For those who will be in the Bronx tomorrow, the documentary will be screened at 2PM in the Mertz Library at the New York Botanical Garden. If you’re there early, I’ll have a carnivorous plant display and will be available to answer carnivorous plant and documentary questions. Hope to see you there!
More information is at: https://www.nybg.org/event/the-allure-of-carnivorous-plants-with-jonathan-kui/
Hi everyone!
First off, the good news, and then the better news. :)So, we had our final pre-release screening at GeekFest Toronto earlier this month, and I had the privelege of seeing Matt Kaelin and Eric Kunz online as three of us participated in a brief Q&A session following the screening. The Q&A was livestreamed to Facebook; for those who have FB, the link to the video is below. The CAPTIVATED panel starts about 20 min in.
At the awards ceremony the next day, we found that we had won Best Science Film!
And the news you’ve all been waiting for…
The documentary is now available for full public screening!
It can be viewed on FilmFreeway: https://filmfreeway.com/projects/2099002
…and on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76vcW2nYvQE
Do share and enjoy!
Those of you who have a digital copy included in your rewards perks will have a download link sent out in a few days. Any further updates will likely be little extras, but if you have any other questions, please reach out. In the meantime, thanks to ALL of you for this incredible seven-year journey!!!
Happy New Year! I’m ringing in the new year with some exciting news: CAPTIVATED is now an Official Selection at Canada’s 2022 GeekFestToronto film festival this February! This will be our Canadian premiere, and will be an online event, due to the pandemic. Deeply grateful for the selection!The screening will be February 13, 2022 in the 3PM block.
For more information on the festival schedule, please visit: http://geekfesttoronto.com/
In accordance of the guidelines for the festival, the full public online release of the film will now be tentatively pushed back to the end of February, with more news on that front to come. Here’s to 2022!
So, we’re gearing up for our final screening of 2021, which will be online as an official selection of Germany’s Independent Star Film Fest online festival. CAPTIVATED will be one of the films screened on their Vimeo On-Demand festival stream, available from November 13 to November 28th. I don’t have ticket information as this time, but the stream (and more information) will be available here:
https://vimeo.com/ondemand/ISF2021
(CAPTIVATED is “episode” #31 on the festival stream.)
My thanks to the Independent Star Film Fest for selecting our film for screening!
More news to follow in December…
My sincerest thanks to the New England Carnivorous Plant Society for their support in making the documentary happen, and for hosting our latest screening yesterday at the Tower Hill Botanical Garden in sunny Boylston, MA! I was delighted to return, and to have the opportunity to see the documentary on the screen that we captured on film five years earlier.
Our next piece of news is that we are an Official Selection at the fourth annual Independent-Star Filmfest Munich in Germany! The event date is November 13, 2021. The website hasn’t yet been updated with all of the selections, so I’ll have more information as it arrives…
Greetings, all!
I’m very pleased to announce that the 2021 New England Carnivorous Plant Society Show will be hosting a screening of the documentary on Saturday, October 2nd from 3:00-4:00PM. This will be a slightly truncated version, for time, but I will be available to answer questions at the tail end of the film.
I’m so grateful to them for allowing us to screen, and I’m very excited to return to the Tower Hill Botancal Garden in Boylston, MA for this amazing event. I encourage anyone within driving distance to attend if you can. There’s so much to see, so much to learn, and there will be plenty of vendors on hand to offer a wide variety of plants to buy. I do hope to see some of you there!
More info is at the Tower Hill Botanical Garden’s website at https://www.towerhillbg.org/
Happy August to you all… Just wanted to give some updates on the screenings front.
So, I’m delighted to say that this film did in fact have its world premiere screening yesterday afternoon at the Strong Chance Film Festival in Brooklyn, NY. The entire festival was a delightful experience, and I’m so grateful to the festival for selecting this documentary for inclusion in this year’s slate.
Looking ahead, I was contacted by the organizer of the Sweet Life (Dolce Vita) Film Festival in Agropoli, Italy, that the documentary is an Official Selection for this year’s event, being held August 10-14. I don’t have the exact screening date/time yet, as their schedule (at the time of this posting) has only been released for the first day’s worth of screenings.
And moving into September, CAPTIVATED is also an Official Selection at this year’s Lost River Film Festival, in San Marcos, TX. This is the fourth year of the festival, which is held simultaneously across three different venues for a great variety of programming. Our screening will be at the San Marcos Public Library location, at 10AM on Saturday September 11. The screening will be free for all who may wish to attend. (Their website schedule will be updated with this year’s schedule in the next week or two.)
If the laurel for Lost River FF seems unusual, it’s because the
traditional olive branches have been replaced with diving mermaids. From
their message to me: “Our laurels are
comprised of a pair of mermaid tales, as this magical underwater being
is San Marcos’ mascot with a storied history in our spring-fed river,
which emerges from our downtown and flows 260 miles to the Gulf of
Mexico.”
Still more to follow…
I hope this message finds you all well! I bring some good news… We’ve gotten in our first month’s returns on film festival submissions, and while some of you may have already seen these updates on our Facebook page, I wanted to put out a formal update.
1) CAPTIVATED: THE ALLURE OF CARNIVOROUS PLANTS (2021) is now listed on IMDB. (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14636936/reference) The credits listed there should be complete, but if you find that your name is missing or misspelled, do let me know and I’ll work on getting it corrected. (Those of you with businesses will be listed under either Production Companies or Other Companies.)
2) The documentary won Best Documentary at Mabig Film Festival, a small festival from Augsburg, Germany now in its 3rd year, I believe, with a screening event in December. (https://www.imdb.com/event/ev0008446/2021/1?ref_=ttawd_ev_1)
3) It also won Best Documentary at the first season of Festopedia Cinemas and Scripts, a small event in India (https://www.festopediacinema.com/season-1) now accepting submissions for its second season.
4) …but the greatest news of all, for me personally, is that our film is an Official Selection for this year’s Strong Chance Film Festival, a film festival in its 3rd year in Brooklyn, NY, screening this August, with details to follow. I’ll be in attendance, and am very excited as this will be our first official screening! I’ll have more info on SCFF and our screening there, soon…
More to follow as events develop…
I’m delighted to report that the film is done. The final version is rendering in 1080p overnight, as we speak. My thanks to the principal subjects, whose feedback over the past week helped to introduce a number of minor tweaks to the film.
With the tweaks, the runtime shortened by about four seconds, but it’s still clocking in at just over 78 minutes. I’ve started a project page on FilmFreeway and will upload the full render tomorrow for festival submissions, and will be reaching out to a few other possible venues to see if anybody would be interested in screening it.
Once screenings start, we’ll have the streaming links for the backers who had that in your rewards. It will likely be through Vimeo, more info on that as it gets closer.
And once the screenings are through, those of you who had the downloadable copy in your rewards will get the links to that as well.
Annnnd once all that’s done, only then will the film be distributed wide, so you backers will definitely have a period of exclusivity, with my thanks.
Alright, I’ll keep you posted… Things are ramping up…
I hope this update finds you all well… If this is TLDR, and you need the key points to skip the rest:
**Movie is basically at picture-lock. Runtime is
79 minutes. Score is done. Currently normalizing audio levels for
dialog, score and voiceover narration. Will submit to cast and to NECPS for screening consideration in July for their fall 2021 annual show. Then festival submissions.**
The full story:
Greetings, all. The last I provided an update was just as the
pandemic was beginning, and I’d been holding off on doing any more
Kickstarter updates until the movie was totally complete, mainly because
I didn’t want to post another “Yes it’s still coming!” message, but
today I received some encouragement to do so, just to provide “Proof of
Life” of this project. In that vein, I’m going to try to give a general
timeline of what’s been happening since the last kickstarter update
about a year ago, so that you’ll all be aware that work HAS BEEN
CONTINUING and is near completion.
March 24, 2020 – A rough cut assembly, including all credits and titles is completed.
March 30, 2020 – Rough cut is sent to composer Adonis Aletras for scoring.
April 14, 2020 – Score is completed.
June 13, 2020 – Completed the “Greater Good” coda segment, highlighting the “take home” message of the film, featuring interviews and footage from the non-principal subjects (i.e. Brooklyn Botanical Garden, Brooklyn Public Library, NY Hall of Science, Queens Botanical Garden) and rough credits sequences.
September 7, 2020 – Second pass at edits on rough cut, for clarity and continuity. Identified problem areas where camera was out of on interview subject. Began manual unsharp masking of all identified areas. (This would continue for several months into January 2021.)
September 14, 2020 – Final images for end credits requested from Corey Bennett. These are a treat. I won’t spoil them here.
November 14, 2020 – Voiceover narration recording sessions with artist Kristyl Cuenca-Sisko begin.
January 3, 2021 – Based on recommendations from Adonis Aletras, contracted someone to clean up some of the interview audio recorded in a greenhouse (with FANS!) in Ithaca. In hindsight, I had overestimated how well I’d be able to clean up the audio on my own in post-.
January 14, 2021 – Voiceover narration recording sessions complete!
February 15, 2021 – Video lock on film. Work on normalizing/balancing audio levels on dialog, voiceover narration and score begin.
So, yes, we’re almost there. Working on the audio levels has been
nearly as time consuming as working on the focus issues in post-, but
the end is at least in sight now. As of three nights ago, I had just
made it to the “Summer” section of the film, so we’re getting there…
The goal is to get everything wrapped by July 1st, to send the final product to cast for them to see, and to the NECPS in hopes that they’ll find it appropriate to screen at their fall show. I don’t anticipate posting any more updates until July, at which point I’m fully anticipating the update to be “it’s finally done” because this project has been five years of my life, and I’m as eager to get it out there as you are to finally see it.
There were two warring quotes that have struggled for dominance in my mind over these past five, long years.
“A work of art is never finished. It is merely abandoned.” (Da Vinci? And I don’t plan to abandon anything.)
The other quote was from Matt Kaelin, from the Spring section of the documentary…
“You can’t keep changing things forever. There has to be a point where you say ‘This is it.'”
And (as I told him two weeks ago when I came across his line again) that point is fast approaching. But we’re not there just yet.
If anybody has questions, please feel free to post them here in Kickstarter as well, I’d be glad to answer if I can…