I just returned from the awards ceremony at Indie Fest, and I am pleased to announce that Yellow Lights won two awards – Best Cinematography, and Best Feature Film!!! The awards were given by the Academy of Independent Cinema Arts and Artists. This makes Yellow Lights an Academy Award-winning film! Okay, maybe not quite. In any event, we were just hoping to win a student film award, so to win the Best Feature Film (overall) was a great honor! Thank you again to everyone involved in making the movie!

Indie Fest was a fun week of networking with other filmmakers, seeing their work, and talking with them about true independent film. We will soon post links to the sites for some of the other filmmakers that we met this week. Most importantly, for all of those who are wondering – we will soon be updating our website to include the graphics of the olive branches surrounding the two awards! Apparently, that’s how you know your movie is real.

[tags] Yellow Lights, indie, Indie Fest USA, movie, award, AICAA [/tags]

Originally posted on YellowLightsMovie.com:

Well, the screening for Indie Fest USA is over. We didn’t get the turnout we were hoping for due to a lack of publicity by the festival’s organizers, but it was great to have our movie play on the big screen at an AMC theater. Those that did come seemed to enjoy the screening and had some nice comments afterwards.

One of the attendees at the screening is a Film columnist for OCWeekly.com. In his blog post about the first day of the festival, he had a nice write-up of Yellow Lights, the relevant sections of which are reposted below. The full article can be found here.
From OCWeekly.com: “Two features came next. The first, YELLOW LIGHTS, was a truly pleasant surprise. A college movie made by college students on their weekends off for approximately $500, it belongs in a class with Tom Huang’s 1999 feature FRESHMEN (full disclosure – I did the DVD commentary for that movie with Tom, but only because I was a fan of the film and asked if I could; I accepted no payment).

Hollywood has an incredibly distorted view of colleges when compared to the truth. Dorm parties generally aren’t that exciting, but merely crowded room were one can maybe get drunk if the keg doesn’t run out too soon. Nerds don’t manage to steal the football quarterback’s girlfriend. Students are dirty and untidy, and their rooms are minuscule. YELLOW LIGHTS, directed by Kevin Tostado, gets it right, though the campus seems so empty at times that it’s almost Kafka-esque; only one character decorates her room with any flair.

The movie opens with an answering machine message (clunky exposition device, yes, but makes sense in context) to our mopey protagonist Brian (Bennett Chabot) from his girlfriend back home, telling him it’s over and never to call her again. But hey, it isn’t long before he meets Alex (Aja Munsell), a total babe who’s totally into him. In an atypical gender-role-reversal, the only problem here is that Brian wants to jump back into an ironclad commitment immediately, and Alex isn’t sure she’s done sleeping around. Also, Brian gets obsessed with his friend Chris’ love life way too much, determined to make sure he keeps his commitments.

Tostado ultimately seems to come down on the side of commitments being detrimental, or at least obsessions about them – I’m not sure I agree, and even though Alex is a babe, the idea of winning her heart while she’s still determined to maybe sleep with other guys doesn’t seem quite like the prize one would want. But Brian’s not me, and as an audience member I’m rooting for what he wants. The sex scenes may be of the extremely truncated “fade-to-black” PG variety, but they turned me on and I’m not ashamed to admit it, dammit.

A better sound mix is needed – early on, it’s clear that Chabot and Andrew Tsang, who plays Chris, recorded their ADR at different times, even though they’re in the same scene. It’s distracting at first, but eventually I stopped noticing. And Tsang needs to bring it more – in scenes where he’s supposed to be mad, I’m not feeling it like I should. Still, I can’t hold these things against the movie because it rings true in ways that teen movies generally don’t.” –Luke Y. Thompson

[tags] Yellow Lights, movies, indie, Hollywood, review, film [/tags]

I have just gotten word that Yellow Light’s screening date for the Indie Fest USA 2007 festival will be on Monday, October 29th at 7:00 PM in Theater 9 at the AMC Downtown Disney 12 in Anaheim, Caliifornia. If you or any of your friends are in the area, we’d love to have you at our festival premiere.

It looks like tickets will run $8.50 each (based on other information on the festival’s web site) and there will be audience choice and best of fest awards given so we could definitely use all the support we can get!

Hoping to see you all in Anaheim in a month!
[tags] Yellow Lights, Indie, Film Festival, Anaheim, AMC, movie [/tags]

On a somewhat similar note, Yellow Lights now has been sent off to the Phoenix Film Festival as well. We’ll hear back in Dec/Jan for that festival in April.

Now to go enjoy my 1-day weekend!

[tags] IMDB, Yellow Lights, movie, Hollywood, job [/tags]

So now that the movie is finished, Tom and I are beginning work on the special features for the DVD to be on sale at some point in the future, possibly on this very site! Things we plan to make are a full behind-the-scenes documentary with interviews of all the cast and some of the crew, a deleted scene, blooper reel, and much more to come. I don’t want to give away all of our surprises. We’re also trying to finish up the trailer. Right now, we’re just trying to add some music to it to give it some more character.

Add Yellow Lights as a MySpace friend and help get the buzz going for our movie! The more people are talking about us, the better chance we have of getting into festivals and having Yellow Lights go somewhere! Keep checking the website to find out how things are coming along with the movie as Yellow Lights slowly starts up its festival run.

[tags] Yellow Lights, movie, indie, Hollywood, Sundance [/tags]

I’m definitely getting more open to working in TV again so I can have a paying job, although I know that’s not where I want to end up working. I just think that it may be difficult for me to get out of TV and back into film once I start down that career path.

On another note, Yellow Lights is almost to the point where Tom and I can sit back and say that it’s completely finished. Tom is meeting with Brian and Sean to do some final music work tomorrow, and then we’ll have a day or two left of work and it will be finished! A month from today is the earlybird deadline for Sundance, and we plan to have the film burnt onto a screener DVD and in their hands by August 18th. With the 15-20 festivals that we plan on submitting to, we need to save costs wherever possible, so submitting early will definitely help.

Starting tomorrow, I’m going to be volunteering at the San Diego Comic-Con. For those unfamiliar with it, it’s the largest convention in San Diego with 100k attendees and showcases everything from comic books to Hollywood movies to Japanese animation. I’m looking forward to the panels showcasing upcoming movies and tv shows including: Kevin Smith’s panel (always entertaining), a Lost panel with the executive producers and the actors who play Hurley and Jin, a 20th Century Fox sneak peek at upcoming movie releases in late 2006 and 2007, and a bunch more.

I decided to dig up some short clips that I shot at the 2003 Comic-Con of Halle Berry blowing me a kiss & Hugh Jackman singing both parts of Summer Lovin’ from Grease. Enjoy!

[tags] Yellow Lights, San Diego, Comic-Con, Comic Con, Halle Berry, Hugh Jackman [/tags]

The “premiere” for Yellow Lights went really well. We had somewhere between 150 and 200 people piled into the auditorium to watch the movie. We got a ton of applause at the end of the movie which made me very excited and happy about the prospects of this movie. We still have some fine-tuning and a layer of polish to add to is so that it will be ready for submission to film festivals starting with Sundance in the late summer. Although I’m definitely curious what the reaction will be from audiences who know nothing about Olin.
I’ve been starting to pack my room up and clean the stuff off my walls. It’s a slightly weird feeling, but it still feels like it hasn’t quite me yet that I’m going to be done with Olin. Maybe during the ceremony?? Maybe I just feel like Olin is such a part of me that I’m not actually losing it? Who knows?

On Monday, I’ll be packing up most of my room into a minivan and starting to drive across the country. I’ve never done a road trip of that extent before, so it will definitely be a cool experience. I’m not sure where I’m going to be staying after the first night yet though…

To the Classes of ‘07, ‘08, and ‘09, I have a lot of friends amongst your classes and I look forward to hearing how you guys make Olin even more of an awesome place in the future. Feel free to keep in touch with me. I’ll also be at campus every once in a while, and I plan to be at each of your graduations.

To the Class of 2006, you all are so amazing. I feel so lucky and privileged to have been a part of your class. It’s been great being one of your guys’ Senior Class Reps and I hope you’ve had a fun and enjoyable last week of events leading up to Commencement. I’ll be proud to walk down the aisle tomorrow with all of you and I definitely want to hear what you guys are up to!

My new email address will be kevin.tostado (at) alumni.olin.edu for those who want to stay in touch via email. I’ll be in San Diego for most of June and hopefully in Los Angeles/Hollywood after that.
[tags] Olin College, graduation, Yellow Lights [/tags]

Sadly, my time at home in San Diego for break is already quickly coming to an end. I’m only here until early Friday morning and then I’ll be flying back to Boston. It’s always nice to see my friends from home and see how things have slightly changed.

I haven’t really done any posts in a while because I’ve been so busy at Olin with things for Yellow Lights or for SCOPE or for CORe stuff.

To be more specific, in the last 2 weeks before break, my SCOPE team ran a 22-person focus group spread all over the Boston area involving cellphones with a program that we had developed. We had to coordinate all of the meetings as well as providing technical support for the buggy software that we had written. Luckily, the program was working decently for a majority of the ten days that the focus group was going on and we feel like we received a lot of justification for the decisions we’ve made to this point, which was good to hear.

In Yellow Lights, we’re slowly winding down with filming. We’ve got about 8 scenes still to film, 3-4 of which have dialogue, and we’ll hopefully be done with filming by the end of the first weekend in April. We’ve already begun the tedious editing process and so far we’re happy with how things have turned out. We may need to do some dubbing for the outdoor scenes, but luckily no complicated reshoots.

Last night, I was thinking about the fact that I only had two months left until I would be graduated from college. It’s still weird to think about, I guess.

Oh, one other thing was that I finally got to see the 2006 RX-8’s in person and I’ve picked the color and model that I’m going to order tomorrow! Here are a couple pictures as well as a link to all the pictures of the Phantom Blue RX-8 that I’ve taken.

[tags] Yellow Lights, RX-8, RX8, Olin College, San Diego [/tags]

Since November, we have started principal photography. We’ve filmed 10 out of approx 50 scenes and finished 2 out of 9 shooting weekends. The filming has generally taken longer than we expected it to, and we didn’t originally budget in time for costume changes, makeup fixes, or pizza breaks on the longer shoots.

We’ve filmed all of the scenes in June’s and Chris’ rooms because we’re trying to get as much filming done that takes place at one location at the same time (or at least the same weekend). The scene that has taken us the longest to film was the conversation between June & Chris over a game of pool. Although the scene itself is fairly short, the storyboards ended up having 23 different shots of the two characters, and we had to spend time having Amanda attempt to make shot after shot on the pool table until she sunk the balls.

It definitely is going to continue to be a lot of work to spend each weekend filming, not even counting the 1-2 rehearsals we’ll have each week. But in the end, I definitely feel like it will be well worth the effort and time put in.

Hopefully, the official movie site should go live in the next 1-2 weeks. You’ll be able to find it at http://www.yellowlightsmovie.com.

If you have any questions about how the project is coming along, feel free to leave comments on this site, or email me at kevin@yellowlightsmovie.com.

Once it is up and running, our movie updates will be going on that page instead.