Josh Lowman's Blog

SF Premiere of “We Are Croissan’wich”

Rickshaw Stop. Happy Hour. Friday June 19.

Church & Steak (which is me and Rinee Shah) presents the SF premier of my short film “We Are Croissan’wich”. PLUS, the premier of the Church & Steak music video “A Woolgathering Exodus”. PLUS two other short, funny films that go great with beer.

It’s all topped off by a potentially mind-blowing performance by DATE NITE.

Come out and let’s have fun.

http://www.wearecroissanwich.com/
http://www.wearedatenite.com/
http://www.vimeo.com/churchandsteak/

“We Are Croissan’wich” at the East Lansing Film Festival

So. Moeka and I are flying back from our second festival. It was such a satisfying experience. The festival director, Susan Woods, and the programming director, Nayana Sen, treated us like royalty. The audiences were engaged and enthusiastic. And we met some insanely talented filmmakers and got to compare notes with them.

The whole thing was a head trip for me personally because I’ve been to so many festivals thinking, I wish I could make a film. Which quickly devolves to: what is wrong with me that I can’t make a film? At some point a couple years ago, a new thought started taking hold: maybe nothing at all was wrong with me. And as that thought increasingly came up, a film kind of naturally came about.

So now to be in East Lansing, my hometown, where my work is seen and even celebrated—it’s just such a reversal of events. I don’t want to seem like an ego-maniac, but of course it feels great to be recognized. It was this moment of, “I did it.”

That quickly brings up another thought: You better think of your next film now and it better be good. But I’m going to try and put that aside for a day or two and just enjoy this.

“Changeling” and “Burn After Reading”

Here are two movies I recently watched by directors I became obsessed with in college. Very  different approaches to storytelling. The Coen Brothers are putting on a post-modern vaudeville show with an odd, almost architectural plot,  while Clint focusses on reducing a story to it’s essence.

While watching Burn After Reading I was thinking what amazing writers  these guys are, how hard it would be to write something like that.  Impossible. They always get into scenes in an interesting way. The way  the characters’ motivations are revealed, the plot twists—it’s all so specific and fresh. It’s easy to watch and admire what they do.

But too often it’s not that moving and in the end, pretty meaningless. Burn After Reading was a solid middle film of theirs. Way better than something like Oh, Brother Where Art Thou? or Intolerable Cruelty, but nowhere near Lebowski or Miller’s  Crossing. Weird how uneven these guys are as filmmakers.

Changeling was kind of the opposite. Each line of dialog, shot, plot twist feels necessary to move a meaningful story forward. It’s not a movie where you gain a lot of insight into your own life because it’s more of a straight-up good versus bad story, but it’s still very moving. There were a couple times where one of the characters would stand up for this woman in trouble, out of a sense of justice. I realized I wish I had more help like that in my life. Maybe that’s the true purpose of movies, to put us in contact  with elusive, sometimes powerful parts of ourselves. In doing so maybe they can help us change for the better. I’d love to have lunch with Clint Eastwood and talk to him about all of this.

Blu-ray Report

Despite the awesome graphic above, this post is not a robust product comparison of DVD Studio Pro and Adobe Encore. But I did have reason to sway from DVD Studio Pro recently because I wanted to be able to burn Blu-ray discs on my Mac. DVD Studio Pro won’t do it, Encore does. A few people wanted to know what my experience was, so here it is.

The reason for Blu-ray was simple. I was screening this short at a festival and to screen it in full-on 1080 HD, I could either supply them with an HDCAM master or Blu-ray. Getting an HDCAM master made is expensive and I thought I might want to make more Blu-ray discs in the future so I jumped in and bought a LaCie Blu-ray Recordable drive. The discs themselves are relatively cheap at about $10. I can also burn discs in 5.1 surround sound, which is neat.

To get there I had to do a couple easy things. One—I up-rezed the footage from 720 pixels (which we shot in) to 1080. Two—I brought it into Encore, made a menu with a play button and burned a disc. It was amazing how simple it was. I paid a lot of money for FCP Studio and it’s frustrating Apple hasn’t gotten around to supporting Blu-ray yet. Anyway, no matter. Encore was so easy to use I may just switch altogether. Plus, the integration with Photoshop is pretty slick. I didn’t really get into the software enough to put it through its paces but it looks great so far.

The print looked great in a huge theater! We shot on the HVX-200 in 720/24p with an adapter and cinema lenses, blew it up to 1080 for the master and when you watch it in a huge theater, it looks like film. Kind of amazing really.

So there you go. I hope that helps the other film/video people out there that have been helping me with advice and moral support.

Poster

Here’s a first crack at a poster.

2009 Wish List

- More time to write

- Nikon d90

- Magic Bullet Looks

- 2nd Dell 24 inch monitor

- A talented producer to collaborate with on films

- A talented writer to collaborate with

Accepted

We Are Croissan’wich got accepted to the Beverly HIlls HD Film Festival. This will be the first time going to a festival with my film in it. I think every other time I’ve been to a festival I came away resolved to make a film. Then naturally I wouldn’t do it for one reason or another. And over many years of doing that, I ended up pretty frustrated with myself.

This time’s different. And that’s probably what it means to me more than anything else. For once I didn’t put it off. Showing at this festival—in Beverly Hills, no less—it feels like there will be a moment where I can exhale and say: I did it.

Details:

Fine Arts Theatre
8556 Wilshire Blvd.
Beverly Hills, CA 90211
phone: (310) 360-0455
December 28 :: 10PM