As filmmakers, I imagine most of you have been to at least one screening at a film festival before. If you’re like us, though, you’ve been to many, many film festival screenings in your life. And if you’re *exactly* like us, you’ve developed a pet peeve for that moment when the lights first go down at a festival screening, when you’re forced to sit through the exact same “Welcome to Our Festival!” identifying spot over and over and over again.
It just so happens that the same group of people who run Filmmaking Frenzy (“us”) also run the best genre film festival in the United States – Fantastic Fest. And because we don’t just run our own festival, but also go to lots and lots of others and have developed this pet peeve for repetitious ID spots, we’re hoping you, the Filmmaking Frenzy community, can help us overcome that problem at this year’s Fantastic Fest.
With that in mind, here’s the assignment for the next Frenzy – we want your team to put together a 30 second “fantastic” spot, and the ONLY rules are that it has to feature a child under the age of 18 in some way, shape, or manner, the film must have some "fantastic" element (horror, sci-fi, fantasy, supernatural, crime, action, basically anything that enters into any realm of fantasy or is really cool) and that the last line of your video has to end with the word, “fantastic.” Other than that, we want to see anything and everything you can come up with.
Want to make a 30 second spot about throwing a baby off a skyscraper? Awesome. Want to make a video about a junior high kid who finds out he can make clouds solid and use them as weapons against the bullies in his gym class? That sounds ambitious for thirty seconds, but we’d love to see it. And we’d love to show it to the crowd at Fantastic Fest 2008, too.
So here’s the deal – the top 60 submitted Fantastic Frenzy videos we get will be screened in front of an unsuspecting audience during Fantastic Fest this year. Each of those audiences will include visiting filmmakers from around the world, press from the likes of IFC TV, Fangoria, Ain’t It Cool News, and USA Today, plus a legion of the most devoted and intelligent genre film fans on the planet.
But because we know that even that sort of screening isn’t enough for you, there will be other prizes as well:
Our top ten favorite films, as picked by the Fantastic Fest programming staff, will each win $100 Alamo prize packs that can be redeemed anytime for food or drinks.
And the number one film as picked by the voting members of the Filmmaking Frenzy community will receive two VIP badges to this year’s Fantastic Fest – badges that will allow you to meet and mingle with the stars of Fantastic Fest. These badges sold out before the end of Fantastic Fest 2007, but we held a couple just for you.
Plus the winning filmmaking team (maximum 5 people, 21 and up) will get guaranteed access to the DONKEY PUNCH boat party on Lady Bird Johnson Lake, and an All Access Pass to the GET LIT closing party that we’re throwing underground at Longhorn Caverns.
If you are a filmmaker outside of Austin who can't make it in for Fantastic Fest, you can swap out the goodies above for $250 cash. But you should really just find a way to get here if you win, because it’ll be soooo worth it.
Fantastic Fest runs from September 18 through September 25, and because we need time to build DVDs of our preshow reel, your Fantastic Frenzy films are all due no later than Monday, September 8. Anything we get after that can’t be guaranteed to play during the festival and won’t be eligible for any prizes.
So take a break from your Unnecessary Sequels trailer making, find a kid, and pretend to torture him on camera a little bit. That sounds like it will be the kind of movie that’s fun for you to make, and fun for us to watch, too!
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