Wisconsin, Tallahassee, and Atlanta!

I was on such a high after the Wisconsin Film Festival that it’s taken a little while to get back into the swing of things. Here is the promised picture that my friend Tina took of Kelley and myself doing the Q&A after the screening in Madison. 

After the screening we went out for a bite to eat and took a picture. Almost all of these people drove all the way in from Chicago to see it. Super grateful to have such good friends and family. So a week later I went down to the Tallahassee Film Festival. One of the really cool things we did was go on a tour of Tallahassee and the surrounding areas to show that this would be a good place to shoot our next film. I had a few drinks the night before after a long trip (I left at 4 a.m. to fly into an airport several hours away and barely made it in time for a documentary panel that I was part of, so I was tired), and I frankly didn’t want to participate in the tour. And besides I had to meet Michal Kapral who was coming in for the screening as well (graciously) later in the afternoon. AND, I wanted to be rested for the screening that night since the tour was from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m…. and I had another panel at 2:30!

I ended up really enjoying the tour. We went to this nature preserve where they shoot a lot of films and I took a few pictures with my iphone, so pardon the quality. 

We went to a bunch of other places including a town (I forgot the name) where the local banker secretly invested most of the town’s money in Coca-Cola stock and told everyone one day that they were all millionaires. Crazy.

We went to the FSU Stadium and, being a Notre Dame football fan, I reluctantly took this picture to be gracious to my hosts. I’ve since burned it.

My phone died soon after so I don’t have many other pictures of the tour, but like I said, a lot of fun.

Michal Kapral came down from Canada to be part of the screening and do a joggling presentation. The theater is part of the FSU film school and super cool, and the projector gave a gorgeous image.

Here’s Michal doing his joggling demonstration. He was unfazed by the first question from the audience from a 7 or 8 year old, “why did you come all the way down to Tallahassee?”I met a few other filmmakers that I really enjoyed hanging out with and getting to know better. Tyler Elliot was there with his film Hooligans at War, which played at the same time as mine so I wasn’t able to see it, but it looks great. Check it out.  And I hung out with the guys, Ahmed Ahmed and Taylor Feltner, who made Just Like Us, which I was able to check out later that night and I enjoyed it a lot. We all participated in the panel after the tour together and they had a lot of interesting things to say. I’m hoping to meet up with Taylor after our screenings this Saturday at the Atlanta Film Festival, where we’re both playing (at the same time).

Atlanta Film Festival you ask??? Yes. Winnie, Guffman, and I drove down from Chicago to come to be part of the Atlanta Film Festival. We left on Wednesday, and were going to try to push through to make it in one day, but decided to delay it a bit because of the pending crappy weather. We ended up staying in Franklin, TN and completing the trip today. I’m glad we didn’t try to fight through the bad weather. There were many tornadoes that tore through the area and we got glimpses of them along the way.

We made it to Atlanta and Guffman is in heaven running around and swimming and playing in the monkey grass at my in-laws.

My friend Curt Gill is in PR and was nice enough to get me on a few radio shows here in Atlanta. Now I know how some of the subjects in my film feel when we would shoot 20 hours of footage and they’re in the final movie for 10 seconds or something. I did a 15 or 20 minute interview the other morning and they used a couple seconds of it here. But I’m happy that they’re promoting Breaking and Entering and the Atlanta Film Festival, even though I sound like a jag.

I’m really excited to be back in Atlanta, and can’t wait to screen Breaking and Entering with family and friends. Get your tickets here if you haven’t already.