A couple weeks ago, the family film I wrote and directed, The No-Sit List, won an award at the Kids First! Film Festival.   I didn’t have this blog then, so I’m announcing it now.  Hey, the whole point of awards is announcing them!

The Kids First! Film Festival is run by the Coalition for Quality Children’s Media.  I’m pretty sure it claims the be the biggest or oldest or best-attended or something children’s film festival in the country, world, or universe. 

The No-Sit List won for “Best Independent Feature, Ages 5-8″.  So that’s kind of cool.  You can see a complete list of winners at the Kids First! 2009 Winners Page.

Congrats to everyone in the cast and crew who worked so hard to make he movie great!

Excerpt from 6 Ways to Make People Watch Your Movie – Part 2: Make Them Laugh.

We filmmakers need to get people excited about our films.  Rather than hoping to stumble across a successful marketing approach for a film, it’s better to plan one from the very start–ideally before you commit to making the film–and tweak it based on what really gets people to pay to watch movies.  “6 Ways” is about those things that motivate someone to say, “I’ve got to see that!”

So how do movies like Napoleon Dynamite or The Hangover rocket from obscurity to national reknown in the blink of an eye.  Is it the big stars?  The special effects?  The action scenes?   Actually, it turns out these movies are really, really funny.

From my IndieFlix guest-blog.  Read the rest.

When I was 15, my brother had a saying about me, “Sometimes right, sometimes wrong, never in doubt.”

I’m not sure it was a compliment…

However, it was a pretty good indicator that I was born to be a film director.  A director with a film in production makes, on average, 17 million decisions per day.  It’s a safe bet that he’s not going to be right on every one.  And that’s okay.  Being right a lot is overrated anyway—show me someone who’s right all the time and I’ll show you someone making safe choices based on avoiding past failures, someone who eliminates the possibility of being surprised by a wrong choice that somehow turns out right.  And that, my friends is the definition of genius—making the wrong choice turn out right.

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“I just finished watching Entry Level and loved every minute of it.  Is there a soundtrack available?  If not, do you have a list of the songs and artists from the film?  I’d love to have it.”

– Chris

Thanks, Chris.  Making Entry Level was a labor of love for me and a lot of other people, so I always like hearing from people who enjoy it.

I get asked about the soundtrack a lot.  (Possibly my #2 question in film fest Q&As…right after requests for the Pear Tartlet recipie.)  Personally, I love the music from the film and feel very lucky that we got to use it.  Amine Ramer and Alexandra Matisse, the music supervisors, found around 60 truly amazing songs from independent artists for me to choose from to help create the mood of the film.  The proposed songs for the movie are still one of my favorite playlists on my iPod.   (continue reading…)

I’m a big fan of U.S. film crews.  I consider Los Angeles and Seattle my home bases for production–that’s where I work most often and have the fattest contact files–but I work all over.  Often, I’ll head off to direct a project somewhere else and pick up a local crew.  Wherever I fly around the country, I find that film crew quality is pretty consistent.  Sure, you run the risk of a bad apple once in a while, but on the whole, the crews I work with have an amazing can-do attitude, plenty of experience, and are almost never fazed by having to do the impossible in too little time with insufficient resources.  (In fact, it’s expected.)  Need to build a bicycle mount for the camera from just a hi-hat, two grip arms and a gobo head?  A good key grip will make it happen in about ten minutes (five if the sun is setting).  I often compare indie film crews to Marines–both have that “improvise and overcome” ethic.

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