After the 6th film, they took a quick break and asked for a representative from each group to come up to the front. Much like the other film race, they went down the line and people said who they were, what they worked on, what they did, and what the biggest challenge (aside from time) they encountered was.
Every introduction got a bit of applause as people remembered what the movies were. So troubles ran the full expanse, from "getting the file to export and burn" to "there was a car accident and we had to go to the hospital". Lots of war stories, and we could all relate.
During all of that I took the time to stand up, walk around a bit, and stretch my legs before climbing back into my little spider hole between the booth benches. It was nice. Also, it was getting warm, so my little spider hole was getting cramped with my jacket crammed in around my knees. Ah well.
Next stretch of films, more reminders that our movie was totally jank in comparison. But we were having so much fun watching, it didn't even matter anymore.
And then we saw our movie's specs flash and heard the first lines of our own.
"AWW FUCK!" we all shouted practically in unison before we all suddenly shrank down into each other on that little booth bench. It was like squeezing a sponge the way we all just kinda clustered together, trying to hide underneath each other.
It was game time.
Aaaaaaand . . . y'know what? We got a pretty damn good response! Lots of laughs for certain parts, and a lot of general interaction for the others. I feel like even though our execution was perhaps lacking, the audience could see what we were trying to do, and they really latched onto that aspect of things.
So when she's in bed and is about to find the clown nose on her night stand, you can hear people murmuring and laughing, going "oh shit, clown nose!" and stuff. Later on with the clown in the mirror, more people going "OH DAMN!" and stuff. Opening the chest, lots of "here it comes..." and "The clown's in there!!!" and stuff.
Then I got bludgeoned to death. Folks enjoyed that.
By far, however, the best part of our whole screening . . .
. . . was right when the movie ended and the credits ran, some dude in the back just shouted, "OH FUCK! THE GIRL WAS THE CLOWN!!!"
That made our night. Soooo much laughter and cheering after that. Loved it.
Anyway, I represented our film for the break. Got to the front late and thus got to speak first. I'm pretty sure I said something like . . .
"Hi. I'm James Leung, and I worked on 'Smile For Me'. [applause] Yeah, I was the guy that got bludgeoned to hell. Um, the biggest challenge for us, aside from just being super hardcore amateur at this... [Alexa laughs from the booth bench]... is that we did have a lot of people working on this, and we did end up having... a lot of creative differences, which sucked. But, apparently our film wasn't too horrible, so hey."
Oh, also, it occurred to me then that Scott McNeil was sitting directly in front of me, front row center, cowboy hat and boots, with a glass of beer.
Fucking Scott McNeil. Booyah.
