Premiere Night - The Seattle Freeze

Tonight was the world premiere of the documentary short I co-directed, The Seattle Freeze, produced by the UW Extension Independent Filmmaking class that I've been involved with over the past year. 6 documentaries in total were directed by members of the class, ranging from such subjects as deafness to mental illness to wind power.

Our documentary doesn't cover quite so much political ground -- instead it focuses on an observed social phenomenon that may or may not exist in the Seattle region. It's quirky and actually managed to provide a bit of comic relief, garnering a good handful of hearty laughs from the audience.

The whole experience of watching the film with an audience of about 100 people was really interesting. Seeing that they were humored in spots I never expected was completely fascinating and also very thrilling at the same time. I totally did not expect much reaction at all, having watched the movie in its entirety some 50 billion times over the past several months. The fact that people seemed to enjoy it made a lot of the little issues and sticking points over the months seem very trivial in the end.

After the movie we had a good Q&A with a lot of questions that really showed the audience got into it. For being the first of the series of documentary shorts it did pretty well, and overall I'm satisfied how things turned out.

I suppose this means I'm officially a "filmmaker," though as Robert Rodriguez says in his 10 Minute Film School, "The moment you think that you want to be a filmmaker you're that."

The Seattle Freeze will be available on YouTube soon.