PSIFSF 2007: Day 2
A Nice Place to Stay
If you’re ever in Palm Springs, stay at the Pepper Tree Inn. They offered a discount for festival attendees, and it was well worth the reservation. Great layout, decor, and detail.
High style at low elevation.
Films, Films, Films, Films, and More Films…
At this point, at the end of the second day at the Palm Springs Festival, I’ve watched 74 short films. Of those, I’d say 25% were excellent, 25% were average or mediocre, and 50% I didn’t like and would never program. Not bad when it comes to festival statistics. My favorite live-action work was “Deface,” a very moving drama set in North Korea which details the plight the average person caught in a Communist dictatorship. Of the animated films, “Anatomy 101″ featured very impressive motion capture and a virtual human character lead. “The Needful Head” had fantastic writing and voiceover, plus a very nice take on limited-frame stop-motion-style keyframing. “Window Masks Doors” had a great Da-Da-ist design. “The Girl Who Swallowed Bees” was a sweet tale of hopelessness turned into salvation. “Yoga Noga Reyoga” was very cute and is perfect for children. Aside from “Bee,” which incorporated live-action and 2D, all the films in this paragraph were created as 3D animation. Perhaps the most mesmerizing animated short was “Madame Tutli-Putli,” which featured astounding stop motion. Even more amazing, live-action human eyes were flawlessly tracked to all the figure’s faces. Very haunting. There were a few difficult pieces - perhaps because I’ve seen them several times at other festivals. Despite whatever technical skill and passion was involved in the creation “Startle Pattern” and “Perpetuum Mobile,” I found both hard to tolerate for 11+ minutes. Subject, pacing, execution, and so on.
Handouts
Shameless self-promotion is the name of the game at film festivals, so filmmakers bring a literal ton of handouts. Most handouts come in the form of postcards, but there are unusual variations that include matchbooks, bookmarks, hand fans, and such. The Palm Springs festival staff set up 4 or 5 large tables for these, and most were overflowing within a day. Palm Springs has a very high handout/sq.ft. density - perhaps second only to Sundance.
One of the “practically empty” tables.
Still room for a few hundred more cards.
My favorite handout so far is a spray-painted audio cassette tape with the film’s title (”The Phonekeeper”) pasted on. If you look closely, you can see that it was originally “Steve Wariner’s Greatest Hits.” Steve Wariner is a country songwriter, singer, and musician. He probably doesn’t go to film festivals.
This tape will…well, who knows?
L.A. Rude Syndrome
Although there are many nice people attending the festival, there are a quite a few that suffer from L.A. Rude Syndrome. They have lived and worked in L.A. long enough to become so self-absorbed that they cannot carry on a normal conversation. They either talk about themselves endlessly or half-listen to you while looking over your shoulder to see if somebody more important is nearby. Should they actually engage in the conversation, they are mostly interested in what you can do for them. Why do they do this? Because they are obsessed with becoming rich, famous, or just plain successful in the film business. Oddly enough, they are usually decent folk who have gotten swept up in the Hollywood craze. 4 out of 5 times, if the filmmaker lives and works in L.A., they’ll have the Syndrome. If they’re from some other part of the country, they are almost always more fun to be around and quite a bit more sincere. And I can say this - I lived and worked in L.A. from 1989 to 1996 and no doubt suffered from the Syndrome at some point. I’ve also traveled to festivals all over the U.S., as well as Canada and France.