Tales from Seattle International Film Festival

Ticket: $3 - Seeing a film I wrote in theaters: Priceless.

Hey folks, Jeff again. Something really special happened this month and I couldn't wait to write about it. On April 13, I took part in a bimonthly event at SIFF (Seattle International Film Festival) called Crash Cinema. The point of Crash is to bring people together, whether in teams or in my case as perfect strangers, for an impossible task: to make a movie in eight hours.

There were a few rules for this challenge, including that each finished film could be no longer than three minutes, and that it had to be back at SIFF by 5 PM. The first rule some ignored, and the second rule we ALL ignored, but I digress. We all also had to start off with the same set of prompts, which we pulled from a hat. The prompts were:

Genre: Film Noir

Action: Pet an imaginary cat

Object: Broom

Phrase: "Where'd you put the cheese?"

All five had to make it into the movie somewhere, past that we could have fun. So that’s what we did.

At the offset, when all 150+ would-be filmmakers were gathered in the cinema, one of the SIFF staff running the event had asked if there were any writers in the crowd, since the festival was always short. After looking around a moment, I raised my hand. I’d written a handful of plays in college (some better than others) and a couple of short films, but nothing recently except a SILENT short film a few weeks before (more on that project to come!). It was terrifying to volunteer to write for strangers, but I’m so glad I did. Within five minutes the challenge had begun and our group was discussing story ideas. Ten minutes later I was writing dialogue for people whose names I hadn’t learned yet. After an hour and a half we had a draft and we were en route to shoot in a group member’s house in West Seattle. Of course I re-wrote the entire thing in the car on the way over (while driving!), but no time to quibble, because we then had five hours to rehearse, shoot, and edit the thing.

With Greg Sommers-Herivel behind the camera, Jason Jenkins, Dustin Kaspar, and Ronee Collins hurriedly learning lines and blocking, Katerina Giannoulas and Kara Baskett making everything run, and me (a little annoyingly) looking over everyone’s shoulders and occasionally changing dialogue or suggesting shots, we got it done. We even kind of got it to the theater on time, in that we weren’t the last ones to stagger in out of the hail (yes! Hail. Thanks Seattle). Then came the joy of buying a ticket, grabbing some snacks, and watching it on the big screen along with everyone else’s. It was amazing to see 15 different films made from the same five prompts, all wildly different. Some silly, some earnest, some highly crafted, others shot on iPhones. The cinema was filled with pure joy and excitement.

That’s the moral of this story. There is nothing that compares to watching a film, especially YOUR film, the way it was meant to be seen, projected onscreen in a dark theater with an enthusiastic audience. I’d never had that experience before. It’s magical. I want to thank SIFF and my new friends for the chance to buy an actual ticket to a movie that I wrote. It’s a huge wish fulfillment and is a feeling that I’ll treasure. Now that I've had a taste, there’s no turning back, I've got to make more. I want to encourage all of our readers to do the same. Find more about SIFF's programs here: http://www.siff.net/, and If you don’t have a community like Seattle that has programs for amateurs, MAKE ONE. Grab some friends, some diet coke, and a camera and MAKE A MOVIE. Do it in a day, don’t take time to second guess, and don’t stop until you’re done. Shoot passionately and with wild abandon and see what happens. On a day when I might have slept in, bought some groceries, or gotten an oil change, I became a filmmaker.

The movie we made, Hard Boiled, is silly, but it’s fun. Watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDyi3N274vQ

I’ll see you at the movies.