Indiedance will post the videos of their announcement and their interviews with all the winners including yours truly soon and I’ll link to that then. For now, here are some screen shots from their website:
Sweet! Kinda makes me feel like dancing!
(A look at the on-set monitor during the Tell-Tale shoot)
ALSO… just before posting this I got notice that the judges from Art is Alive Film Festival have nominated “The Tell-Tale-Heart – a musicabre” in two categories: Best Special Interest Film and Best Musical Soundtrack.
Not sure if this panel discussion will be broadcast on-line, or if you need to be at the Silverspot Cinema to partake. For now it appears to be the latter. I’ll update this post when I know more.
According to plan, we will have a round table discussion on the following three areas:
Improv – The New Tool for Acting Improvements Surviving the Struggle: Staying Employed and Engaged in 2020 Strengthening the Relationships Between Filmmakers and Fine Actors
Four Festivals Feature ‘THE TELL-TALE HEART” this month
Covid 19 has done a number on the film festival circuit, effecting many festivals that had been scheduled to screen “The Tell-Tale Heart – a musicabre” earlier this year. There have been postponements and cancellations and switching from the traditional theater format to on-line screenings.
The good news for you, dear reader, though is that on-line festivals are rather conveniently accessed from the comfort of your home. And it so happens that this September there will be four festivals sponsoring online screenings of my short film musical adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Tell-Tale Heart – a musicabre” (happy recipient of over 40 awards already). I will be doing some online Q&As as well as panels/workshops. It’s going to be a busy month.
I will post more details on each individual festival later, but for now, here’s a quick rundown of the September festivals featuring me and my musicabre:
Art is Alive Film Festival – Sep 2-6
“The Tell-Tale Heart – a musicabre” will screen online this Friday, September 4, at 8:15 EDT (7:15 CDT) followed by a Q&A with me.
The Orlando International Film Festival is screening some feature films in a physical theater, but most of their selection, including the short films of which “The Tell-Tale Heart – a musicabre” is one, will be screened online.
Information on the on-line screenings is still forthcoming. Check their website or this blog for more info.
I have already posted pictures of what I called The Lovers of Grand Army Plaza. But those spring pics are few and overcast compared to these sun drenched shots I took over several days this summer. So today I’ll post more from the fountain at Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn, with the understanding that sometimes more is more.
The central couple of the art deco fountain are meant to represent Wisdom and Felicity.
One approaches the fountain from the south through the arch of Grand Army Plaza, which itself faces the entrance into Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. The arch was built to commemorate the preservation of the union after the Civil War. Union Street leads right to it, rising up through Park Slope.
All Things Come to an End, if not this Pandemic (yet)
I’ve continued posting the awkwardly named Daily Outdoor Memory Escapes far longer than I thought I would. Arguably the pandemic is worse in the whole of the USA than it was when I posted my first Outdoor Memory, locked down in our home in Brooklyn. New York has so far weathered the worst of the storm, and along with New England is now managing to manage Coronavirus more like Europe, unlike the rest of the States, which are mostly in Covid disarray.
So it would be a good reason to stay put where it’s safer rather than travel in the country. But we have our reasons for travel – by car, not plane – and we have our masks, and our hand sanitizers, and our social distancing. And so new outdoor memories are being made. And collected here are the final 48 of the 128 Daily Outdoor Memory Escapes I posted, with the first two installments located here and here.
Another Spreewald pic, as I wonder when we’ll ever be able to return to Germany again…
Daily Outdoor Memory Escape #85:
One final Spreewald pic, not only because the thought of visiting it anytime soon is a dead ender, but because the canals there have regular dead end street signs too.
After 5 months locked out, a return to the gardens
Last March, on the weekend where Broadway was already shut down and schools were cancelling performances and assemblies, but the rest of the city was still open for a few more days, Ed and I went to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden while we still could. There were many people there, but it was possible to keep six feet distance from another, which the public was already mostly practicing. Two days later the gyms and bars and restaurants and museums and the botanic gardens closed, and the full city wide quarantine was enforced the following Sunday.
Nearly five months later, as New York slowly moves through phases of incremental opening, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden is finally unlocking its gates. Last weekend BBG members could visit. The general public is welcome starting this weekend. However, advance timed-entry tickets are required, which will limit how many people are in the gardens at any one time.
Ed and I being members, we visited last Saturday, and found we had much of the park nearly to ourselves. In addition to reduced admittance, warning signs and one-way markers and the cordoning off of narrow paths attested to the brave new world of Covid we live in. Also, unsurprisingly, indoor areas including the café, shop, library, and conservatory remain closed.
On the plus side of novelty, several sections of the gardens that were still being redeveloped in March are now finally on view. August may not be the most colorful season in the garden – the cherry blossom, tulip and rose seasons passed unseen by the public this year due to the lockdown – but the beautifully landscaped new areas can now be shared and promise to grow even more delightful in years to come. These photos were taken by both Ed and me.
The Brooklyn Museum of Art as seen from the garden.Hmmm, the biggest Giant Snowflake I know is orange… and in DC….Sweet Pepper Bush
The Sweet Pepper Bush is just one in many new plants at the garden that have a unique and delightful scent. We decided to order some for our own front porch.
However the Fragrance Garden, traditionally planted with flowers and plants that encourage visitors, particularly the vision-impaired, to touch as well as smell, has had all its plants removed, presumably because its main use in these times was deemed too unsafe.
Ed, genuflecting before his True God This is the picture Ed took during his devotionalContinue reading →
I’m happy to report that I won Runner Up Best Actor of Year 2020 from Flicks Film Festival for my performance in “The Tell-Tale Heart – a musicabre“.
I’ve already posted about the Flicks Film Festival giving me an acting award in November 2019 and the long and winding road that led to me finding out about it.
This month the festival announced the semi-finalists and the finalists and finally the winners for the year on their facebook page.
Like every other festival this year, Covid 19 seriously effected how they would proceed:
So, July 14 the full list for the Best of the Year 2020 were announced. This required more than one page. I’ll share the page that includes my category (middle of the right column):
The Tell-Tale Poster Shines on a Big Billboard over Broadway
Last night Ed and I travelled to Times Square to watch the poster for my gothic musical short film “The Tell-Tale Heart – a musicabre” be broadcast over Times Square.
Here a quick clip of the moment it happened:
And now for the whole story, including more pics and video.
My musical Poe adaptation is part of the Shockfest Film Festival 2020. As such it has also been included in their Poster Competition.
Last night Shockfest commandeered (or rather, rented time on) “the most technically advanced screen in the United States, Silvercast Media’s ‘Godzilla Billboard’ located smack dab in the middle of Times Square, the largest billboard in all of New York City.”
Part of their presentation was featuring all the entries in the poster competition. Ed and I could either watch the Shockfest show live on-line culminating in the airing of the billboard presentation. Or we could go to Times Square and catch that part live in person.
Haunted horror house.
We decided to go to Times Square.
It would be only my second subway ride since mid March, when the Covid 19 lockdown began. Even though New York City has so far weathered the worst of the pandemic and is slowly, responsibly opening up, subway ridership remains low (and well masked) and Times Square is sparsely populated, nothing like the mass of tourists that thronged the area all day long in the past.
Ed wearing his “rainbow bandit” mask.
The Shockfest billboard presentation was scheduled for 9:30pm. We arrived at Times Square around 9:20pm and perched ourselves across the street and waited.
Below is the 2020 Official Trailer for the Denali Film Festival. It’s a beautifully put together trailer, full of lovely images of the great outdoors. You get a strong sense for the festival’s overriding theme, of nature and humanity placed in a diverse, panoramic landscape.
And then you get the exception that proves the rule: me smirking satirically into the camera, the first of three clips edited into the trailer from “The Tell-Tale Heart – a musicabre“, a gothic, interior chamber piece without the slightest bit of sunlight or nature.
When I first saw the trailer, I joked on facebook:
I looked at this really cool trailer and thought “one of these things is not like the others…”
To which the festival directors responded: “You fit right in! Excited to see you in 2021!“
This after they already privately told me “We both really enjoy your work! We sang ‘true, nervous, very very dreadfully nervous’ most days the last month“, establishing them in my mind as among the sweetest festival directors I have interacted with so far.
But however my film fits in to the wider festival, I am still taken with how much the Tell-Tale clips stand out in this trailer – and I mean that as a compliment for how well the trailer is put together, and uses those quick clips as contrasting punctuation.
I get a kick of how the edit follows up my criminal smirk with a close-up of a bird of prey. And how the other two clips from Tell-Tale also appear to be chosen for being of most startling contrast to the rest of the trailer. (I include screenshots of all three at top and just below.)
I’ve now watched the Denali Film Festival trailer almost as much as my own trailer for Tell-Tale, which is another way of saying I really like it, how it represents the Denali Film festival, and how it positions my little gothic musical within its program.
But there’s more to this post, as you might have surmised by the title, and by what one sees at the end of the Denali Film Festival trailer:
I’ve been taking long walks in Brooklyn lately. And the other day in Cobble Hill I came upon this amazing facade festooning the brownstone at 108 Wyckoff Street.
It’s a fantastic riot of mosaics and messages, colored stones and mirror glass, lace and silhouettes, toy figurines and goddess statues, lovers and angels, flowers and kittens, outrage and whimsy. “Please enjoy, look, touch, but do not take the objects”.
I just had to take copious pictures to try to capture this work of art and activism and then share it with an audience that is less likely to amble by this Brooklyn side street anytime soon.
And just like every year for the past 27, I composed a viola piano duet for us to play. Each one is called an Evocation.
This year’s birthday duet, Evocation XXVII, takes on a stately air, something that puts to my mind classical Americana. The melody just came to me one morning at breakfast, and I quickly sketched it in a notebook. With both Ed and I together at home practically 24/7 since March, it was tricky finding moments where I could take to the piano and computer unnoticed and complete the composition. The most opportune time would seem to be when my psychotherapist husband conducts his sessions on-line, since then he’s in another room behind closed doors. But I couldn’t play the piano then, as the sound bleeds through the walls and would be heard during therapy.
Here is the audio of the computer program doing its inhuman best reproducing the music:
Evocation XXVII
After the break, I’ll share the full piano/viola score. But before that, a little Coronavirus treat: Ed and I in the rainbow masks Ed gifted me on my birthday in May. Here we are as the Rainbow Bandits, demanding not your money or your life but your Manolas or your Louboutins.
Central States Indie FanFilmFest has named “The Tell-Tale Heart – a musicabre” Best English Language Featurette of the year.
After earlier awarding my musical Edgar Allan Poe adaptation Best English Language Feature/Featurette for the Winter Quarter 2020, the festival is now announcing the winners for the year. Most category winners were listed on their website last night:
A construction fence wraps around a shut down gas station on 4th Avenue and Union Street where Park Slope borders Gowanus in Brooklyn. Many Black Lives Matter demonstrations took place in this area this past month, and it is around that time this fence got covered with poignant, witty and lovely murals on three street sides. I just had to take pictures when I discovered them walking in my neighborhood.
The fence is not made to last. Eventually another 12 story residential apartment building will be erected at this site. The murals will be gone. But here they are now on my modest blog to be preserved in some form while this blog endures and to share with you wherever you happen to connect to the internet.
That’s right. You have another chance to watch the well-reviewed “The Tell-Tale Heart – a musicabre” at a film festival. And you don’t need to fly to New York to see it, just like you didn’t need to fly 5 weeks ago to Switzerland, because in the age of Coronavirus, for now, if a film festival is up and running, it’s doing so on-line.
Click here to get to the New York Lift-Off Festival. Find the NEWCOMERS SHORT 1 program. For $10 you can watch a wide variety of short films during the month of July. “The Tell-Tale Heart – a musicabre” is listed at #61 in the NEWCOMERS SHORTS 1 program, showcasing “films from brand new voices”.
Well, I guess I am a new filmmaking voice. I’m an old showbiz hand otherwise…
While you’re at it, please vote for “The Tell-Tale Heart – a musicabre” in the comments section and the festival’s special voting website. Here’s their explanation how:
Please vote by first writing VOTED in the comments section, followed by the names of your two favourite films. Then head to our website on liftoff.network/voting-system-newyork-newcomersshort1/ to fill out the more detailed voting form.
Votes with only one selection/ the same film twice will be INVALID.
Strictly one set of votes per person.
PRIZES
The top 2 voted “audience choice” films, plus 1 jury selection will go through to the Network Round.
The overall winning film in their respective category will receive a physical screening at next year’s New York Lift-Off, and free membership to the Lift-Off Network.
Membership entitles the production team to fee waivers across all of our 25 festivals and showcases on FilmFreeway, along with production support applications to our Lift-Off Production Support package worth nearly $75,000, Career Road-Mapping Consultations and lots more…
Season Awards nominations will be awarded to winners in their category and special mentions.
Voting will end 10pm (BST) Sunday 31st July.
After the festival, these films will be removed from the public domain.
Notes from a Composer 