About a Donkey will be screening at the North Carolina Gay & Lesbian Film Festival, which runs August 16th through 19th! If you're near Durham, please mark your calendars! Our primary screening will be Saturday, August 18th, at 5:10pm. And we'll have an encore screening on Wednesday, the 22nd, also at 5:10pm.
Kelsey Rauber
Georgia Film Festival Recap
Last Saturday was the festival premiere of our feature About a Donkey. Kelsey and I flew down for the festival and enjoyed the hell out of it.
The festival was held at the University of North Georgia, and is run by professors at the school. The whole staff was lovely and super welcoming. There’s a real community feel since many of the volunteers are students, and families of those students come out to support the fest.
About a Donkey screened at 2:30pm in a nice theater. We could feel the care put into the setup. The screening started on time and played without tech issues. We had about 35 people in attendance, which was pretty cool considering we don’t have any cast or crew connections to Georgia. With the exception of wonderful filmmaker friend, Lynne Hansen (creator of I Make Films Like a Girl pins & shirts), who drove from Atlanta to finally meet me in person and support our premiere, everyone in attendance was a local who came out of mere interest in the film. We were elated to quickly realize the audience was enjoying the film because laughs started from essentially the first punchline and continued steadily throughout the film. One guy sitting right behind me and Kelsey was a particularly enthusiastic laugher, which made the experience all the more enjoyable for us! The Q&A was well-run and thoughtful. The audience had a lot of questions, and we were relieved and grateful to hear that the film resonated with them and they wanted to learn/see more!
Even after the Q&A, quite a few people stuck around to talk to us and personally tell us that they liked the film. Two teen girls talked to us about their own aspirations in film and were super excited to meet us. That was a really humbling and inspiring moment.
We spent much of the rest of the day hanging out with Lynne, whose work you should definitely check out. She’s a horror fan/filmmaker like me, but had some really positive feedback about the film and how it touched her despite its lack of gore! And a couple strangers even tweeted recommendations of catching the film at future festivals. The afterparty was really fun, held at a local brewery. We chatted with a couple other filmmakers in the festival, but mainly found ourselves in Q&A’s with students who wanted to hear more about what we do and how we do it. It was an awesome experience all around.
I loved being part of the Georgia Film Festival and would definitely like to return. I want to thank them for programming our film. As filmmakers, our goal is to reach people beyond our own network, and festivals are a way to do that. However, festivals often have a goal of filling as many seats as possible, which typically means trying to program only name-driven content and/or local content where cast & crew will heavily market to their local networks. That’s why it’s so wonderful that the Georgia Film Fest programming team enjoyed the film enough to offer it a slot and allow us this audience engagement!
We’ll have more festival news soon! Stay tuned!
-Christina
BTS of New Short "Revelations"
in Short Films
Yesterday, May 12, we completed my (Kelsey's) directorial debut "Revelations."
Logline: On a familiar girl's night, two adult women with burdening secrets can no longer keep them from each other.
Like most of my more recent projects, this script originated from a creative discussion between Christina Raia, Ryan Kramer, and myself. For a while now I've wanted to direct a short, mostly to improve my writing. I love to try new things, probably because I have a real fear of becoming stagnant in life. And I am obsessed with lesbian content as well as representation of adult women beyond the usual "husband left/cheated on her, then she xyz" narrative.
So, I knew I wanted it to be about two women with secrets. Does that sound vague to you? Because yes, yes it is. Which is probably one of the reasons it took me about five variations to get to the final script. At one point I had a revelation be that one of the women was Catwoman and the scene took place in an apartment in Gotham City. I was so excited about it until Christina pointed out that one needs to buy certain rights to use trademarked names and places... so, I started over. Not completely. But mostly.
Once the script was completed, I figured I would take my time (this was mid-March) and SLOWLY build my cast and crew. But Christina (thankfully) had other plans. Her shoot got pushed back, which is why the week my script was in a finalized form she let me know "Great! I'm free May 12th, let's lock it down!"
And so we locked it down.
Since I did not study film and this was my first time directing I had a lot of questions. Because I have been on a couple of sets (mostly by CongestedCat) I thought I was prepared to do this. But once the date was set in iCal-stone, my deficiencies became palpable. It was invaluable to me that Christina agreed to produce the short.
It was also Christina's idea to choose a DP who I could grow with. So, I was ecstatic when Kim Whiten, our IndieWorks videographer, agreed to come on board. We have been friends for a while and she assisted on the About a Donkey set, but this was her first time as a DP and it was a fantastic fit.
We alleviated some of the day-of stress by testing the lighting a few days prior to the shoot. I always had a vision of a very blue-pink look. I made a Pinterest page which helped me share the vision with others. I was very inspired by Janelle Monae's "Make Me Feel" video as well as the "San Junipero" episode from Black Mirror.
I had written this short with Katherine Wessling in mind. She was phenomenal on About a Donkey and I was hoping to work with someone that I knew and trusted. I was worried it would be incredibly short notice but thankfully, she was free, allowing me to determine half of the cast about a month out.
Finding Lina, the other half, turned out to be a little more difficult. We'd already seen how difficult it was to find women who are non-union and of a certain age while casting for About a Donkey. As I became pressed for time I had to loosen the age restrictions and luckily cast the talented Dana Scurlock, who also played a role in About a Donkey!
The three of us met up the Sunday before the shoot to go over any questions and do a reading to see if all the dialog felt natural. And once that was done, we were ready to go to production.
Having seen how Christina operates during production I was convinced I wasn't going to get any sleep the night prior to the shoot. Then I was reminded that the thing that gives me the most anxiety in life is the fear of not getting enough sleep. So, I slept.
Then, on May 12th, we did it. After some initial sound issues, we started shooting at 9 am. The full scene takes place on the couch, so blocking was easy. I honestly could not have wished for a smoother shoot.
We wrapped early(!), getting the tentative shots we had added. And we were still able to see daylight as we ripped down the garbage bags from the window.
It was an incredible experience. And it never would've happened without everyone involved.
I have to thank everyone mentioned above as well as Matt Gershowitz who agreed to be my Assistant Director. His input and ideas helped me pin down my vision. Also, huge thanks to Erin Clayton and Adnan Malik who helped make the look come to life. Thank you Chelsea Frati who agreed to do set make-up and nailed it. And thank you Marlene Eric, Christina's mom, for catering.
I could not have wished for a more talented and kind cast and crew.
-Kelsey
About a Donkey: Cast, Crew, Supporter Screening
Saturday was the one year anniversary of starting principal photography for About a Donkey, AND it was our unofficial premiere of the film. We rented the beautiful Anthology Film Archives' 187-seat theater for our cast & crew screening. Seed&Spark supporters who originally contributed $100 got an automatic invite as part of their campaign incentive; and we decided, since we had such a large theater rented and so many friends and family eager to see the film, it'd be a great idea to offer limited tickets to cover the cost of the theater. We didn't advertise to the public, so as to not blow our premiere status, but we offered tickets to family and core supporters. We ended up with 96 total people in attendance and ended up making $764, just over enough to cover our $740 theater rental!
As for the screening itself, it was a success! The audience seemed to really enjoy the film. It looked absolutely beautiful on the big screen. It got laughs at spots we were hoping; and we were so humbled to hear about how certain moments, and especially the ending, made people emotional. We set out to make a timely but hopeful piece about working towards acceptance. It was so lovely hearing comments about how it resonated with people who didn't know what to expect from the film.
Hearing it in a theater setting was a big help and made us realize we need to revisit our audio cleaning and levels a bit to better balance tracks for such a wide space. We'll be doing that over the next week or so. And we'll be submitting to festivals and crossing our fingers. We can't wait to share it again in more theaters and with more audiences!
Thanks everyone who made getting here possible!
Picture Lock! (About a Donkey Seed&Spark Update)
Hey there wonderful About a Donkey Supporters!
Exciting news, we've reached picture lock! This means we're done playing around with the pacing and shot choices, and our edit is locked in place (with an 80 minute runtime). And since we've already started a rough sound mix, color grade and score, we're feeling very confident about making our end of month deadline!
To celebrate, here's a quick video that features a frame for every shot captured through principal photography!
We got to this milestone through a really beneficial feedback screening, which you can read about HERE.
And through a quick pick-up shoot Sunday night! I went into the feedback screening feeling like one character's arc was lacking a certain something, and the screening gave me clarity on what that was. I avoided the thought of shooting anything new with the actor, though, because she (Sarah Haruko) had moved to LA. However, a perfectly timed work trip allowed me to brainstorm a quick scene that could be shot on the west coast and effectively fill in this narrative gap. Thanks to Sarah for being fully committed to finishing up this film, Chris Orsi for helping shoot, and friends Cat Papadimitriou & Chris Haddix for loaning a camera, we pulled it off!
Check out a raw screenshot.
I even make a cameo!
Thank you all for making this possible. Stay tuned for more as we make progress through post-production!