Freedom Plaza Gets A Screening - A 'Truly Free Film' Story

In my first blog, The LOOP Reality here at Pericles Shrugged I lightly touched on my burnout of promoting my feature length independent movie LOOP. Since LOOP was completed at the very end of 2007, I have been working hard to promote it. It's been a tough go. When I started promoting LOOP, I was already exhausted from making it. It almost seemed that I was spending more money just to get the chance have a festival consider the movie than I did to actually make it. As this year came to an end I put LOOP on the back burner as my job became more demanding and precious and other real world issues began to consume my time. But still, it's all I though about.

But then after discovering and following the Truly Free Film blog and watching the speech that inspired the creation of the blog, and especially after watching and listening to the three parts of the DIY Dinner NYC video, I began to think about my approach. My promotion had been split down the middle. I'm 50% old skool and 50% techno-geek (and I am almost 50 years old). I knew about the potential of viral video and the exposure it could bring, but I was not going in that direction. Furthermore, I learned that I didn't necessarily need to for my video to be all "LOOPcentric" to promote LOOP. New ideas began to form and I began to think of the body of work I have accumulated over the years. I decided to post Freedom Plaza on the net for all to see and I wrote a short blog about it.

I was feeling a bit tentative about it for some reason, but also excited by the experiment of it all. Would it matter?

In October LOOP screened at the 1st annual Flyway Film Festival in Pepin, Wisconsin. The festival director and curator of films at the Lake Pepin Art and Design Center, Rick Vaicius who is on my email blast list and after alerting me to the fact that my blast had a bad link in it wrote this after viewing Freedom Plaza:

How can I get this saved to my hard drive. I'd like to show this to our audience on Saturday prior to our screening of David Modgilani's film "Crawford".

-Rick

OK. It's lucky. The timing was right. But... wow. Freedom Plaza is a short kinetic movie that is based on a true personal encounter of mine. People respond to it well, but it has been hard to get it seen. But after one day - 3 days ago from this post - Freedom Plaza will be screened before a buzzworthy independent documentary that I want to see.

This is GREAT!

So I started the mental gymnastics of DVD burning and shipping and Fedex and...

But wait a minute.

He asked about downloading.

I knew that there are ways to download Flash movies, but there would be a substantial quality loss and then it occurred to me. I use a file transfer system to collaborate, trade artwork and Electronic Press Kits over the internet. It is called Yousendit. For free anyone can send up to 100 mbs, but I bought a low cost subscription at $9.95 a month which allowed me a 2gb file size. I checked the file size of the uncompressed DV of Freedom Plaza. At four and half minutes Freedom Plaza was 1gb!

I wrote back to Rick and asked to give it a try. He was game. That evening, using YouSendIt, I began to "push" Freedom Plaza from my computer to the YousendIt server. I think the entire movie and a promotional still took about three hours from my consumer DSL connection. After the file fully uploaded, the service sent a message to Rick, since I specified him as the primary recipient, telling him that the file was ready for download. Rick, who lives in an idyllic but somewhat remote part of Wisconsin (which has an admittedly slow internet connection) downloaded the clip in six hours.

The next day Rick sent:

Hey Peri-FP just finished downloading.

It plays fine and looks and sounds great! Thanks! I'll let you know how it is received this weekend. - Rick

MUSIC TO MY EARS!!!

So this Saturday at 8pm CST, Freedom Plaza will screen at the Lake Pepin Art and Design Center before the acclaimed documentary "Crawford," and, I'll get feedback!

HOW COOL IS THAT?

Also, unless I delete it, Freedom Plaza will stay at that link for 14 day or 500 downloads. Would you like to download it to check it out and see the quality for yourself? Give loopmovie a tweet on Twitter and I will send you the link.

So, I just have to give more props to Truly Free Film. It has certainly re-energized me and the information and resources there have already produced results.

I have barely scratched the surface.

Simultaneously, Rick on his own had posted some kind words about LOOP in the Flyway Film Festival Facebook Group. I was working on a blog about that, but then this happened. I will post what he had to say shortly.

Take care, have hope.