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So here’s the deal… the LES film festival only accepts films that are made for $200,000 …]]>

Use this graphic to navigate your film to The LES Film Festival 2012
Graphic designed by LES Creative Director, Roxy Hunt

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So here’s the deal… the LES film festival only accepts films that are made for $200,000 or less. With that small of a budget you are going to have trouble securing the following: amazing special effects, expensive locations, A-List Celebrities, and a stellar montage where everyone is throwing cash at strippers who are grinding up on the hood of a Bentley and dousing themselves in Cristal.

What you do have at your disposal is great writing.  Guess what – great writing is free and that’s what interests us most!  That’s why we created this festival!  A good story is a good story.  Period.  The only thing that will mess it up is bad acting…. well that and bad directing and editing. So let’s start with that.  Great Writing!!!

WRITING & SPECIAL EFFECTS

Write a story that you can actually pull off on your budget!  Your bedroom will never pass as a battleship and downtown Cleveland will never be Paris.  It just won’t.  As valiant as the effort may be, it is most likely not feasible without a good chunk of money.

No genre is off limits, but be honest with yourself and be realistic.  You CAN make a sci-fi or horror film on a low budget… Paranormal Activity, Blair Witch, etc… You can!  YOU CAN!  What made these movies successful is what they managed without the special effects! The horror and suspense was in the script.  It came from there!

With $30,000 you most likely will not be able to recreate the battle scene in Pearl Harbor and your mother dressed as an alien with a tin foil hat on may not be the most convincing of characters. Sexy yes, but convincing…no!  Working with little money means the story has to be STRONG and you’ve got to do some problem solving to make your story fit your budget.

ACTING

Wow.  Seriously WOW.  Where to begin. There are a lot of actors out there.  There are a lot of bad actors out there.  Have a discerning eye.  Have 3 pairs of discerning eyes and a fourth pair outside the door waiting to be called in at a moments notice!!!  Stay hydrated.  If you’re not feeling it in the audition, in your gut, then keep on looking.  Don’t cave in.  Search and search and search until you’ve found the right person.  You’ll know it!

Bad acting can drag down a great script.  Even if the production value is amazing and the writing and directing are superb, a bad lead can be the kiss of death and make your stellar film unwatchable.  Also, if you’re not a good actor, don’t cast yourself in your film.  Only cast yourself if you truly believe that only YOU can do the film justice, and don’t cast your friends just because they are your friends!  They might be great friends but they also might suck as actors.  Cast age appropriate.  A forty year old pretending to be in 6th grade doesn’t work.  Even if you give her pig tails and a pink composition book.  Maybe try giving her a Wizards of Waverly Place backpack?

On the flip side, a great actor can really elevate your script and make it hard for us to take our eyes off the screen.  Actors shouldn’t look like they are acting.  *Crying a lot and screaming does not equal good acting.*

EDITING

If you are not a good editor, find someone that is.  Bad editing will ruin your film.  There are lots and lots of people out there that are looking to collaborate and would be happy to have a project to work on.  Place an ad on Craigslist, join a film tracking board, do SOMETHING to get an editor who knows what they are doing.  There are many editors fresh from graduation who are talented and looking to meet people and looking to build their resume.  You may meet a great friend and future collaborator.  You may even meet your next love!  There is absolutely nothing hotter than an editing suite after hours with the hum of your FCP system in the background.  Nothing.

CAMERA, SOUND, and MUSIC

If we can’t see what you’re trying to show us, it makes it impossible for us to watch your movie.

If you don’t have good sound, if we’re straining to hear what you’re trying to tell us, it makes it impossible for us to watch your movie.

Music.  Music can make a movie soar, but it can also drag it down and destroy it.  Use music when necessary and use GOOD music.  Don’t just repeat the same chord from your keyboard over and over again every 5 seconds.  Find local musicians.  It’s great exposure for them and you can probably get it for free.  Just make sure to have a release form and give them a little percentage on the back end in case the film is a run away hit.

DIRECTING

Add up all of the above and you’ve done a lot of great directing.  Make strong choices.  Make bold choices.  Surround yourself with people you trust and who will tell you the truth.

IN CONCLUSION

We have everything from drama to comedy, animation to experimental in our festival.  Good is good.  No matter what genre it is.  Just be realistic.  What all the films do have in common, though, is a clear vision.  Something that pulls you in.  Conflict.  Tension.  That type of suspense that makes you want to keep watching.  These elements don’t cost any money.

So that’s it folks! These are just a few of our tips for making a good film and a great low budget film.  We’ve seen some amazing work that has been submitted this year and are so excited to share it all!  Think of the low budget as a great challenge to getting even more creative and to work on making your script even that much better.  We believe in you!

Sincerely,

Damon and Shannon

Follow @lesfilmfestival

LES Film Fest 2012 | IFP BLOG #2 (watch us watch submissions) from BFD Productions, LLC.

Vibe, Energy, Aesthetic

by Deepak Chopra…actually Us

We’ve never read a Deepak Chopra book, although we get the good bits from our Facebook News Feeds (it’s very en trend now).  “I’m not religious, but …]]>

LES Film Fest 2012 | IFP BLOG #2 (watch us watch submissions) from BFD Productions, LLC.

Vibe, Energy, Aesthetic

by Deepak Chopra…actually Us

We’ve never read a Deepak Chopra book, although we get the good bits from our Facebook News Feeds (it’s very en trend now).  “I’m not religious, but I am spiritual.”  Shut the F up.

The aesthetic choices we make, and the energy of the spaces we pick create a certain VIBE.  These are the important elements that set the LES Film Festival apart.  Where most film festivals believe that identifying with a location and packing screening rooms is enough, we take a different approach.  We want to have a unique style/brand that separates us from the generic, run of the mill festivals.  Something that is more human, personal, fun, less corporate, and more approachable.

All of our screenings are Bring Your Own Booze, lively, and fun.  We want our audience and filmmakers to not feel intimidated when they buy their ticket and to not feel intimidated when they walk in the space.  We want everyone to feel like a valuable guest at our party.  Good Choices.  Good Energy.  Good Vibe.

Every Detail Matters

We take great care with all of our marketing materials and any other information pertaining to us.  Every detail from colors to font to images to verbage are all conscious choices.  Every detail matters.  The words and images we use in talking about ourselves are our first impression, and we hope to represent ourselves as accurately as possible.

For LES Film Festival 2011, we thought it was important for people to be a bit “familiar” with who we were before the festival began.  We pounded the pavement in the neighborhood, hung up flyers,  talked with folks, and posted videos of ourselves talking about the fest online.  We tried to make our presence known as much as possible and took the reigns in doing this for ourselves.

Now for friends…

Tony Castle & Damon Cardasis

Roxy Hunt & Shannon Walker

T-Rox

Tony Castle and Roxy Hunt (affectionately known as T-Rox).

Damon met Tony and Roxy of BFD Productions at their mutual day jobs.  After T-Rox attended Damon and Shannon’s show, VICKY AND LYSANDER, the conversation of working together arose and teaming up made sense.

Tony and Roxy are a talented filmmaking duo who run BFD Productions, a company that produces videos, graphic design, and film events such as the The Vail Film Festival, Vimeo Offline, and their original brainchild, The BFD Film Festival that they created back in college.

To be honest, when we first thought of the idea of a festival catering specifically to filmmakers like ourselves, filmmakers with little to no budgets, it felt as if we had just jumped off a very tall TALL cliff.  Tony and Roxy helped us in ways we couldn’t have imagined.  Together, we all focused in on how best we wanted the festival to be represented and how we wanted it to look and feel.  They built our fabulous website, created marketing materials, helped program the films, and became our fellow festival directors. Between the four of us we do absolutely everything.  EVERYTHING! (more on this in the next post…)

The Day Job, Forging Ahead and Why Working With Good People Makes it Easier

Like most “artists” we have had to hold down day jobs to make ends meet.  In a lot of ways this can suck, and you find yourself practicing a lot of self motivation in front of the mirror.  The fact is, it is exhausting to work all day at your job only to start work on what you’re passionate about in the evening.  It’s tiring and draining and you find yourself resenting your friends who are completely content working behind a desk at an insurance agency, but you need to pull yourself out of this!!!

Yes, they have dental insurance and their company matches their 401K, and YES once a year they get a beautiful sheet cake served in the conference room with Bonnie from Accounting leading the “Happy Birthday,”  but so what!!!  She IS captain of an adult  acapella group and sings a fun rendition of “UMBRELLA,” but still… SO WHAT!!!  You can either bitch about what you don’t have, or you can just keep going.  One foot in front of the other.

Most days after working… work on the festival begins. This can involve anything from meetings with potential sponsors or partners, to submission screenings, to making short films of our own.  That is why it is important to work with people that you love spending countless hours with. How lucky we are to work with people we love and respect.  This is what gets you through it.  Being able to laugh most of the time and entertain one another while making work is THE BEST!  When you are pulling 14-16 hour days, working weekends and days off, you want to do it with people that you TRUST and enjoy being around!  It makes the work fly by!

Friends And Business

We’ve learned how important it is to work with people you have fun with, people who listen, value your input, do not get defensive, politely tell you you’re wrong, and most importantly get the job DONE.  Our friendship with Tony and Roxy grew substantially from just working together and being able to rely on one another.  But this is not always the case.  A lot of people have the best of intentions, but at the end of the day are not willing to interrupt their social lives in order to do what needs to get done.  This can ruin a friendship.

Tread carefully, choose working relationships wisely, think everything through, stay positive, have some whiskey, chase the whiskey with beer, and most importantly… PUT IN THE WORK.

Sincerely,

Damon and Shannon

lesfilmfestival.com

The LES Film Festival was started in 2011 by creators Damon Cardasis and Shannon Walker as well as by fellow festival directors and creative team Tony Castle and Roxy Hunt. They are entering their second year which will be March 6th-18th, 2012.

So, who the F* Are …]]>

The LES Film Festival was started in 2011 by creators Damon Cardasis and Shannon Walker as well as by fellow festival directors and creative team Tony Castle and Roxy Hunt. They are entering their second year which will be March 6th-18th, 2012.

So, who the F* Are We?

We met at NYU in 2002 at the Atlantic Theatre Acting School. Damon took Shannon’s chair and she intensely confronted him with a stone cold, “you took my chair.”

Thus began a fast forming friendship that developed into us consistently coming up with different ideas and characters, making jokes, mostly to the dismay of our teachers, and resulted in us being separated for the rest of our time together in acting school. It was in our third year that we realized that our sometimes disruptive behaviour could be turned into something positive and began to write sketch comedy together.

After graduation, Damon moved to Los Angeles where he began working at ICM, a talent agency, and Shannon worked at a boxing gym and continued acting in various Off-Broadway productions and in small independent films while writing plays and short stories. In 2007, Damon got a job working for producer Scott Rudin which brought him back to NY and from there worked with Rebecca Miller on her film THE PRIVATE LIVES OF PIPPA LEE.

After working with Rebecca, Damon was inspired to start writing and creating his own work again, and the pairing up with Shannon was only natural. We missed each other. We also knew what this would entail; working day jobs in order to “create” (as obnoxious as that sounds).

Flash forward to spring 2008. We were sitting around with a couple friends talking about making a film, and we just started delegating roles. Shannon would write the script, Damon would direct, and we would all take a hand in producing (big shout out to Tyson Kaup). We raised some money, formed an LLC, Shannon wrote a feature film from scratch, cast the actors, and shot in seven eight-hour days (thank you SAG ultra-low budget rules). From concept to final day of shooting took six months. We had wrapped our first feature film, MARCH! (a mockumentary about an overzealous tenant battling her landlord) for under 10K, and it ended up being a huge learning experience for all of us.

In the meantime, while we were in post-production, we began to plan an improvised dinner party, Vicky and Lysander, in the Lower East Side at the space Grand Opening (an interactive store front that had previously been a pop up Wedding Chapel, a Drive-In Movie theatre, etc). The idea for the dinner party came from a sketch we had performed in college where Damon played the role of Lysander, a flamboyant bon-vivant, while Shannon played the role of socialite Vicky, the “It Girl of Manhattan.”

This married couple represented the worst of NY; social climbing name dropping assholes who are completely diluted in their own prestige. After 80 performances that involved dancing on tables, and scraping dried mac and cheese off of plates, we were exhausted from doing the show in the evening while still holding jobs during the day. The show had originally been planned to run for a month but thankfully positive press, strong audience support, and word of mouth extended it to three months.

MARCH! was now completed. We submitted it to festivals and were looking for a venue in NY to do a run of the film that we had worked so hard on. We discovered there weren’t a lot of doors that were willing to open for us, so we thought, “Alright. We can do this. We’ll build the damn door and then open it for ourselves.” We think highly of our movie and know that other filmmakers feel the same about their work but get frustrated when competing with higher budget films for a spot in the big festivals. We wanted to see what filmmakers who were working with similar low budgets were making and support their work as we were still trying to figure out how to support ours.

Enter Grand Opening. Again.

Having been so warmly welcomed in the space for Vicky and Lysander, we now wanted to turn this pop-up space into a theater, show low-budget films exclusively, eat popcorn, drink booze, and have some conversation afterwards. Informal and fun. This was the plan and hopefully we would have an audience that would be willing to embrace it.

We teamed up with fellow filmmakers and friends, Tony Castle and Roxy Hunt, of BFD Productions (more on them in our second blog), who have amazing design and technical skills. We were all on the same page with concept and programming and soon realized that we needed more help. Tony and Roxy shared the same language and aesthetic and came on board as our creative team and fellow film festival directors.

We pounded the pavement putting up flyers and contacting everyone we knew to help spread the word. We narrowed the submissions to 50 films. Features, shorts, animation, experimental, etc. etc. It was so exciting to see just how smart and creative people could be without the luxury of a huge budget.

Hopefully people would show up.

Well they did. We sold out all the screenings, got a lot of wonderful press (thank you press!), were placed on the “Highbrow and Brilliant” quadrant of New York Magazine’s Approval Matrix and made some new friends, all while having a blast. We were like proud parents at our kids Christmas Pageant standing in the back every night watching all these amazing films that had been made on the cheap. After we closed up Grand Opening on the final night, we all sat around at a bar and started talking, “Ok. Now how do we make this better next year?”

So that’s where we’re at. This year we have more films submitted from all around the world, bigger venues including; Sunshine Cinemas, Crosby St. Hotel and Grand Opening, and a panel of great and eclectic judges including Academy Award Winning Actress Susan Sarandon, performance artist legend Justin Bond, GQ Senior Editor Logan Hill and photographer and filmmaker Harvey Wang.

In this blog we hope you learn a little bit more about us and what it takes to put together a film festival. We also hope to show you our lives as “struggling artists” in NY (no, not trust fund babies who do their art from their parent’s pied a terre in SoHo) but what a modern day struggling artist may look like. The artist that uses whatever free time they have to write and put together various ideas and projects simply by placing one foot in front of the other.

So that’s that. For now. We’ll be blogging at least once a month. Thank you kindly. We’ll see you soon!

Damon Cardasis and Shannon Walker

www.lesfilmfestival.com

You can also follow us on twitter:
@lesfilmfestival
@damoncardasis
@_shannonwalker
@whoistonycastle
@roxitron