“January” Reflections

It is finished. It is online.

I am monumentally proud of everybody’s hard work and contributions to this film. Now comes the exciting part: submitting it to film festivals and sharing it with friends, family, and strangers online. 

Unfortunately, our first foray into the film festival world did not end positively. Just minutes ago, I received this email:

Dear Mr. Eickhoff,

Unfortunately your film January has not been selected for this year’s Frog Baby Film Festival. We broke previous records of submissions, having over 50 which meant tough decisions. If you would like copies of the evaluation forms from the judges regarding your film, please let me know. We would also love to have you at our festival taking place in Pruis Hall on March 24th at 7pm (doors open at 6:30pm). Thank you for your submission and hard work.

I’m not entirely surprised; this isn’t everybody’s type of film. Our campus does not have a program, or degree, in filmmaking—the closest thing is a Film Studies degree or degree in Digital Video Production. The Telecommunications Department’s emphasis is on commerciality, “the Industry,” technical specifications. These are not the elements that create a great film. “January” does not aim to be a commercial success. It is atypical from many commercial films, because its focus is not on pandering for low-brow humor, or impressing viewers with unrelated action sequences and explosions. “January” is a film about people. Real life. Real emotion. It is dialogue-heavy, character driven, and certainly not everybody’s cup of tea. It is disappointing to me that the judges did not see fit to reward these elements, but I don’t know their criteria. I am meeting with the coordinator for this event to get copies of their evaluations, in order to garner more insight, as well as learn why January didn’t make the cut.

I’m not disappointed, exactly. I don’t think that Frog Baby was the correct venue for the film. But I do feel sorry for those who have dedicated their time and hard work to the film. While, for some reason, the judges did not see fit to reward our efforts, please know that I am incredibly proud of all of you. Evan, Zach, Steph, Lauren, David, Chris, Dan, Natalie, Jack, Eggroll, Graham, Mike: thank you so much for all of your work. You are all incredibly talented people and I would be honored to work with you again.

For those that want to see the film, check out the following:

January from Brent Eickhoff on Vimeo.

LOVE,

BRENT

“January” Production Diary #9

We have been hard at work the past few days, and the film is really coming along. Not much to really report, as they’ve all been minuscule polishing sorts of things, but the film is almost ready to be graded.

We have confirmed that a high school class of juniors studying American Film will have “January” screened to them in its current iteration, so that we can get feedback from a diverse group of audience-members before we start submitting it to festivals. I’m pretty pumped to get lots of feedback on it, and I’m definitely interested to see what several classes of high schoolers think about it—hopefully they can connect to it in some way, but regardless it’s great to get it out there.

In lieu of more words (I’m not feeling verbose today, how strange!) I’ll post a bunch of pictures from the process. Hopefully they’ll give you some insight into production!

LOVE,

BRENT