Friday, February 27, 2009

Omaha Film Festival 2009 – Thursday, Day 6

“Hey, who scheduled this thing?!” as quoted by myself and Jeremy as we looked at today’s schedule. You see, we’ve had this crazy karma or spidey sense or dumb luck that has somehow allowed us to schedule various films over the years and having the scheduling magically work out. Truth be told, we do put a lot of work into it and a lot of thought and planning goes into how we schedule things and it always seems to work fine. When we put the schedule together (typically at least a month before the festival), there are often some lingering unknowns such as what format the filmmaker will send in to screen (35mm, Beta SP, Digibeta, HDCam, DVD, BluRay) and the question as to whether or not the filmmaker will be in attendance. Somehow with all of those variables and running four films at once with various runtimes, the schedule has always worked out. Today however we were going over the schedule now that all of the “unknowns” are “knowns” and it was interesting to see that we actually had four filmmakers in attendance in four different screenings, and the end times of each of the films ended approximately 10 minutes apart. For those of you that have attended our screenings, you know that the three of us (Jeremy, Jason and myself) like to get up after each screening with the filmmaker and help facilitate the Q&A sessions. With four at once and only three of us, that was going to prove to be challenging. And as I write this, I’m not really sure how we pulled it off. I know I conducted the final Q&A with Logan, Noah and Jeremy after their film “Touching Home” but I’m not sure how the others came out. I guess props to the other guys for making it work (assuming it did).

This day has been a big red star on my calendar for about a month now because we were going to be short staffed in the projection booth and I kept hoping that it would just “work itself out” but sadly the “itself” that it “worked” meant me spending the first half of the evening upstairs making sure the films went off on time and in the proper format. As I look back on the chaos of the last twelve hours, it’s good to know that everything worked out and I assume that it was all seamless to our attendees. Granted, I didn’t do as many introductions so I’m sure a LOT of our festival goers missed seeing me!

A few of the highlights included Q&A’s with filmmakers Matt Desotell from “Agent 5: A Night in the Last Life Of,” Rollin Binzer and Tom Hurvis from “The Providence Effect,” Chris Taylor with “Food Fight,” Logan and Noah Miller from “Touching Home,” and Frank Monteleone from the short film “Valley of the Moon.” It’s always great to have filmmakers brave the Nebraska weather and come out in support of their films. We tried to help out with the sixty degree weather yesterday, but it (obviously) couldn’t hold up and we’re back to February in Nebraska.

Thanks to everyone that’s come out and supported us over the last several days. We literally plan this event for a year (we’re already making plans for oh’ten) and having decent turnouts is an awesome thing (especially for the filmmakers that travel here). Check out the website, create a screenname, rate and review some films. Guilt session over.

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