Behind the Scenes Seminar 2015

Reviewed by Logan Kovarick. Seen at the Santa Barbara Film Festival.

As the festival has put on a few free seminars at the UGG lounge, there was one that particularly stood out to me, the Behind the Scenes Seminar. Missing a couple attendees, the afternoon seminar had only three people in attendance to talk for an hour in front of a full house. Moderated by festival program director Michael Albright who interviewd Jordan Ledy, the director of “It’s Better in Italian”, and Christina Lee Storm, producer of “Life After Pi”. Both shorts explore the behind the scenes aspect of film making, foreign and domestic. Ledy’s film explores the cultural phenomenon of the Italians dubbing all imported films from Hollywood. Storm’s film explores a CGI company that won an Academy Award for their exceptional work on Life After Pi, but went declared bankruptcy two weeks prior to winning the award.

What was emphasized during this seminar was the fact that Hollywood is a global industry and is ever expanding. With that, there comes a lot of international jobs on these huge franchise films because they not only distribute across seas but are on location. Which makes for an interesting and unique time in the business where these jobs are being created for international relations. Along the same lines of international business, both filmmakers mentioned how important it is to pinpoint your audience internationally. You can’t make a film and expect it to have legs overseas if most of it doesn’t translate to a foreign audience. Films like the Transformers franchise perform very well because its eye candy and nothing more than explosions and CG, compared to a local film about Santa Barbara. With a small local film, you have already eliminated overseas business and probably the rest of the country because why would they care about a small town film. Just an example in how important it is for whomever is in charge to find an audience when making a film. If I’m an executive at a production company and you’re pitching me an idea, you need to tell me two things. In one sentence or less, what your pitch or idea is, which is called a log line. As well as who exactly your audience is. If those two things are not clear to me as business man, then you need to reconsider this idea and our meeting is over. This idea is something that they really touched on during the seminar which is great information to anyone coming up in the business.

Another thing I thoroughly enjoyed about these group of Seminars was that they allow most of the time to be opened up for questions from audience members. Its a great opportunity to really pick these guy’s brains and get some really good answers. A great experience for students in the area and  Every other time, when you’ll attend one of these seminars, you will get someone who asks a question about THEIR project, trying to make connections with panelists and get them on board with their movie or idea. Which is something that is a waste of time for the rest of the audience and the panelists. But I digress, these seminars were only a short hour long and made for a great time and I highly suggest attending these in the years to come for who ever is interested in intimate question and answer seminars.