Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Cucalorus - Wednesday

I felt pretty unaccomplished after Cucalorus 13 last year, as I only attended one day's worth of films, so I decided that I'd attend as much of Cucalorus 14 as possible. I started on Wednesday, of course, with the Visions 08 kickoff. I have to give a huge thanks to Andre for his efforts to enter "Adam and Eve" which was a project that Dylan, Russ, Jamie and I made for 6x1 multi-plane animation. He basically just emailed us all and asked if we would mind if he put it into Visions for us, which of course we all gladly agreed to. So it was thanks to him that I even got a chance to see the student films from this year. On the topic of Visions, I thought all the films were pretty good, but Zero Deficit and Taintsmouth were easily my favorites. I had been hearing about Taintsmouth since I took Intermediate Doc and finally witnessed Rob's masterpiece. Brilliant.

I stuck around after Visions and tried to get into Chip's film "Two Hours in the Dark" but I was told it was completely sold out already. It's interesting how they made it work this year where, even if you were a FST major with an all-access pass, you still had to get paper tickets way in advance to have a chance to see the more popular features. I was surprised that some professors even had a hard time getting into films (Hulse couldn't get into Chip's film). I explored all my possibilities and talked to Joselyn and Bobby and somehow got hooked up with one of the small tickets they reserve for the last 10 passholders to arrive. So luckily, I got to experience one of the 'Work-in-progress' screenings. I thought it was a really good idea to put Chip Hackler, his editor (Alan?) and Terry Linehan, his producer, up front in Jengo's in order to guide the audience through the viewing. The film looks great, especially the art direction. The actor playing Frank Capra looks a little shaky though. Chip said the film should end up being about 40 minutes long once it's all done, and I'm hoping I'll be around to see it when it premiers. Oh and I can't forget to say that, although the editor seemed like a pretty cool guy, he just needed to stop talking. I just felt that he was stealing the spotlight from 1) the film, and 2) Chip as a director. He made some good commentary but just too much commentary. Oh well, the few scenes we saw looked very good and the screening itself was a new experience that I'm glad I was a part of.

Late Wednesday I returned to Jengo's for the film party and managed to get into the 'sex shorts' as they were called. All of them were pretty ridiculous and hilarious. "The Letter 'C'" was awesome and kept everyone constantly laughing, but my favorite was the extremely weird "Hezurbeltzak, A Common Grave" which was basically very cryptic pencil-looking drawings being animated, showing sex and some very odd things (like a woman swallowing up a dog with her something-or-other...) Very, very strange film but I thought it was amazingly creative. After the sex shorts, I met up with a bunch of friends behind Jengo's and went out back for the best part...FREE BEER.

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