Gettin’ to the AFM
I uploaded my recorded pitch video last night, It embodies a culmination of five or six days of memorization, rehearsal, rewrites, rephrasing, and retries, and that’s just for one project, it’s been and exhausting couple of months preparing our creative project(s) for Market.
The AFM (American Film Market) is the biggest market for film and television products in North America, to paraphrase Frank.
“If you can make it there we can make it anywhere.”
As such, the AFM has been an ongoing goal for us since 2015. Every year for those seven years, we set out with the goal in mind of attending the AFM in November, and every year save this one, we have failed.. We almost achieved it in 2019 having acquired the airline tickets, but fell short on the conference tickets.
It’s a costly endeavor for a couple of self-employed, self financed mediaphytes. One of the positive pivots of the pandemic, though it presented as a hurdle at first, the desolation of my freelance business, freed my mind to consider alternate opportunities for financial income. In fact, I started to consider any work as a means to our end. As such this past year has found me in some odd places. I’ve been in Prison with an Avenger, Trapped by Hurricane Katrina, I sold t-shirts at comic con(s), and even ran away to join the circus. But it worked!
Today as we finalized our pitches, At 50 years old, I picked up my first ever passport, with the flight booked, tickets bought, and the hotel confirmed. Its t-minus one week, to the end of a 15 year long journey that began in 2006, when we won a chance to pitch our “web series” idea to a panel in L.A. with very little idea of what we doing, our naiveté then, cost us everything, but it forced us to gain, knowledge, determination, perseverance, patience and everything you need to be filmmakers.
We are off the AFM. to sell our wears, as proof.
Wish us luck, we are sure to need it, competition is going to be stiff and plentiful, and likely, we will be at it again next year.