Filling in the Hiatus

I have not updated the blog for awhile, so I will summarize the last month and a half with 3 major events:

APPLE EXTRAVAGANZA

In Mid-October, my amazing oogaFilms crew and I entered the Apple Insomnia Film Festival and wrote, shot, edited, and scored a three-minute film within 24 hours.  The film is titled “Crosswalk” and is inspired by an experience I had earlier in the summer.  The festival was an online voting-based contest, with the voting period having just ended a couple days ago.  What really surprised me, pleasantly, was the amazing support I had from my crew and friends in promoting this little video.  Many people were more than willing to go out of their way to tell people about it and invite their friends and family to vote.  Unsolicited by me, people would randomly come up and ask about the contest or would proudly let me know that they had voted.  Dan Jones even risked his school computer account in attempting to promote the film the entire populous of University of Texas! This was a big contest, with about 2000 entries from across the nation, so it is hard to say what the outcome would be, but the real prize in all of this was to see the overwhelming support from friends, something I don’t deserve, but I am extremely grateful for nonetheless, and that’s something a contest can’t give you . . . unless its a popularity contest.

VICTORY AT OURSTAGE

So a film that I am very proud of is “Countdown” starring William Jackson and Lindsey Rendon, which I filmed last spring.  It was just kind of sitting on my computer, so I decided to submit it to a on-line contest site called OurStage.com, which holds monthly contests where users vote by comparing two of the entries back-to-back.  So I sent it in and left it there, checking it every once in awhile, and it would do decently but never quite good enough until the month of October when it got FIRST place in the short films category!  Once a film is placed first in its category, it then moves onto the Finals which was held Halloween day on-line, so I called a bunch of my friends and we participated on-line that day and we got third overall.  Now, third won’t get you anything, but the fact that it made it it the Finals was exciting, and because it got First in its section e-mails came rushing in about prizes to be awarded, acceptance speeches to be made (which you can currently watch at OurStage.com), other sites wanting “Countdown”, and–what was most exciting to me–The Miami Short Film Festival premiering “Countdown”! So, I would say this was a step in the right direction in my filming adventure . . .

BATTLING THE DRAGON

Amongst the bliss which is movie-making, I am struggling terribly with my Japanese class, which I have identified as the bane of my current existence.  My grades were just getting worse and worse, and it got to the point where I was going to drop the class.  However, through circumstances out of my control, I was forced to be a man with this and push through.  So I isolated myself from society, and studied incredibly hard for the next test.  It seemed to have paid off so far, with a 67.1/70 on my oral exam, the written exam could be a different story though.  I can’t afford another bad major grade in the course for the rest of the semester, and its a struggle considering I have grown a distaste for the language and the teacher.  I wish I would have taken Latin . . .