Newsletter: July 5th, 2007
Director's Ramblings: The Aftermath!
Welcome to the July 2007 edition of the Updoc Films Newsletter. The last few months found Updoc Films experiencing major upheavals as we undertook our first office and resouce relocation. Since our last newsletter, The Updoc Films alumni attended, shocked and alienated the audience at the 2007 Kinetoscopic Wonderment Film Festival at the University of Texas with our Student's Guide To University series. We were on hand to film the showing and audience responces. Stay tuned as the Students' Bootlegged Guide to University will be showing online soon.
Updoc Films' New Offices
Updoc Films' staff has been busy relocating our offices from the inner city of Austin to the outskirts of Leander, Texas. Due to the length of locating a suitable location, we're all feeling as though we've been on hiatus for a few months, effectively keeping us away from doing what we love most. Now that we've set ourselves up and grudgingly begun organizing ourselves, we're back in action.
A Students' Guide To University Chapter 2
Quickly completing his first short film trilogy, Devon Grey's latest Students' Guide To University chapter goes about exposing and criticizing the ideology, propaganda and indoctrination of institutions of higher education. Details are far and few between at the moment, but Devon tells us he's finished the script and has begun animating the short film.
No Mittens Film Festival
The No Mittens Film Festival is in part inspired by the strange changes in weather, which we are all experiencing, and childhood memories. During about with insomnia, and aided by multiple viewings of the film, “The Science of Sleep,” the idea came to us. The conception of the festival was also driven by our desire to bring a new venue/event to emerging artists who have no place to present their video works. With this festival theme of winter and sleep, one can be a metaphor for the other (i.e. Winter: the coldest season of the year. Sleep: a state of partial or full unconsciousness.) To learn more, visit the official website
Human Rights Film Festival
Human Rights Watch's International Film Festival has become a leading venue for distinguished fiction, documentary and animated films and videos with a distinctive human rights theme. Through the eyes of committed and courageous filmmakers, we showcase the heroic stories of activists and survivors from all over the world. The works we feature help to put a human face on threats to individual freedom and dignity, and celebrate the power of the human spirit and intellect to prevail. We seek to empower everyone with the knowledge that personal commitment can make a very real difference. Read more here
Call To Artists: The Millies Movie Mural Matchup
A unique contest merges fine art and film. Director Lorre Fritchy is teaming with Gallery 181 to host a contest that will determine the winning artist to create paintings featured in Fritchy's upcoming feature film, "Millies," to be filmed in and around Lawrence MA in 2008.
In the film, a troubled group of mill workers returns from 1912 to convince a bankrupt mill owner that her future is the key to their past. The paintings are significant in the subplot between the mill owner and a delinquent Latino youth. Fritchy will judge the contest based on the artwork as well as contestant interviews. Images should represent the theme of "Mill Ghosts" - see mill buildings themselves as characters in a story, what history or industry has happened there, what dichotomy of the rich and the poor they represent, how do old mills fit into the modern world? Show us your inner Millie! Read more here