Sunset to showcase their students' thesis films to the industry at large. Now, thanks to "Fine Cut: KCET's Festival of Student Film," there's no need to drive to the DGA in order to check out the work of the latest diploma-clutching filmmakers. Every Thursday at 9:00 p.m. during the month of October, Southern California's esteemed PBS station is broadcasting an hour-long block of handpicked student films and then streaming them for the worldwide audience on its website.

Celebrating its tenth annual incarnation, "Fine Cut 2006" debuts seventeen films ranging from one to thirty minutes in length. The film schools made the initial recommendations (of over 200 films), with KCET responsible for the final selection. "KCET proudly continues its commitment to showcasing the region's best student films," proclaims the series executive producer, Bohdan Zachary, who predicts the October 2006 screenings will "have the largest audience ever.""

Post Durango Independent Film Festival Stress Syndrome

Pictures from the festival will come in a few days...

This past weekend, Borderline took my mom, my girlfriend Natalie, and myself to Durango, Colorado for the 9th annual Durango Independent Film Festival for it’s premier screening. I was so excited to go that even picking out the rental car was a thrill.

The audience LOVED Borderline. Lots of laughs and chuckles. I think people feel kind of creepy laughing at the Mother in Borderline. The first time it is revealed that the Mom is behind everything people don’t bust out laughing, it’s more of an, “oh my god, that’s messed up, what the hell is wrong with people, etc.” The biggest laugh of Borderline at both screenings was at the end of the film when Timothy innocently suggests of Chelsea’s dad “Maybe he can give you some therapy.” I never thought that that would get the biggest laugh. In all honesty, I wrote that last scene pretty quickly, I just needed to wrap everything up. You gotta love it.

Borderline screened with a feature called “The Passage.” The Passage was directed by the same guy who made “Alpha Dog” so there was a packed house at the first screening at 6pm on Saturday Night. Unfortunatly for me, The Passage was an INTENSE horror/ thriller and by the time the credits stopped rolling and the lights came back up, there were only about 8 people left in the theater for some Q&A on Borderline (No one was there to speak about The Passage”. Everyone wanted to get the hell out of there. The first thing I said before the brief Q&A began was “Thank you so much for staying. Listen, I wanna get out of this theater after that just as much as you do!”

Durango was extremely beautiful, and with temperatures at around 50 during the day we never worried about us LA people getting too cold. It was a really cute festival. I met the head of Features for the fest and she seemed interested in the feature I’m writing. She’ll be one of the first people I’ll be calling once I’m done.

This weekend really made me realize that my future is not in this short film. Sure it’s fun to go to festivals, but I can’t rely on Borderline to jump start my career. I have heard so many awesome stories of people getting agents, or people screening their films and getting approached to direct some feature. These, I’m guessing, are probable 1 in 1000 stories that are like miracles to filmmakers. I think I’m just like everyone who thought that it was going to happen to me.

If you ask my mom or my girlfriend, I was in kind of a bad mood all weekend. I think I now know why. I have a good amount of festivals I have left to submit to, but
It’s time to begin the end of Borderline’s chapter in my life. It’s time to look at what’s next….


(it’s a full length movie I’m writing that I want to direct in case you were curious)

DIY Film Festival & Convention

I have no idea what this festival is or why I applied to it. But I got in under their student competition. If you feel like going it's Saturday night, the 23rd of Feb. Check out the website for details.

http://www.diyconvention.com/

Cleveland International Film Festival

Borderline will be screening at the 32nd Cleveland International Film Festival in Mid March. Oh Yeah!

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

Close To Locking

For the last few weeks I've been showing my movie to friends, family, and faculty. I've gotten plenty of feedback, mostly good. I showed a cut of the movie to the class I'm a teachers assistant for. This enabled me to get responses from a group of people that had no idea what the movie was about. Showing it to this fresh audience was really helpful. There were things that people enjoyed and laughed at, and there were parts that were meant to be meaningful or funny and totally did not come across that way.

So my schedule says I should be picture locked my December 5th. This means I stop editing and start working on sound, music, titles, etc. I think this is a doable thing. I have to show the movie to about 3 faculty members at USC. This is a requirement. I think it's a good idea because these people have seen hundreds of short films so they know how to make a short story work in a short amount of time.

So the movie is going well. I'm really happy with how it's looking. I am nervous about starting to work on Music because all of the temporary music I've tried to put in hasn't really fit. But my mentor at school says I have to keep looking and trying new stuff. So I will.

Temp Music

I've begun testing out music in different spots of the film. I'm doing this for a few reasons. 1) I want to find out where score will go and 2) I want some form of music to be in the film when I start screening it for faculty and friends to give me feedback.

It's a fun yet annoying process. Some songs work and some don't. I really try to make a song work by fidgeting with where it comes in and where it goes out. But most of the time it ends up not working so I do all that work for nothing. But when I find the song that fits it feels great. But it takes so many tries! I'm testing mostly a variety of jazz music because you can find pretty much anything for any mood. Also, there are typically no words in jazz tunes.

I am hoping to be picture locked by the end of November so I can give the picture to my composer and my (soon to be found) sound editor. I'm looking forward to the screenings as well. Those should start in about a week.

Sam Lem