The Long Wait

So it’s been about 4 or 5 days since the entry for Tropfest closed and now I, like the many other people who entered, sit here and wait.

And we hope.

And some of us even pray. Why? I don’t know. Ask them. I’m a Distorted Jew. We don’t pray. We eat ice cream.

So, we all sit here with high hopes that we might just have impressed the Tropfest committee enough or found a niche they like enough or have made something so brilliant in every way that they’d be fools to ignore it and they just HAVE to let it in right now.

But the truth is — for me anyway — while the film I entered, “Two Bricks”, is easily one of the best things I’ve ever done and is something I’m incredibly proud of, and while I have a lot of high hopes and confidence for the film, the waiting game for it is a pain in the ass.

And it drags you down.

I seriously don’t know how long it takes to go through 700 or more entries. I just don’t. I don’t even want to think about it.

Okay, I will. Just for the hell of it.

If all 700+ movies are 5 minutes long, that’s 3500 minutes minimum right there. Since the maximum runtime for a movie in Tropfest is 7 minutes, most people will exploit that and make a movie a bit longer since it gives them more time essentially to fill in the gaps of a story… essentially. Since some people will be under the 5 minute suggestion I have, 3500 minutes is an acceptable average at this point in time.

So, 3500 minutes. If you take 3500 and divide it by 60, you get 58.33… so that’s approximately 58-60 hours worth of content straight that the panel has to go through. With more probably still. There’s probably more like 60-90 hours worth of content they have to look at, especially if there’s over 800 entries.

Now, considering the average work day isn’t looking at films, this is a fair amount of work days they have to go through.
I imagine they watch a film, make a comment, write some notes… move on to the next one. And because of all of that viewing time, they’re gonna have to take a few breaks fairly frequently to catch a breather or two.

Think about what it’d be like watching a movie marathon in the daytime. I’m not talking about one of those bullshit Hoyts or Greater Union bludgefests where every wanker and his girlfriend is there to show the world how hot each of them are together and how much toilet paper and candy every other patron in the cinema can throw at the next wanker on the screen for the entire night.

I’m talking about sitting there, watching a film, anf really being forced to pay attention to it. To see if it was good, if it wasn’t, how the script was, the acting, the dialogue, the filming techniques… fuck, whether they really liked it or just wanted to throw a brick at it.

So we’ve got our 60-90 hours of viewing material for the panel that we’ve all contributed to.

If you go off of the 60 hours mark, that’s 7 and a half days of 8 hour days without a rest. The moment you add breaks and what not, you’ll hit more like 8-9 days.

So, we all have somewhere around 8-10 days of waiting before anyone is likely to get called, unless your work is so fucking brilliant that it foregoes the rest of the scrutiny because you’ve kissed so much ass or something like that.

Worse off, since there are weekends in this time period, and weekends are rarely working days, while 10 days would make the date January 21st we might hear from them, this pushes it to the 23rd, just two or three days before, if we get in, we’re supposed to get a Betacam copy in to them with all the other stuff.

All this came about to go through my head because the Tropfest T&C’s pretty much don’t tell you when you’ll get called. They say that if you’re called on February 10 or 11 to be told your film didn’t make it and you have ’till August to pick it up, that basically… well, duh, your film didn’t make it.

How you didn’t work that out when the Betacam entry date went and passed you by is beyond them, I imagine. This just further cements it.

So sometime next week is when any of us might get a call.

In trying to find others who might be going through similar dilemmas, I found a whole bunch of people who’d entered. Most of them don’t have links back to their blogs so maybe me linking them might allow some of us who did some really cool shit to connect.

If anything, I don’t care about winning. I’d like to get into the final 16 so people see my work. I think that’s the right attitude, but I don’t necessarily know if my work is good enough to get me in to do that. I hope it is. I think it is. Especially in wake of some of the other people who are entering in Tropfest.

A quick search on Technorati has revealed the following blog entries on people who have entered Tropfest this year (apologies for any names not spelled correctly… I’m doing this with wayyyy too many tabs open):

[url=http://otherleg.com/anotherblog/archives/1064]AnotherBlog[/url]
[url=http://sarah-phillips.livejournal.com/87291.html]Sarah Phillips[/url]
[url=http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=79908633&blogID=217290560]AstroFong @ MySpace[/url]
[url=http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=96719001&blogID=217306531]Melvin Tozyik @ MySpace[/url]
[url=http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=144035597&blogID=215907457]Stryke @ MySpace[/url]
[url=http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=124046912&blogID=215918230]Pat @ MySpace[/url]
[url=http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=23218413&blogID=216230807]Shenelle @ MySpace[/url]
[url=http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=122201212&blogID=215780837]Mauro Del Citto @ MySpace[/url]
[url=http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=114721014&blogID=215349103]Paul @ MySpace[/url]
[url=http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=110565331&blogID=214924816]James @ MySpace[/url]
[url=http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=88443261&blogID=216092712]Ed @ MySpace[/url]

And if MySpace wasn’t being the piece of shit programming that it always has been or less people relied on it for their blogs, I’d have been able to link you to more.

That’s only a few of the people I’d found who had worked on something for Tropfest.

This is big, people.

We’re all working individually and yet since only 16 out of the seven hundred or eight hundred or whatever hundred are going to be picked, we’ve all gotta stick together.