A DOC'S JOURNAL by Scott Solary

Good Hard Working People
Contact: Luci Westphal
admin[at]goodhardworkingpeople.com

WORLD PREMIERE: ALL GOD’S CHILDREN, FIRST DOCUMENTARY EXPOSING CHILD ABUSE WITHIN PROTESTANT EVANGELICAL MISSIONARY COMMUNITY

Filmmakers and Eight Abuse Survivors Attend World Premiere at Sarasota Film Festival on April 5th and 6th

(Brooklyn, NY, March 2008) All God’s Children will have its world premiere Saturday, April 5, 2:30pm, at Regal Cinemas Hollywood 20 Theater 8, with a second screening on April 6th, 3:30pm, at Regal Cinemas Hollywood 20 Theater 11, as part of the Sarasota Film Festival. Eight members of the Beardslee, Darr and Shellrude families, who are featured in the film, are scheduled to attend both screenings along with the filmmakers, Scott Solary and Luci Westphal. Q&A sessions with the filmmakers and participants will follow both screenings.

All God's Children is the first documentary to expose issues of child abuse within the Protestant Evangelical missionary community. The film takes a personal look at the consequences of the abuse through the eyes of three former missionary families. While the parents were stationed in remote outposts throughout West Africa, the children - starting at the age of 6 - were required to attend Christian and Missionary Alliance (C&MA) boarding school in Mamou, Guinea. Cut off from their parents and without any reliable means of communication, the children suffered extensive abuse at the hands of the all-missionary staff.

It took the children decades to acknowledge the effects the abuses had on their lives. When they finally dared to speak out, the C&MA denied all allegations and refused to help. The children and their parents took action...

In Attendance:

- Scott Solary, New York (director, producer, editor)

- Luci Westphal, New York (director, producer, camera)

- Ann Beardslee, Florida (parent & former C&MA missionary, member of MK SafetyNet)

- Dr. Howard Beardslee, Florida (parent & former C&MA missionary, member of MK SafetyNet)

- Dianne Darr Couts, Ohio (former student)

- David Darr, Ohio (former student)

- Dr. John Darr, Massachusetts (former student, professor of theology at Boston College)

- Rev. Richard Darr, Illinois (former student, Methodist pastor)

- Marilyn Shellrude Christman, Washington (former student, member of MK SafetyNet)

- Beverly Shellrude, Ontario (former student, member of MK SafetyNet)

ADDITIONAL PRESS CONFERENCE:

The MK SafetyNet is an advocacy organization for abused MKs. Many of their founding members are featured in the film. They are holding a press conference preceding the premiere on Saturday, April 5, 1pm at the Selby Public Library, 1331 First Street, Sarasota.

Website (Trailer, Hi-Res Stills, Press Kit & Synopsis): http://www.allgodschildrenthefilm.com

To request a DVD Screener of the film: info[at]allgodschildrenthefilm.com

Filmmakers Scott Solary and Luci Westphal are available for interviews.

Please contact Luci Westphal, admin[at]goodhardworkingpeople.com

Good Hard Working People, LLC, P.O. Box 170077, Brooklyn, NY 11217 http://www.goodhardworkingpeople.com/

BLOGS:

Good Hard Working People blog: http://goodhardworkingpeople.blogspot.com/

Scott Solary blog: http://blogs.indiewire.com/swestphal-solary/

Posted by Scott Solary at 10:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Once we finally had our 2 master digi-beta tapes dubbed, it was on to producing all the promo needs for the festival. Roman Bodnar also edited an awesome trailer which I posted previously. If you're a Facebooker, check out the fanpage we set up.

First we made the graphic for our screener DVDs:

Then we needed postcards:

FRONT

BACK

and of course, the poster:

Posted by Scott Solary at 07:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

edited by Roman Bodnar

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REPOSTED from Good Hard Working Blog:
Oh, how naively I wrote on Monday, March 17th, about finding some flash frames in the master DVD of All God's Children and worrying that it would take ALL DAY to get a new one made. It took ALL WEEK! Every single Groundhog Day started with me proofing the DVD I had finished making by 2am-ish the previous night - only to find something else wrong (flash frames, glitches, drop-outs, fuzziness, interlacing... - all things that did not reveal themselves on the Avid timeline) and having to figure a solution to the issue and starting the process of Avid to tape to FCP to Compressor to DVD Studio to DVD (with variations) over again. Every day I watched the film at least twice - without ever looking away as to not miss any frame-long errors.

And I thought on Monday I might risk my sanity. You should have seen me by Friday.

But the spirits of low-budget filmmaking prevailed again and we now have a master DVD. By the way, one of the secrets was to add a frame to each clip going into each cut, skipping Compressor all together and bumping up the bit rate on DVD Studio to 6.8.

Two more days of interlacing (Why is all the Super 8 3:3 instead of 3:2 pull-down? Must be the slow-mo.) and drop-out scares (How in the world can drop-outs sneak in during the encoding of an uncompressed QuickTime file out of Avid?) and with the help of the wonderful Scott and Jessica at Atmosphere Pictures I now have a final DigiBeta master. Actually it's in the mail and should arrive in Sarasota at noon today!

All in all during the last 10 days I must have watched the film about 15 times without ever looking away (not counting the times I watched it casually while it was being digitized or laid off). But a week like that is totally worth it when you receive unexpected emails from people who somehow have heard about the film and share their own stories of abuse at missionary boarding schools and their anticipation of our film helping them and others in making this topic public. I hope the film won't disappoint.

What I know won't disappoint is the trailer Roman Bodnar has cut together for us. It should be up here and on the website later today or tomorrow.

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At last the mystery is revealed:

That explains this classic video from Black20:

Happy Easter Everybunny!

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Iraq by the Numbers:

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It's the Iraq war's 5th year "anniversary" today (March 19). Check out today's MobLogic show, "5 Years in Iraq."

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Me, Jeff Marks and Adam Elend hold Lindsay Campbell and we all scream. All we needed was the fourth producer, Clark Caldwell, to complete our MobLogic crew, but he had returned to New York earlier that day.

Karina Longworth and myself. I know the photographer took a better pic, but this is what I could find.

Here's some more

Posted by Scott Solary at 04:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

I've put off posting about this until everything was in place, but at last I can blog that "All God's Children" will have its world premiere! And it's in my home state of Florida. I feel like I've probably told everyone that reads this blog the good news, but wanted to make sure it gets its own post and that the words of happiness and thanks are recorded in the annals of blog history.

If you scroll down the right of my hompepage and in the Categories section and click on the "All God's Children" link, you'll see how long I have been keeping record of the progress of our film. Basically, right after we received the Jerome Foundation New York Media Arts Grant. We had interviewed the Beardslee family, but the Darrs and Shellrudes were yet to come.

I feel very fortunate to have been on the minds of the indieWIRE guys when they were thinking who to invite into the new world of blogs they would host. The only thing cinematic going on in my life was the doc, so I figured I'd use the blog platform to serve as a journal for the films production, hence the name, a doc's journal.

Regardless of why you make films, after you've shot and edited and often before, you begin thinking about who will see it and where. We thought we were finished many times before and have entertained many festivals as its' first screening. We've even contemplated the sad realities of not having that opportunity at all. But then comes the kind words of Tom Hall telling you that your film, "is a powerful story of abuse and the path to recovery and we would be honored to show the film at the festival." And we knew Sarasota was perfect. We have only heard rave reviews of the staff, screening venues, accommodations and hospitality from filmmakers and industry alike.

So we will have two screenings within the opening weekend of the festival: Saturday, April 5th at 2:30 and again on Sunday, April 6th at 3:30. All but two of the participants in the film (as well as their families) will be attending. Most of my family and even a posse of our dear old Florida friends will be attending. There is also rumor that there will be a press conference. And because the denomination has a large retired population living in Florida, we may even some controversy. We could only hope.

We are utterly ecstatic to be premiering our film at this years Sarasota Film Festival. We think it's a perfect fit and an awesome place for the film to begin this new leg of its journey.

Posted by Scott Solary at 09:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

We successfully launched our new show, MobLogic on Friday. If you haven't seen our beautiful website, CLICK HERE. While you're there, please check out our archive, subscribe to receive daily updates and leave us a comment on your thoughts. We really want to be reflective of what the people are thinking so let us know. If you want to know what makes Lindsay the smartest and most talented actor/host in the world, read this interview in CNET. Here's some other press: Silicon Alley Insider got the inside scoop, followed by New TeeVee. Luci also has a great post at the Good Hard Working People blog.

I can't say enough about all the people I work with. Talented and driven would be a gross understatement. Check out our "ABOUT" page to see the faces behind the machine.

We have a Flickr page that we're trying to populate with pics from our misadventures and I'm trying to Twitter often. If you want to follow my silliness, search Scott Solary.

I've met a lot of filmmakers who will also be in Sarasota screening their films as well as some nice festival programmers who expressed interest in seeing "All God's Children" so keep your fingers crossed that they will like it enough to program in their festival.

We're having our launch party today at 3. I'm hoping the weather holds out. I'll have to post more later when I can catch my breath.

Posted by Scott Solary at 12:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This year's SXSW fest is going to be a busy one for me. I'll be wearing several hats throughout the week.

First, we'll be launching MobLogic.TV on March 7th. I'll be producing a show on Friday in and around SXSW to air on Monday. We'll overnight it and have the guys in New York cut it to air on Monday. HERE'S OUR FACEBOOK PAGE.

I've been instrumental in organizing the party for Sunday. Our decision to have ours at 3:00 has proven to be a good one. There seems to be 5 other parties happening that day, but they're all starting at 6:00 or later. We'll be draining our last margarita by then.

Secondly, I've written about the Exquisite Corpse Filmmaking Project I'm a part of and on Tuesday, I'll be in front of an unknown amount of people talking about my process of making my 4-minute contribution. I shot my part 4 weeks ago and handed off my minute to Scott Colthorp a week later. VIEW MY LAST MINUTE HERE! I have to say, I'm really proud of my piece. I can't talk about it too much yet, because other filmmakers aren't allowed to know. Shhhh!

Thirdly, I'll be going down to Austin this year to promote "All God's Children". We received great news last Monday night: our film was accepted to the 2008 Sarasota Film Festival and will be screened twice between the 5 - 8th of April! We are so excited by this news. It will be our official World Premiere and we can think of no other festival that would be better than Sarasota. I hope to meet some people who are also planning on being in Florida in April that will come support our film.

We have lots of family and friends in and around Florida who are planning to attend. There is also a sizable C&MA community there as well. It should be a full screening with a lively Q&A afterwards.

The festival makes its formal announcement very soon. It'll get its own post after that. (and I'm sure plenty more surrounding the experience). This is the beginning of yet another leg of a long trek with this film. One we've been looking forward to for quite some time now.

Somewhere between all that I had a birthday. It was a wonderfully relaxed couple of days with friends, food and shopping.

Posted by Scott Solary at 08:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)