Santa Ana Winds

Tallahassee Film Festival

Santa Ana Winds has been selected to screen in competition at the 2010 Tallahassee Film Festival. Congratulations to our cast, crew and donors!

The Tallahassee Film Festival (TFF), is an annual, independent film festival in Tallahassee, FL. TFF has attracted thousands of visitors to the Big Bend region, including professionals, student filmmakers and film buffs of all ages. TFF offers visitors independent and award-winning film screenings from around the world, plus workshops, lectures and networking opportunities with film industry professionals. The 2010 festival, presented by FCCU, takes place April 8 thru 11 and this year’s theme is See You in the Dark!

In 2009, TFF awarded AFI Thesis film In the Name of the Son Best College Student Film, which then went on to win two of American Film Institute’s most honored awards for directing, the Franklin J. Schaffner Fellow Award and the Rogers Award as well as numerous other Fest Bests. TFF also featured Bohemibot which would later win the 2009 Student Academy Award.

Santa Ana Winds Premiere

We are very excited to announce the premiere of Santa Ana Winds. Thank you to everyone that helped us along the way! We proudly invite you to join us in celebrating the donors, the players, the collaborators, and the volunteers who made this film possible.

Who:

Cast, Crew, Donors, Volunteers, Friends and Family

What:

Premiere of Santa Ana Winds
DVDs will be available at the Premiere!

Where:

American Film Institute Map It
2021 N. Western Ave
Los Angeles, CA 90027
In the Mark Goodson Screening Room of the Mayer Library Building (Directions).

When:

Saturday, December 5th, 2009
Hors d’oeuvres & Cocktails Begin at 7:00pm
Screenings at 8:00pm and 9:00pm

Congratulations Everyone and Thank You. That’s a Wrap!

Last Wednesday (May 20, 2009) was the last day of principle photography for Santa Ana Winds. After six full days of filming at LAX and West Century Blvd. (with a second unit day thrown in there too) we have accomplished what many people have told us would be challenging, difficult and even near impossible.  Indeed it was a very challenging project, but with the generosity of our donors, help from our mentors, hard work from our crew, and talent of our cast, we were able to film Santa Ana Winds.

I hope I was able to thank everyone personally, but for those that I missed, I would like to take this opportunity to recognize and express our team’s gratitude for your contribution to the film. Through the years we have learned that filmmaking is a very collaborative process and no one person is responsible for the success of any film. Santa Ana Winds is no exception. No part is too small and for all of them we are grateful. Thank you.

I would like to give a big shout out to D. Scott Easton, our 1 st Assistant Director on Santa Ana Winds. When our original 1st AD had to leave town for a family emergency two weeks before principle photography, D. Scott came in and took the reigns. By filming at LAX we needed to constantly interface with multiple jurisdictions (TSA, LAWA, LAX Airport Police, LAX Two Corp, Fire Marshals, Electricians, etc.) and even more so, the general public. D. Scott dove right in and guided us through the storm, all while keeping his cool, sharing his inspirational stories and riddles. As a young producer, I have learned a great deal from D. Scott and am honored to have worked with him.

Now that our project is ‘in the can,’ we still have a lot of work to do. The post production process takes a total of 19 weeks. In this time we do everything from editing, to reshoots, to sound mixing, to ADR, to Color Correction, Visual Effects and DVD Mastering. This weekend the team is surely catching up on some well deserved rest, but expect to see more frequent updates from us now that principle photography is behind us.

Loveless

Per Will’s post, Team Santa Ana Winds has been busy with the sort of nonsense that reads on these sorts of blogs as uninteresting—budget locking, locations, auditions, rewrites, etc. I don’t feel comfortable talking about any of these things, both because they are boring and I have little to add to the subjects that hasn’t been seen before. When our location (LAX, really) and actors are set, we’ll put up some info and pictures.

Aside from our normal responsibilities, we continue to explore what culture our last weeks here as students in LA can provide. I enjoyed a week of endurance, watching first Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman… at LACMA and then being just destroyed by My Bloody Valentine’s 130+ dB assault at the El Rey a week later. 

Jeanne Dielman… documents, in 3 1/2 hours, 3 days of a single Belgian mother who moonlights as a prostitute. Most of the film takes place in her apartment (the men come to her place when her son is at school) and documents, silently, Ms. Dielman’s mechanical, perfected way of living that is sterile, boring, monotonous, and other adjectives we used to describe robots. After nearly 2 hours of efficient living—and we watch this woman wash dishes, boil potatoes, make coffee, clean tables, all in lengthy takes—something finally goes wrong: the potatoes burn. When Ms. Dielman is washing dishes and puts a dish on the drying rack still covered in suds, our theater gasped collectively. How could she?! It was like Michael sending Fredo out to the lake, except in extreme miniature. The film is fiction, and it does things with time we can never afford to do in 15 minutes—3+ minutes of kneading ground beef might not fly here. In capturing the peculiarities of life, though, Jeanne Dielman… is irrepressible.

My Bloody Valentine was one of the few bands allowed to break the 72-hour Coachella embargo against bands performing in Los Angeles on either end of the festival. After a 17-year hiatus, they returned last year to playing the soul-shaking shows they were apparently famous for in the first place. For their canonical album Loveless, frontman Kevin Shields engaged in all kinds of wacky behavior to get the sound just right—and for the most part, he did, with “swirling” guitars and “dreamy” melodies enveloping the listener in his still-well-constructed pop songs.

This effort seems moot in light of the band’s live show, though. Despite looking like polite pre-middle aged Britons on-stage, the band played at such an impossibly high level of controlled volume that earplugs are a necessity (and still don’t do the trick). Aside from the noise, the band fires a series of strobe lights directly at the audience, making connecting with them visually a physical impossibility if only because your eyes are constantly refreshing themselves. And the band didn’t even look like they were trying.

It was an antagonistic performance, to be sure, but I can’t shake it still. Their songs are too gorgeous, and the movements and changes in them were still audible in the fuzz of the room. They close with “You Made Me Realise,” a non-album track that escalates into 10+ minutes of pounding white noise.

Again, the sound levels were estimated at around 132-135 dB—similar to that of a 747 airplane taking off. And much like that roar is deafening but interesting in its violence, so was this quartet on stage like a 747 firing up indoors. Volume is surprisingly hard to control well, but when sustained (and its audience prepared) it’s as violent as a punch to the gut or a shaking of the shoulders. Will this be in our movie? Eh, hopefully.