"Where is Spencer?"

As regular readers of this here blog already know, my roommate Chris and I have been hard at work on a film for Project Twenty1. Now that the film is completed and mailed in, and the competition's organizers have informed us that we are officially accepted into the festival and will be up for awards, I can stop holding my tongue and knocking on wood, and can provide you with a bit more background on it and let you know more of its possible future.

The official title for the film is "TUMBLER: the boom." Why does it have a seemingly nonsensical subtitle, you may ask? Because we created our film in concert with another team based in Grand Rapids and Chicago, the highly vaunted Team With No Name, headed by Brilliant in Context repeat offender Anthony E. Griffin. It was this team that I was a member of for the past two iterations of the competition. Their film is entitled "TUMBLER: the echo," and seen together, the two films will, hopefully, tell two sides of one story from separate but similar points of view. We aimed to make them engaging on their own terms, while simultaneously offering further treasures of thematic goodness when seen and/or considered side by side. Both films are dramas told primarily through the possibly unreliable voiceovers of bystanders to the main action.

Have we succeeded? Only time will tell. Both films will play in Philadelphia at the Project Twenty1 Film Festival, October 1st through the 4th. No word yet on which specific day they'll play, but if it's anything like last year's competition, they'll go up on that Sunday, followed by the awards announcements. Our goal wasn't really to win awards (though we certainly wouldn't turn any down), it was to make a film we could be proud of that just might get us a bit more attention for other projects. Together with Team With No Name, we wanted to make a dramatic, compelling, memorable experience for the audience by telling stories we ourselves enjoyed in a way that was fresh and new. Chris and I are happy with the results of "TUMBLER: the boom," and we can't wait to share it with all of you. The fastest way for you to see it, of course, is to attend the Project Twenty1 Film Festival--we're not allowed to distribute it until then. If you can't make it, we may be able to put it up online in the days immediately following.

In the meantime, we'll be working on putting together some promotional materials: trailers, gag reels, posters, promotional art, behind-the-scenes photographs, and the like. Anything we come up with will promptly be posted here and wherever else we can put it up to build buzz and put asses in seats.

See you in Philly.