Music Videos and a stripper pole…

Uh… this is a little late, but I guess after recovering from festival time and then going through all this random personal stuff, I just didn’t have a whole lot of time to blog about this earlier.

So! For those who didn’t know, last year, I was invited to curate the 1st-ever program dedicated to the music video for the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival. I think last year I only had like a month to curate. Lol (it was nuts). This year, I got to curate again (w/ a whole year to curate~ phew) and we decided to extend our reach outside of the U.S. (big shout out to AliveNotDead.com for hooking it up w/ some videos from Asia).

During the selection process, I saw a wide variety of videos. I actually had to do a lot of scouting like last year. I think many people didn’t/don’t know we have a music video program. So I have to thank YouTube for being so handy during those couple of months. Mucho thanks to Abe Ferrer, Angela Makabali, and Maya Santos for helping me a great deal with getting everything together, too!

Come show time in May, the program sold out and we had a huge turnout of filmmakers in the house! We also had a very productive Q&A no thanks to me as the audience members really had some great questions to ask!

(that’s me behind the podium w/ a crapload of filmmakers on the stage)

Yikes, Asia Pacific Arts even talks about the program here.

Anyway, for those of you who missed it on the big screen, I can only show you what you missed via YouTube (there are a total of 15 videos):

Full program listing here.

And that concludes my recap on that.
For all you Asian Pacific / Am music video makers out there, watch out for ‘09 Call for Entries. I’m expecting to see lots of great work again :]

P.S. - I guess I should recap the live music event / afterparty that followed. Turnout was great, I believe a lot of people enjoyed themselves, but the one thing that sucked was that the place was just not meant for live music (especially the kind of live music we planned for). The following picture may describe it all… mellow acoustic rock and a stripper pole (why?! it wasn’t there when I scouted out the venue…). Also, what you can’t see is all the chaos going on opposite the performance… noise of a busy bar.

Lucky for me, Scott Tang, Karin Anna Cheung, and Big Phony (pictured above) are all just so freakin’ awesome. They handled the situation like the pros that they are. My emcees, Hans and Mike from Tatum Jones and Kathy Uyen were also super. I especially liked it when Kathy yelled at the chatty mouths to “shut the f*ck up.” Hahaha. Despite all that, we ended up all having a good time and getting tacos next door, which is always a good way to end a night.