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Seen at Cutters
Fast Forward Co-Founder Sean U'Ren is also an assistant editor at Cutters, an award-winning Chicago-based editing company.
Check out a brief intro to Sean's commercial work at www.cutters.com.
For more information about the, check out the Fast Forward Film Festival website.
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ChicagoFilm.com correspondent and multimedia maven Renee Basick treads the "nocturnal frenzy" of the Fast Forward Film Festival and lives to tell the tale.
Time + money = creativity is the veritable Hollywood axiom. All I have to say is thank gawd this is Chicago and that formula need not apply.
Sure, there is a perversity in the artificial constraint of either budget or deadline, but the independent fervor in this city allows for reveling in the guilty pleasure that can only come of a kind of creative self-love.
Enter the Fast Forward Film Festival. Trust me, words that begin with the letter "f" are abundant over the course of the 21 hours that 30 teams have to write, shoot, edit, master, and screen the three minute video they are expected to produce overnight. Friendships are tried, relationships crumble. Humility is learned. No, I take that back--it's a two-by-four you are whopped over the head with. Perhaps I'm being a bit harsh, but if so, it is only because it was my first time thrown into the pack of rabid video dogs that prowl the city during this nocturnal filming frenzy. I've been assured that the first time is always the worst.
Atom Paul's namesake coffee shop, Atomix (1957 W. Chicago Ave.), is the regular launch pad for the event, hosting the throng of mildly masochistic "videomakers" who gleefully show up raring to deprive themselves of sleep, square meals and congenial comrades.
"Out of Context" was the theme for the most recent installment of the three-year old quarterly (or whenever they get around to hosting another) festival and, although clever, proved to be a source of further restriction on the already strangling deadline.
The premise was this: U'ren and Paul chose six sets of dialogue from obscure films and television shows and handed them out on slips of paper. All the teams had to use the scripted lines either visually or acted in the order given. By the time I fully understood the implications of this edict, it was far too late to pose as an unsuspecting café patron stopping in for a sticky toffee.
"Sad, tired and confused" was the darkness from which FFFF sprung forth, admits U’ren when probed about the festival's conception. And to further relieve their ennui, the duo imposes themes that have ranged from "Haiku" to "At the Drive-in" and "What Happened to Group 18?" an inside reference to a team that is, as far as anyone knows, still MIA. Each of those motifs inspire imaginative jaunts that could make for some incredibly interesting video.
Alas, I was disgruntled. The two short quips I was left with were not sparking flashes of brilliance nor even, at the least, spurring dim notions. As the crowd clucked and clamored out the door, spilling into the bitter night, I was left staring at the scrap of paper. Blankly.
Atom Paul tries to reassure wavering participants by telling them they shouldn't be intimidated. He tells the following as an anecdote, "One of the best film that has been entered was shot on a crappy camera and had no editing but it was such a good idea that it didn’t matter. It was the audience favorite."
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003: Fast Forward Film Festival
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