ATL Flick Chick: A Chick at the 2013 Atlanta Film Festival Pt. 1

#ATLFilm365 #AtlantaFimFestival @ATLFilm365

If you read my weekly film event postings, you know the 2013 Atlanta Film Festival started yesterday. Film festivals are a great way to see films that you don't normally see at the multiplex, or anywhere else for that matter. Festivals also give audiences an opportunity to hear from the filmmakers directly about their films. In full disclosure, for this year's Atlanta Film Festival I volunteered to screen submitted films in order to help festival programmers make their final festival selections. I watched over 100 short films and earned myself a festival pass which I plan to make great use. I'm also a dues-paying member of the festival and I highly recommend membership as a way to support the organization and to see some great movies. So enough with my PSA.

This afternoon I saw The Exquisite Corpse Project. In this movie, which was part documentary and part narrative feature, filmmaker and comedy writer Ben Popik had five of his friends write a feature movie script which he made into a film. The catch was that each writer wrote 15 pages of the script (15 pages translates into 15 minutes of screen time), but only had the previous five pages and a character/location list as a reference for their portion of the script. Think of it as a filmmaker's game of telephone. In addition to shooting his friends' script, Ben also filmed his friends throughout the project getting their reactions to each others' portions of the script, documenting their decisions in writing their own portions of the script, and their reactions to the final script and film. So the the movie is the filmed script interspersed with the interviews. It was a really clever way to document the screenwriting process. It also felt like watching a therapy session for writers who also happen to be friends. The filmed script was entertaining as well and wasn't as much of a hot mess as you might think under such circumstances.

Ben Popik was at the screening and says The Exquisite Corpse Project will be available online at the film's website next month.