Versus the Film Festival
adequately adequate
On the 11th, 12th and 13th of October, 2002, we all went to the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival.
That was not unusual; my sister and I have gone every year since 1998. That's not a long time for a tradition, but next year we'll have been to half of them, and that sounds sort of good. The new angle this year was that Matie and I had made a movie which was, astoundingly enough, going to be shown. We weren't sure what to expect.
That is, the festival was about the same as always. Lots of guys in black overcoats, printed T-shirts and ponytails milling around tables selling stickers, books, RPGs and resin bird skull replicas, and the blurry half-waking hours of movie after movie after Chinese food after movie. That was pretty much the same, except we stayed with a friend of the family newly moved to Portland and thus didn't get gouged for a motel room like last year.
We also had Pop and Staniel with us, so we didn't fall into the trap of sleeping until noon and getting nothing done ever that so frequently afflicts us when we find ourselves at loose ends. Having Pop with us also kept us from circling various blocks as much as we usually do, looking for parking and street signs.
The effects of being recognized as filmmakers were pretty subtle. After a certain one of our video shorts had aired, people started recognizing Matie, rather loudly, as "the whore!" I got to shake poor harried Andrew Migliore's hand. A group of very excitable people sitting in front of us during our movies, after being tipped off by Pop that we were the filmmakers, took our picture and waved at us in crowds. It didn't cramp our style much, especially compared with the other thing we were doing.
As you've heard, I like H.P. Lovecraft. I'm not sure why exactly I decided to, but I went to the U of O library and Xeroxed up an actual H.P. Lovecraft Has a Posse sticker. It looked many times less stupid than the MSPaint one in the archives here. There were twelve to a sheet, and I lettered them each individually, being both indie and compulsive and also not having a working scanner. I could have Xeroxed one twelve times, but that would have been hard.
Anyway, after a lot of gluing we went to Kinko's and made about 450 of them, about 2.5" square on crack and peel matte sticker paper. They turned out pretty classy - as Matie says, the picture of Lovecraft I used looks like he's saying "I have a posse?" - and didn't have our URL or our production company name (Blood Everywhere) anywhere on them. I wanted to do Shepard Fairey proud.
That's when I realized that we had to somehow pass these stickers out, and that would be awkward. It doesn't seem so hard, but Matie hates people in general, I am afraid of them and Staniel was an x-factor. Luckily, we weren't counting on Pop.
My father shouldn't be a physically imposing man. He's 5'11", bespectacled and of average build. I guess it's the beard, or the duck-hunting coat, or the black beret and kitten-eating stare that combined to make him an exceedingly efficient sticker distributor.
While Staniel just sort of kept his in his coat pocket and I left mine in small stacks on tables, Pop stood in front of the theater door and handed a sticker to every single person who entered. The Moonies would kill to have such a salesman.
As it turned out, he was using a combination of his college-honed skill at avoiding the strip club pamphleteers in Las Vegas and his natural talent for boldfaced lying. "Take a sticker! For the drawing." "You need a sticker to get back in."
Meanwhile, Matie and Staniel had some stickers given back to them and had other people demand that they explain what the hell they were about, and I continued surreptitiously dropping stacks of five stickers on counters, info tables and Amoree Lovell's piano.
We eventually gave out all but one hundred of them, tapering off on Saturday and only throwing a few around on Sunday, the day that Pop went home before the festival started. It was a nice little diversion, and not the horrible nightmare I had worried about.
Did anyone like them? Well, some people giggled, a few promised to put them up on various things, and I overheard several punk guys putting on the 'splainin' hat for their girlfriends' benefit. My favorite sticker reaction, heard in the theater after Pop had accosted them at the door, was the woman reading off "Five foot eleven, one hundred forty-two pounds. Wow," and her escort responding, "He was pretty svelte."
Oh, the movies. Well, there were some other people's movies, and I fully intend to run through them later, and like I said, we made some movies too. Except we have only the crappiest of equipment and the shakiest grasp of technical matters, so what Matie and I made was a series of six ultra-short shorts called "Six Shorts in Moonlight," an incredibly obscure pun (on the title of one of the chapters of Re-Animator).
We figured that the best way to have people not hate our movies was to make them incredibly short, because while you could be irritated by a twenty-minute piece of pretentious junk that was also blurry, a forty-second humorous short would not lose very much for poor picture quality. Only one of the six ran longer than a minute, including titles.
People seemed to enjoy them, too; they were put in groups of two between some of the longer (in actual as well as perceived time) shorts, and after the first two the audience actually applauded when the opening credits started. Yeah. After #4, "Fax Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family," there was a little programming error and the first few seconds of the credits for #5 started, then cut to blackness again. Astoundingly, there was a respectable "Aww" chorus. And of course, "The Whore in the Burying-Ground" got a good reception, even though Matie had to bury her head in my shirt while it played.
Next time, we're going to make a five-minute movie.
That was not unusual; my sister and I have gone every year since 1998. That's not a long time for a tradition, but next year we'll have been to half of them, and that sounds sort of good. The new angle this year was that Matie and I had made a movie which was, astoundingly enough, going to be shown. We weren't sure what to expect.
That is, the festival was about the same as always. Lots of guys in black overcoats, printed T-shirts and ponytails milling around tables selling stickers, books, RPGs and resin bird skull replicas, and the blurry half-waking hours of movie after movie after Chinese food after movie. That was pretty much the same, except we stayed with a friend of the family newly moved to Portland and thus didn't get gouged for a motel room like last year.
We also had Pop and Staniel with us, so we didn't fall into the trap of sleeping until noon and getting nothing done ever that so frequently afflicts us when we find ourselves at loose ends. Having Pop with us also kept us from circling various blocks as much as we usually do, looking for parking and street signs.
The effects of being recognized as filmmakers were pretty subtle. After a certain one of our video shorts had aired, people started recognizing Matie, rather loudly, as "the whore!" I got to shake poor harried Andrew Migliore's hand. A group of very excitable people sitting in front of us during our movies, after being tipped off by Pop that we were the filmmakers, took our picture and waved at us in crowds. It didn't cramp our style much, especially compared with the other thing we were doing.
As you've heard, I like H.P. Lovecraft. I'm not sure why exactly I decided to, but I went to the U of O library and Xeroxed up an actual H.P. Lovecraft Has a Posse sticker. It looked many times less stupid than the MSPaint one in the archives here. There were twelve to a sheet, and I lettered them each individually, being both indie and compulsive and also not having a working scanner. I could have Xeroxed one twelve times, but that would have been hard.
Anyway, after a lot of gluing we went to Kinko's and made about 450 of them, about 2.5" square on crack and peel matte sticker paper. They turned out pretty classy - as Matie says, the picture of Lovecraft I used looks like he's saying "I have a posse?" - and didn't have our URL or our production company name (Blood Everywhere) anywhere on them. I wanted to do Shepard Fairey proud.
That's when I realized that we had to somehow pass these stickers out, and that would be awkward. It doesn't seem so hard, but Matie hates people in general, I am afraid of them and Staniel was an x-factor. Luckily, we weren't counting on Pop.
My father shouldn't be a physically imposing man. He's 5'11", bespectacled and of average build. I guess it's the beard, or the duck-hunting coat, or the black beret and kitten-eating stare that combined to make him an exceedingly efficient sticker distributor.
While Staniel just sort of kept his in his coat pocket and I left mine in small stacks on tables, Pop stood in front of the theater door and handed a sticker to every single person who entered. The Moonies would kill to have such a salesman.
As it turned out, he was using a combination of his college-honed skill at avoiding the strip club pamphleteers in Las Vegas and his natural talent for boldfaced lying. "Take a sticker! For the drawing." "You need a sticker to get back in."
Meanwhile, Matie and Staniel had some stickers given back to them and had other people demand that they explain what the hell they were about, and I continued surreptitiously dropping stacks of five stickers on counters, info tables and Amoree Lovell's piano.
We eventually gave out all but one hundred of them, tapering off on Saturday and only throwing a few around on Sunday, the day that Pop went home before the festival started. It was a nice little diversion, and not the horrible nightmare I had worried about.
Did anyone like them? Well, some people giggled, a few promised to put them up on various things, and I overheard several punk guys putting on the 'splainin' hat for their girlfriends' benefit. My favorite sticker reaction, heard in the theater after Pop had accosted them at the door, was the woman reading off "Five foot eleven, one hundred forty-two pounds. Wow," and her escort responding, "He was pretty svelte."
Oh, the movies. Well, there were some other people's movies, and I fully intend to run through them later, and like I said, we made some movies too. Except we have only the crappiest of equipment and the shakiest grasp of technical matters, so what Matie and I made was a series of six ultra-short shorts called "Six Shorts in Moonlight," an incredibly obscure pun (on the title of one of the chapters of Re-Animator).
We figured that the best way to have people not hate our movies was to make them incredibly short, because while you could be irritated by a twenty-minute piece of pretentious junk that was also blurry, a forty-second humorous short would not lose very much for poor picture quality. Only one of the six ran longer than a minute, including titles.
People seemed to enjoy them, too; they were put in groups of two between some of the longer (in actual as well as perceived time) shorts, and after the first two the audience actually applauded when the opening credits started. Yeah. After #4, "Fax Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family," there was a little programming error and the first few seconds of the credits for #5 started, then cut to blackness again. Astoundingly, there was a respectable "Aww" chorus. And of course, "The Whore in the Burying-Ground" got a good reception, even though Matie had to bury her head in my shirt while it played.
Next time, we're going to make a five-minute movie.