Monday, March 12th, 2007

Dispatch from Texas

After a furious final week of color correcting and online editing, I’m here in Austin at the South by Southwest Film Festival. The film premieres tomorrow, and thus far I’ve just been taking it in, seeing some films (Fish Kill Flea and Silver Jew among them) and meeting some good people. The SXSW Interactive Festival is happening at the same time as the film fest, so the convention center is crawling with web programmers and designers. Not surprisingly, the Interactive crowd is just a little more psyched about the premiere than the general film population. But everyone seems excited. I’m still getting plenty of “You mean, the font???” reactions.

I caught a guy trying to steal one of our posters yesterday… which is a compliment I guess! I felt bad making him put it back, but we didn’t bring very many, and the postering situation here is sort of absurd. They only have three little kiosks at the convention center where filmmakers can put posters and fliers. So it’s a constant battle for space. Every time I walk by, someone has put their poster over ours, and two other people have put stickers over that poster, etc. It’s a mess.

I also got to see Mike Mills’ new doc Does Your Soul Have a Cold? which follows five Japanese people suffering from depression. I think most audience members were expecting some sort of exposé on the pharmaceutical industry, and the effects of American companies marketing anti-depressants internationally. What they got was a very personal, poetic film about the daily lives of the subjects, without any talking heads or ambushes of drug company execs. I really enjoyed it, but what killed me was that Mike had used Helvetica for the titles in almost the exact way that we’d used it in earlier cuts of the film (upper case, bold, big). During the online I decided to switch to a smaller, upper and lower case style for our titles. Mike’s film made me miss our big caps!

More soon.

-Gary

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Posted by Gary

8 Comments »

  1. Hey Gary, good to hear that the posters were printed in time for SXSW. I was a bit worried about that. Glad it all worked out well! Speak to you later.

    Comment by Danny — Monday, March 12, 2007 @ 7:37 am

  2. zomg it’s Danny from Experimental Jetset!1!11!11!!11!!!!

    Comment by some guy — Tuesday, March 13, 2007 @ 5:56 pm

  3. Congratulations on the premiere! I was in the audience, and I loved the film. Well-done.

    One question: Is there anywhere I might find a list of the songs used in the movie?

    Comment by Aly — Tuesday, March 13, 2007 @ 10:54 pm

  4. if i were there, i’d steel a poster too. really. look forward to seeing the film some day.

    Comment by cyphunk — Wednesday, March 14, 2007 @ 3:31 am

  5. There’s music in the film from The Album Leaf, Battles, Caribou, Chicago Underground Quartet, El Ten Eleven, Four Tet, Kim Hiorthøy, Motohiro Nakashima, and Sam Prekop. Most of the songs are unreleased, so they’re not available for purchase. But if you liked the music, you should definitely pick up the latest records from all of the above.

    Comment by Gary — Wednesday, March 14, 2007 @ 9:55 am

  6. congrats on the premiere!!
    is there going to be a possibility of buying the dvd soon?

    Comment by kae — Wednesday, March 14, 2007 @ 10:34 am

  7. Gary, from what I heard you had to turn people away at the screening. I don’t think a few fliers or posters would have helped attract any more people since there’s been so much talk and anticipation for this film that the result of more promotion would have been more people standing outside.

    I’m just sad I had to miss it due to flight constraints. Hope it went well. I’m hoping to see it in NYC this saturday if I can still get tickets.

    Oh, and I know plenty of people who want that post mate! Including me! :)

    Comment by Charles Adler — Wednesday, March 14, 2007 @ 11:49 am

  8. I thought I might pass this along.

    http://www.cinematical.com/2007/03/14/sxsw-helvetica/

    Comment by James Rocchi — Wednesday, March 14, 2007 @ 4:51 pm

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