manimanimas

However a little of her publicity would be nice!

We're doing our own little grassroots campaign for LUMINA.  Since yesterday, we've gotten written up by Jami Noguchi in his Angry Zen Master blog and by the Spanish blog Dimsum Cinema as well.  We also had our first offline screening at the I Shot Hong Kong Networking Party, which was alot of fun.  Thanks again to ISHK organisers Craig Leeson, Lindsay Robertson and Joyce Hu for setting up a fantastic event at Finds!

On the YouTube front, YouTube has announced both a new homepage layout and changes to the way they choose the videos that appear on the homepage.  It seems like it's a bit harder to get on the homepage now, but we're most certainly going to give it a go!  Here's how to help us out:

1. Sign up for a YouTube account.  It's free. :)  Subscribe to our channel and then favorite, comment and rate our video.  Quick easy things, but they mean the world in terms of our YouTube ranking and our likelihood of appearing on YouTube's homepage. 
2. Outside of YouTube, please let your friends know about us!   Word of mouth is always the indie production's best friend.
3. If you have any contacts to press or bloggers, please ask them if they would write an article about us, or if they have the time and the inclination, interview us!  We have lots of cast and crew who are eager to talk about the project!

My friend, Derrick "One Man Studio" Fong, has just wrapped filming a behind-the-scenes documentary on Josie Ho's new horror flick, Dream Home.  He's been working pretty much non-stop for the last few months, so seeing him out and about at the I Shot Hong Kong Networking Party was just awesome!

When we were talking about his upcoming mountain of editing work (with which I can wholeheartedly sympathise), I remembered that there was a famous director who got his start with a documentary on someone else's film but I couldn't for the life of me remember who it was.

I found it this morning:  it was George Lucas who did a behind-the-scenes documentary for Francis Ford Coppola's Rain People.  The documentary, called Filmmaker, is just mindblowing.  I have embedded the first of the four clips below.

Some cool notes:  Coppola is only 29 years old in the film.  The glimpses that Lucas got in some of the tenser moments of the shoot are dead on - it was ostensibly an argument about the use of a purse in a scene, but it was so tinged with nervousness and insecurity and internal conflict - brilliant.  And for those indie filmmakers, take inspiration : there's someone (not Coppola, but Coppola laughs about it) who talks about doing a bit of guerilla filmmaking too.  Sneaking in shots seems to be a universal phenomena.

Barry Malkin, editor:  "It doesn't matter what you thought you wrote, and it doesn't matter what you thought you planned, all you got is what you really got."  

Hear, hear!