Hello from the Austin Film Festival!

Hey guys, I am writing this kind of late so hopefully I can construct coherent sentences…Anyways, I am volunteering at the Austin Film Festival over fall break so I thought I would post about some of my experiences!

So far it has been a lot of fun and a great experience! I have worked at a few panel sessions but mostly I have been helping out at screenings at different theaters around Austin-which is great because usually I have gotten to sit in on the screenings! There are over 600 volunteers working on the festival and I have met and talked to so many different interesting people-many from Texas but some from all over. I have even gotten a chance to talk to some of the filmmakers! For example, last night I was working at a screening of a film called Restive (check out the website HERE-it is a thriller with pretty dark subject matter that was very well shot) and while it was playing all of the volunteers watched it on a screen in the lobby and the writer/director named Jeremiah Jones seemed too antsy to sit in the theater and watch which was fine for me because he periodically came over to where I was watching and was giving a mini directors commentary which was really cool!

Since I have been taking this class, I have tried to keep motion graphics and animation on my mind while watching movies lately so I have been keeping my eye out for interesting graphics in the films I’ve seen so far at the festival. One thing that I have noticed that I think has been a nice touch to the films are these short animated clips that they show before each film. Each animated clip begins with a crinkled piece of paper being opened up with the title and then continues on to show a sketch-like animation of one of the writers/producers who has spoken at the festival in the past. The clips show that writer/producer in animated form answering a question from a previous panel and they usually try to pick something funny. One that I’ve seen a few times that I have enjoyed was with one of the producers of star wars talking about his reaction to finding out that Darth Vader was Luke’s father. It was really a unique style of animation-If they post these videos online eventually, I will try to post an example. Later in the week when I am more awake (sorry for rambling) I will try to post about the interesting title sequence in one of the films that I saw tonight.