El Caff Wins Best Film at Carrboro Film Festival!

It was a really big weekend for El Caffinato - first, we screened the movie for members of the cast and crew at our apartment, converting our living room temporarily into a movie theater for the occasion. A number of the terrific "El Caffinato" team were able to come, joined by friends and family, some of whom had not gotten to see the film at all yet. It was great to see everyone, and great to hear a fresh set of laughs and reactions to the movie.

The next day was the Carrboro Film Festival, a full day of really terrific films made by filmmakers who all had some connection to North Carolina. We saw lots of moving documentaries, terrific pieces of animation and great narrative shorts. When "El Caffinato" came on in the 5:30-7:00, we had all just scared been half to death by Michael Sharpe's "Deviling" - we weren't sure how the audience would react to the transition to people singing and making hipster jokes. But we were thrilled to hear the collective murmur of recognition when the music started ("Wait, this is a musical?!") and relieved to hear the many laughs that various moments elicited.

Then at the end of the day, there was this:

The Kay Kyser Award for "Best Professional Film."

"El Caffinato" walked away from the festival with the "Best Professional Film" award. We were surprised and honored to be selected from among all the great films that showed at the festival. What a beginning!

We also have made an official movie poster now, which you can check out here, on our IMDb page: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2100434/

Behind the Scenes at Milo's Lament

As we mentioned earlier, "El Caffinato" will have its festival premiere at the Carrboro Film Festival on November 20, 2011. The schedule is finalized, and it looks like we will be part of a block of stellar films starting at 5:30 and running until 7:00, with a Q & A session following the block and the festival awards ceremony right afterwards. Tickets to the whole festival are just $7.00, so you should come out for the day (starts at 1) and see a terrific, eclectic mix of short films.

In the meantime, in case the trailer wasn't enough of a taste for you, we thought we'd offer a little behind-the-scenes look at a section of our movie that we refer to as "Milo's Lament." This is how we took it from conceptualization to screen. 

It starts with a storyboard, drawn by Liz Levitt-Bradley:

Liz drew 140 little drawings like this one, plotting out camera angles, camera motion, edits, and (to some extent) lighting and costume. All of this was done before we got to the set on the day of shooting. We showed early drafts of these to our cinematographer as a way of talking through the shoot, "rehearsing" everything as much as we could before starting. 

Then it was time to go and shoot. As directors, this was the fun part, because we got to watch as our cinematographer, Nic Beery, and gaffer, Nathan Rosenquist, brought their creativity to bear on the ideas that we put on paper, bringing them to life in a way that surpassed everything we had imagined. In this case, we were at the Carrboro Arts Center (the day before we shot at Jessee's Coffee and Bar, which was our primary location): 

Nathan Rosenquist focuses a light on Zachary Davidson in preparation for filming.

This gave us the raw footage - a lot of little pieces, not in sequence - which we then assembled into the right order (using the storyboard as a guide) and color corrected to make it look nice and dramatic and smooth. Here's one frame from the sequence that resulted from filming on that day: 

Neat, huh? 

See you at the Carrboro Film Festival!