THE ADVENTURE THAT WAS THE SECOND MEETING OF THE BIG SPRING FILM SOCIETY!!
The roads were flooding, and we had to take a kayak, but it didn't stop us from having our second meeting! We had about 15 people show up for the meeting: which may seem small but we had 4 new faces show up interested in the progress of the film society and ready and willing to help. I was excited to announce the involvement of the Convention and Visitors Bureau with our organization. We are currently in talks to receive funding for the summer outdoor film series as well as other projects. With their help, we will be able to start taking the film society to the next level.
Since I was pretty sure we were most likely to have some new faces at the meeting, I went back over some goals that I have for our organization. First and foremost we talked about our biggest goal: to put together a film and music festival in Big Spring. Our target is to begin making preparations for this event as renovations in downtown Big Spring continue. What a great way to showcase our newly renovated downtown at completion by filling the streets with live music and film goer's. We are already looking at integrating live music into our outdoor film series with the band Vocal Trash possibly playing before our Raiders event on July the 9th. Next year we plan on putting together a GHOSTBUSTERS screening somewhere downtown. If we schedule it on a Saturday we could turn it into an all day event with live music, a ghostbusters costume contest/or a Ghostbusters short film contest. One of the next goals discussed was the possibility of having a make a film in a weekend workshop at some point. Basically we would bring together 4-5 teams, give them a genre and three different objects and send them out to shoot a short film that has to be turned in by Sunday afternoon. At the closing ceremony Sunday night we screen all of the movies and give out awards. Another event discussed was the possibility of bringing a independent filmmaker to Big Spring to screen some of their work and discuss the battle that takes place when making a movie. These are all good ideas, as the film society continues to progress hopefully we will see them come to fruition. Looking to the future we talked about the film society being able to have office space where we could rent out camera's for projects and set up a film editing suite for post production needs.
From there we carried onto our upcoming events: first of course the Raiders of the Lost Ark event on July 9th in the Comanche Trail Park Ampitheatre. We would like to have several different groups in charge of different things going on at the event: a concessions group, a trash and crowd control group, and a set design group. This event is most likely to be our biggest yet, and in order for it be one of our best organization is going to be key. The next meeting isn't until June, but via phones and email I will be trying to put together groups to take care of different things at that event. The Jurassic Park screening that will wrap up our Spielberg Retrospective (to an extent, a lot of the movies Spielberg either wrote or produced are scheduled for screenings over the next few years)will be on August 28th back on top of beautiful Scenic Mountain. At that event we will also need help with crowd control, trash, donations and etc. .
The Indy Short contest was our next topic to cover as I announced the official rules and the deadline of JUNE 25TH. Films can't be longer than 5 minutes, need to have something to do with or be in the same vein as Raiders, and they must be something that can be screened at a family event. All films must be turned in by June the 25th burned onto a dvd. The top three films will be chosen by a panel of judges and screened prior to Raiders of the Lost Ark on July 9th. When we meet in August or September we will screen all of the Indy Shorts entries.
As far as our meetings go, we are going to try and schedule one every other month. We will have a meeting in June and then several preliminary meetings at the Ampitheatre before the Raiders event. Eventually I'd like to have a short or feature length film to screen at our meetings after we discuss all of our business. If anyone out there has some work they'd like to screen for the film society contact us!
Things are looking very good for the Big Spring Film Society in the days ahead. With the CVVB offering us support and more and more people popping up willing to lend a hand this group can go nowhere but up. 2011 is already shaping up to be an exciting year with Poltergeist (that was cancelled this year) back down at the Comanche Trail Lake, our GHOSTBUSTERS event downtown, and of course Indy will march forward with Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom back at the ampitheatre. For more info on BSFS email Cruiser1977@gmail.com
