MOTEL TRAILER from Jerry Brewington on Vimeo.

A pervy researcher is exploring the nature of time and space with Q-tips and the local janitor in a Chinatown Motel. A "real estate agent", on her way to meet a "Hasidic salesman," upsets  their tests with profound results.

MOTEL is on Facebook!

We finally polished up our short narrative film Motel. Needless to say it has been a blast and the amount I have learned, you could fill up a crater (umm, well not so big of a crater:) We don't have the film on-line (trailer up soon) as we are going to try our hand at a few festivals, but do go by and see the website and check out the wonderful cast and crew.

You can also find us on Our Facebook Page  and IMDB Page. Keep an eye out, aye aye Captain for updates, etc.

CONTACT: qtipoftime@motelmovie.info

written and directed by jw brewington

produced by Eric Frentzel and jwbrewington

Director of Photography Kristina Shulte-Eversum

Editing and Sound Design by Bill Coy

Featuring

Aisha Benton  Jason Rennebu Travis Lee Suit   Eric Frentzel

One filmmaker named Paul Sapiano, who directed the masterpiece, "The Boys & Girls Guide to Getting Down" which IMDB describes as a: "Tongue-in-cheek look at 20-something singles clubbing and partying in L.A." Intrigued, we found this revealing interview with Sapiano

M&C: What in the world were you thinking when you decided to make “Getting Down”?

PS: It was a way of convincing my mother that the last 15 years of partying were actually spent researching for this film. I had been writing scripts and trying to get into movies for many years, but in the end I decided to re-mortgage my place and put my money where my mouth is and together with a friend, Enrique Aguirre, who edited the film, we raised the money.

He's now peddling his mortgaged-to-the-hilt condo to pay the bill.

Groovy dude, looks like something you would put on movie food. (Madvillian, LA Curbed)

At any rate, good luck.

Alex Ferarri  shares the latest update on his kick-ass film Broken.  After many requests we decided to for the first time ever to finally release BROKEN on youtube.

Click here to watch the full short for the first time on-line: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-W3f3JGJD20.

Our friend Carmen and her crack team of filmmakers have produced a really cool web series "The Real Girl's Guide to Everything Else" a spoof with teeth of chick lit and fantasy shows like Sex and the City.

When a journalist is nearly dropped by her agent because her work is too smart, political, lesbian and feminist…she goes undercover as a glitter-wearing, shoe-obsessed, Cosmo-drinking straight girl and attempts to write the next "Chick-Lit" best seller in order to finance her dream project about Afghan women's struggle for civil rights.

 Watch the trailer and go here to follow the episodes on their website!

                                     ( photo by d. lynch)

 The Journal of Short Film released Volume 16 today.
Volume 16 includes eleven films from a diverse group of American filmmakers. Whether through humor, seriousness, or trickery, these artists tackle linguistics, parenthood, romance, kinetics, street performance, the challenge of capturing the ephemeral, and much more.

This is what the LA sky looks like about 5 times a year. I am still coughing up the smoke and smog from the fires and the fire 'season' has not hit its peak yet. Despite that and some other various sundries, the days are good and one reason is we are starting work on a new short comedic film tentatively titled "MOTEL."

Very excited about this one as we are going after the best talent, from top to bottom, we can get. The whole process from audtions to location scouting to wardrobes is a blast of euphoria. I know it will get hectic and stressful-it must!-yet there is nothing like making a film to get the juices going.

More to come.

Lisanti is right, this is amazing shit. Watch it!

Rarely in interviews with indie, DIY, or even industry filmmakers do you hear them say or write what Alejandro Adams director of the film Canary said or wrote to Karina Longworth.

I realize my way of thinking about films is inverted from almost everyone else’s.  I make films because I hate films.  And I feel safe telling you that because you hate films too.  You’re a critic, not a cineaste (or, more colloquially, a “cinephile”).  And I’m a filmmaker, not a cineaste.  Mencken maintained that the critical impulse and the artistic impulse are the same.  A buff’s review will never look like a critic’s review because a buff doesn’t care if cinema gets any better–the critic is the family doctor, the buff is the drinking buddy.  I’m fortunate to know some real critics, as vicious as they are perspicacious.  It’s probably a foregone conclusion that they’re my core fanbase.  One glance at my films and they can see I hate films as much as they do.

I will see his work and follow him for this statement alone. Viva ADAMS and LONGWORTH!!

Susan Ee makes a very good point over at Feral Dreams about the cost-benefit ratio of making and submitting DIY films verses writing novels and entering those in contests, etc.

This is my first novel contest.  One of the things I've come to appreciate about writing novels is that it's so cheap compared to filmmaking and screenwriting.  Aside from all the crazy costs involved with making the films, the cost of simply submitting films and screenplays to contests/ festivals can be surprisingly high.  Each festival submission fee is about $25-$80, with most falling in the $35-$60 range.  It's pretty common to submit a film to at least 20 festivals.  But with novels, it's a no-no to charge for submitting a manuscript.  Novel writers start to scream "SCAM" when they see those kinds of fees.  Yay for novel writers!  Hence, I'm pleased to say that the Amazon contest is fee-free.  :-)

Cheers,
Susan Ee
www.feraldream.com

Footage Firm is running a pretty cool promo to introduce their library of stock footage for filmmakers, especially DIY filmmakers

To introduce you to Footage Firm's quality and selection of footage, we are giving away 500 copies of some of our best selling collections on DVD. You can select one or more of 12 full quality footage collections, ranging from US Skylines to Looping Backgrounds to Winter and Nature reels.

There are no hidden costs or obligations. Simply pay $8.41 for shipping and handling before supplies run out. To purchase all of the footage in these collections, you would need to spend over $10,000.
The DVDs contain full quality clips and come with a license to use the footage in all types of projects.

Now this is a film festival I can get behind. Folks outside the American South call them 'hominy' but I have lovingly known them as grits since I was 2 years old. Plus, this sounds like a really fun festival that indie filmmakers have a good chance of getting in and getting their work seen (and judged!)

Go here to check out the details.

SE poses what I think is the question at the heart of the DIY low-budget filmmaking here in the USA by way of the film industry in Nigeria or "Nollywood."

...most Nollywood movies are made for less than $10,000 (the price of many DIY/ultra-low budget/real indies in the US - $10K or less) and they are popular with ordinary people (as opposed to the art/foreign/indie film loving subculture). Can we duplicate this in the US? Can we make low budget indie movies that appeal to the "ordinary" person?

Check out this energy-filled trailer to Nollywood Babylon.

The first nine minutes of Sujewa Ekanayake's doc "Indie Film Blog Road Trip" in now on-line for your viewing pleasure. Sujewa  explores the synergy of blogging about indie film and/or making films through interviews with some pretty cool names- Anthony Kaufman, Chuck Tryon, Tambay Obenson - just to name a few.

This is so cool because you get to put a face to the blogs you read and hear about ,musings where this whole thing might be going, and tons of other topics as well. Back to the editing bay, SE, so we can enjoy the rest!

 "The deep parts of my life pour onward,
as if the river shores were opening out.
It seems that things are more like me now,
that I can see farther into paintings.
I feel closer to what language can't reach.
With my senses, as with the birds, I climb
into the windy heaven, out of the oak,
and in the ponds broken off from the sky
my feeling sinks, as if standing on fishes."

To me, this films-and oh, so many more- are much more fun to write about than actually see but you might feel differently. Here is the lovely and talented film journo and scholar Karina Longworth on the liner notes for the DVD release of Frank V. Ross' Hohokam

As Ross himself told ShortEnd Magazine, 'Plot is a dead end. Morals are a dead end. Themes are a dead end. Everything is a dead end but the characters.' With his HD camera trained on capturing the minute details of his actors' naturalistic behavior (and the almost surrealy bland suburban landscape which contains them) as unobtrusively as possible, Ross drops us into the lives of this 30-ish, working-class couple, stays a few days until his characters come to a natural catharsis point, and then pops right out again. That we forget that what we're watching is fiction and assume these lives go on without us is evidence enough that, when it comes to avoiding 'dead ends', Ross is on to something."