A Festival, A Website and The End of the Week

It's been a busy summer and things have been piling up. My blinking reminders and my inbox are both in the triple digits now and, embarrassingly, I've got emails that I haven't responded to that date back to April. I don't bring it up because I think you care or anything, I bring it up because I just spent two hours trying to clean this shit up and I feel that someone needs to know. Since you now know, I might as well tell you that I feel like I didn't dent shit. It's still a mess. Anyhow, I was going to power through it for a while longer, but as I was going through the emails, I came across a couple of things that I wanted to pass on; the first is a festival and the second is a website.

So, first up, there's the International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival, which is presented by the Phoenix Film Foundation and takes place October 15 - 18. It's a big genre festival in the Southwest and it draws over 4,000 attendees yearly. They're all about new films, new scripts and emerging talent... they highlight screenplays and films that are anything from slasher flicks to art house horror and the top five scripts are actually sent off to industry 'green-lighters' for consideration. It's really a great festival to look into, if you even just look into the site itself. They're sponsored up the ass, they have lots of stuff going on and they have detailed descriptions of all the films that screened. If you look at last year, they screened a lot of the best indies of the year. So, take a look at what they're screening, it'll be a pretty good indicator of where indie horror is going over the next year or so. That's actually something that I do quite regularily and so should you... go to festival sites, see what's screening, see what they're in to and compare your ideas to what you see. (a) You may get some ideas, (b) you may realize your idea has been done or (c), you may realize your idea sucks.

Next up is a new website that was brought to my attention that's for artists, musicians, fashion designers and filmmakers. It's called PutItOn.com. Basically, it's a social networking site for artists, but you can display and show your films, sell your work and you can even stream live personal broadcasts. So, it could mean a couple bucks for you and a great way to network with the artsy types. I haven't had much of a chance to check it out, but I'll be signing up and taking a look around. No reason you shouldn't either.

That's all I've got for this week... now, I've got a few hours of real work to get through, then my watch says it's beer-thirty.