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My Short Film is Screening in New York
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My Short Film is Screening in New York

and other ramblings

Hey, so I wanted to do a newsletter this week about a short film that I just completed.

This is not something that I composed for. This is something that I've been working on for a while, before I was diving deeper into the composing stuff.

And it's called Beyond Being Well. And it was based off a podcast, which I made in 2020.

I'll get into the story of that stuff, because I'm going to talk a bit about it. But first, I just want to say the film is screening this week! This Thursday and also next week, December 20th. The first one is at Videodome and the second one is at Millennium Film.

I'd love to see anyone who I know or I don't know who's a subscriber and they live in New York to come on out.

Also, Millennium Film has the film streaming online that they're screening that night as well. So I will put that link in there. And if you follow me on Instagram, I'll likely share that the night of as well.

And then there's hopefully going to be some screenings of it in the new year as well.

Short Film Inspirations

But yeah, it's been a long time coming.

To give a bit of a backstory and then go into more of some lessons that I learned from doing it: The movie was based off of a podcast, which we did like a short run of episodes of in 2020 and it was something I made with my brother and I over the pandemic which we had talked about doing for a while, basically it was a health, alternative medicine satire podcast and we had just talked about doing it for a while.

It was inspired by our dad who's a holistic dentist and is interested in a lot of the alternative medicine stuff. So he had kind of introduced us into the world of that. And it was also getting, I would say, more mainstream online in general.

But yeah, we always found a lot of that stuff funny and interesting. And I think that's probably my favorite type of things to write about. It's just something that I'm genuinely interested in, but at the same time, it's something that is kind of funny and laughable, probably because of contradictions within it or within that world.

But yeah, so we finally made that podcast in 2020 (peak pandemic) and we developed these two characters and we did improvised episodes that were fictional. They were fictional characters kind of meeting and then making the show.

It's an easy binge if you're interested. The episodes are like no more than 20 minutes usually. We try to keep it short and really tight. There's a sort of narrative that goes through the thread of the episodes.

But yeah, and then kind of life got back. Life was happening a bit more. And so we stopped doing the podcast...

And then I had moved back to Maryland for the pandemic from New York. And I was getting ready to move back to the area in New York. And I really wanted to film a short... It was actually originally a pilot episode for a series based on the podcast. But it kind of got cut down into a short film. Anyway, I just wanted something to commemorate the time. Because interestingly enough, my brother was also going to leave and go start actual medical school.

So it was just something we wanted to make to commemorate this time that we were able to have together coming back, which we didn't think we would, you know, because of the pandemic. And so it was a little thing that we were able to do.

And we enlisted my good friend, Sam. He's my co-director for it because I acted in it. And then he got us through an edit.

So that's how we kind of came to put the film together.

Short Film Lessons

I would say there's definitely some lessons that I learned because it's been a long time since we shot it. We shot it in 2021. And it's like only a 15-minute movie, but it took quite a while to finish. And that was mostly because we had issues with the hard drive. Of course, we didn't back it up because we're dumb. And so we made that mistake.

We were able to luckily get a string out of an edit before those issues happened. So that's kind of what we had to work with, unfortunately, moving forward.

I still think I was happy enough with that cut that we were just kind of tightening it from there and the takes we had ended up using were the best takes.

But it was unfortunate, especially for, like, color purposes and, you know, a variety of things. I think what we came out with was definitely something I'm happy about, and I want to put it out, and I've been wanting to screen it to places just to see what the reaction is.

But, yeah, that was, I mean, everyone is told this. Hopefully everyone does it. But sometimes even backup drives have issues too. And this can happen.

It's a little bit of a lesson just sitting on something. And especially if you don't have a deadline and you haven't already made something and you don't already have an audience waiting for something else… it really doesn't make a lot of sense to rush things. So sitting on things for a while longer to see what might come from that is really good.

And I think I was able to do that, have a number of iterations of edit and decide that it was more effective as a short film than a pilot. That kind of thing.

So yeah, that is kind of what I wanted to share. But I would love to see anyone from the area come out to the screenings. And yeah, I'll keep everyone updated on if there's any more screenings in the new year.

And also look out for the following post is going to be like around two weeks from now. I'll be posting near Christmas time. My best-of list, which I did last year as well. So it'll be my favorite music, my favorite movies, that kind of thing.

Everyone jumps the gun with the lists. I mean, maybe I should even wait until after, into January. But, yeah, I think I'm going to post that right before the holiday.

But, like, even today, I was listening to an album that came out last week. And it's great and it's probably not made many lists.

I always feel bad for those December releases to kind of get lost but I admire people who choose to drop something [then]. It's unfortunate if they don't want that choice but yeah…

And then also, one more thing is look out for a release of mine and other friends who were putting together our It's Christmas Volume 9, our ninth year of doing Christmas covers to raise money.

This year we're doing it for anera.org. They're giving aid to Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon, I believe. And we did that last year, and we'll be doing that again this year.

And if you're reading this, too, and you are interested in submitting a track, we still have a couple more days...

If anyone feels inspired to record something or has had something in a chamber for a bit or was going to release something anyway that's Christmas or holiday themed, please send it my way and I'll be happy to include it before that gets released.

I think we're going to release it on the 15th, but the deadline is the 12th. It's kind of casual. So, yeah.

Those are some little musings and updates there at the end. But thanks for reading and listening.

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a podcast by will dinola about music, art & actually doing it
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