[Weekly Update] June 7, 2021

Summer! E3! Video Games!

Yeah that's my kind of summer, just stay in mom's basement and never go out.

ABOUT THE CHANNEL

• Our next video is complete and ready to go. It is a highly requested one, about the cultural inaccuracies in Kung Fu Panda.
• If you are interested, check out our script preview post. I uploaded the notes for this film, and includes inaccuracies that I couldn't fit into the main video.
• I thought about doing a side video about that. But halfway through the script, I realize it's really dry, and I just don't have a strong enough personality to carry the video.
• Anyway, we have one more animation on the docket this month: Nezha Reborn. It was made by the same folks who made White Snake, a movie that I enjoyed quite a bit. And similar to White Snake, it didn't make much of a splash, but people who watched it all have good things to say.
• But the main reason I want to talk about it... It's because it's a Cyberpunk Mythological movie. That alone is enough to get my attention.

ABOUT MEDIA (and sort of about my life)

• Gather around the camp fire and let Uncle Yang tell you a story about film festivals.
• Have you been to one? If so, were you an audience or a film presenter?
• So, I have been to a couple, as a presenter of my own short films... and THEY ARE ALL FREAKING TERRIBLE!
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• My first experience with film festival is Montreal World Film Festival. It used to be prestigious.
• Why did I say that? Well, imagine being accepted into the student short film category, and 3 days before the festival begins, you saw the news about the venue backing out of the festival.
• That's right! I didn't get an email or anything about the cancellation. It got the news from local news network. All of the short film programs were cancelled, along with a crap tone of feature screenings also canned.
• What happened? Well, supposedly the festival runner refused to make the financial status of the festival public, which is a big no no for a government funded even.
• Because of this, government grants were pulled. Realizing the festival cannot secure funding, local cinema decides to back out of the event.
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• I was, of course, pissed. I had to pay, if I recalled correctly, $60 just for my short film to not get shown.
• But the gravity of the situation didn't really hit me until a Facebook group is formed by all the affected student filmmakers.
• To my horror, students from as far as Germany and Israel had just landed in Montreal. The screening was cancelled while they are on the flight.
• After days worth of discussion, we went out to give every festival attendees our open letter. We contact a local event venue to held our own screening. Although we only managed to show 6 students films, when there was supposed to be almost a hundred.
• Finally, the festival agreed to screen our short film at a smaller local cinema. But with no advertisement and no announcement, no one else knew there was an event there.
• I went to as much screening as possible, and in almost every single screening, I was alone.
• I was watching some of the most incredible films in my life: Documentaries from Russian students about oil pipelines in Siberia. Israeli filmmakers retelling their story of meeting their Chinese relatives.
• I met filmmakers who went on the do great things in the future, some of them are now promoting their debut feature, backed with the support of renown filmmakers.
• And all of their films went unnoticed because of this screw up.
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• I'm in the process of writing my next short film, now. And it makes me wonder, is it really worth it to go to film festivals? With each short film, I had to spend nearly $1000 just to get into a few screenings. I'd say I'm not that good at filmmaking, but every filmmakers, successful or not, has about the same acceptance rate.
• And new, with Accented Cinema, my voice is louder than ever. I have an audience who are willing to listen to me say the silliest thing. I was put in contact with working filmmakers because of this channel. It gave me more opportunities that any film festivals did.
• So, I'm wondering, should I just skip festivals and go straight to online with my next short film?

Have you been to film festivals? How was your experience with them? Is this sort of bad experience the norm, or am I just incredibly unlucky? Let me know!

I'll see you in a few days, with a new video!