Juror’s Award

Best Dark Themed Short

Best Director

Best Actor

Best Editing

Plus nominations for

Best Cinematography

Best Sound Design

Last night “The Pit and the Pendulum – a musicabre” won 5 of the 7 awards it was nominated for right after it screened at the final night of The Artists Forum Festival of the Moving Image in Manhattan.

I arrived early at the state of the art Dolby Screening Room where the festival took place to make some arrangements with the technical staff at the theater.

Which allowed me to take these pictures of my short film musical Edgar Allan Poe adaptation being test screened in the empty theater before the evening’s program:

That evening, the third and final night of the festival’s live screenings, seven shorts were shown, with “The Pit and the Pendulum – a musicabre” scheduled last. Afterwards there was a Q&A with filmmakers, during which I (subtly?) took this selfie:

The main question directed at me from the audience, here and at pretty much every Q&A I have done so far, is regarding the “mirror masks”. Not surprisingly. I have written a little about the prep for this aspect of the film before, but I promise more elaborate on-set diary and pre and post production posts about the mirror mask imagery will be forthcoming on this blog. There is much to discuss…

Then awards were handed out. We won “Best Dark-Themed Short”.

Ed and me enjoying an awards-selfie.

I assumed this award would be the one for “The Pit and the Pendulum – a musicabre” tonight – I had no idea we were even nominated for 6 more…

And then the film won for Acting, Directing, Editing (Stolis Hadjicharalambous) and the final citation of the night, the Juror’s Award, in addition to having been nominated for Sound Design (Todd Maki) and Cinematography (Jason Chua). (My mother asked me later about original score, but that category was not in the mix.)

Missing in this line up is the framed citation for Best Director. There was a clerical error – I share this award with Sara Shelton who also won Best Comedy for the very clever “Teddy Bear” (which also won Best Actress) – and my certificate was not ready for me tonight. I’m to receive it at another Artists Forum event on November 10.

I’m accustomed to people sometimes struggling with my name; yet at first both the evening’s moderator Kaitlin Leslie and festival director Amos White V had no trouble with it. However after the presenters stumbled hopelessly (and understandably) over Stolis’ name during the middle of the awards presentations, they could no longer pronounce mine nor many others correctly anymore either… Hadjicharalambous (HA – gee – cha – ra – LAMM – booce) had evidently cursed their tongues. 😉