seanmobrien: Reblog This Film Festival.

I’ll never forget Jacob’s face when we walked into the venue and he saw this, when he stopped me midway down the aisle to gasp and hug me, both of us already a little drunk, after weeks of staying at work til 10 watching submissions with our clipboards and complete lack of experience, emailing and calling venues and poster guys and sticker guys and sponsor guys and tumblr friends and tumblr friends and tumblr friends, staring at  falling asleep in our Aeron chairs after more phone calls, “Well, what are you going to do for lights?” “Oh, we need lights?” “What are your tech specs?” “Erm, we don’t know what those are,” “How many people do you expect?” “Lady, we have NO IDEA.”

The coolest part about this, for me, was knowing that we could do it only because we had so many people we knew we could rely on to make it awesome. I knew I could call Will any time of day and get advice and pep talks and ask him what hotel we should stay in and could i really pull this off, I could ask Ned where to have the after-party and he would dj for us and pick me up at the airport and take me to ameoba record and dance with me in the aisles, Lou would know the owner at Cinespace and help me get through to him, then offer to take everyone’s pictures, and order the lights I knew nothing about and he would take me aside and hug me and tell me to be proud, I knew that Brian would scout the location, would take his camera to the event, then edit together everything at the very last minute only after mailing a 8x10 piece roll of plastic back to New York for us. I knew that I could call Eric Spiegelman when I had the idea and ask him if it sounded right, I could ask Justine if it sounded right, i could ask Ronen if it sounded right and ask him to bring his friends, I could ask Peter Atencio if it sounded right and ask him to make a movie for us, I could sit with Fred Seibert and talk the whole thing out and he would give us tips to make it better; I could get on the phone with Ben from Current and Weston from MakingOf and Patrick from Funnyordie and ask all of them if it sounded right, and each and every person would offer to do anything they could. And most importantly, throughout the entire weekend and especially the night of, I could look up and see an old friend or a new friend or an Internet friend I hadn’t met yet, and we could squeal and hug and jump around a little bit, and that is probably the only reason to do anything.