Newport Beach Film Fest

Officially made it into festival number four, The Newport Beach Film Festival. They haven't listed the films yet, but you can check them out at http://www.newportbeachfilmfest.com.

Wow.

And only 4 and 1/2 months to my birthday.

He Says It Better

So I'll let you read it from him.

Short on Artistry, Long on Emotion

It might have been a boring Super Bowl for every city in America, but I know Pittsburgh and Seattle were collectively sitting at the edge of their seats. From Pittsburgh's awful start to the final tackle. Now Pittsburgh gets some sort of respect. Or maybe not. Because according to Seattle and most of the sporting news world, the refs won the game. I guess I was watching a different game. I didn't see the refs miss two field goals like I saw Seattle miss. I didn't see the refs break a Super Bowl record by running a 75 yard touchdown. I didn't see the refs catch two passes out of bounds in the red zone. I must have missed that trick play the refs played out. And all this time I thought it was Hasselbeck that threw that Taylor interception.

Was Big Ben's diving touch down ruled correctly? Yes. Was it clear by the video whether it was a touchdown or not? No, and that's why the ruling was correct. The evidence has to be clear that the ruling is wrong to overturn it.

Was Hasselbeck's tackle a low block? I'm not qualified to comment on that one. Regardless, the ball was ours and the turnover is what wins the game, not the 15 yards we gained from the penalty.

Was the 3:1 ratio of Steeler fans unfair? No. Next time buy more tickets.

All in all it's nice to see Cowher win the big game. It's even nicer to see Pittsburgh alive like this. And as for the game itself, I like Gene Wojciechowski's take on it: "Short on artistry but long on emotion."

Rejection

I don't have the new Microsoft Office, but I'm going to take a wild guess and say there's a new "rejection letter" template on there. Let's take a look at the opening sentence of a few festival rejection letters we've recieved:

"This year, The Deep Ellum Film Festival had hundreds of submissions and the overall quality was higher than ever. This means that we must turn down many worthy films. Unfortunately, we did not select your film for screening at this year's Deep Ellum Film Festival."

"This year's Carolina Film & Video Festival received an onslaught of exceptional entries making it one of our most competitive fields ever. Despite the merits of your film, Captain Blasto , we are unable to screen it this year."

"We have had a record number of entries this year and the quality of films has been unprecedented. We have had some very difficult decisions to make and we’re sorry to say that your film has not been selected as one of our finalists.

Man, it seems that all these fests are just having record breaking years, with such phrases as "unprecedented" and "onslaught of exceptional entries."

Kind of stinks when you get home from a long day at work to find one of these, but this is how the festival world works. You submit a hundred, you get into a few, and we've been accepted into several wonderful ones. Really hoping to make it out to the Lake County fest because the more and more I hear about it and more and more I think it's the perfect place for a film like ours. Check them out at http://www.lakecountyfilmfest.com.

Filmmaker Divided

I owe a lot of people an apology. I've become increasingly harder to get a hold of by both festivals and friends. I'm finding it's ridiculously hard to keep up with the Blasto work having a full time job (currently transitioning into a new position) and starting out with a wife of only 5 months. To solve this problem Ashley will really be stepping it up as a producer. She'll be handling more of the communication with film festivals (since I'm doing an awful job at it.)

Oh the brighter side, we made IMDB. Alot of missing information, but we'll get there. Check us out here.