'My Thermonuclear Family' - Fade In awards

I just heard the news: 'My Thermonuclear Family' is a quarterfinalist in the Fade In Awards.
This is the best possible birthday present that the cosmos could have sent my way.

Developments, Surprises and Progress

Most of the time the pace of independent filmmaking is painfully slow as one develops projects and tries to get them off the ground, sending them off into the vacuum then waiting (sometimes forever) to hear back from producers, agents, actors, readers, commissioning editors, acquisitions people, etc. You keep pushing, trying to stay motivated, using all your strength and stamina to move an elephant up a mountain, and all the time you're just waiting for something to hit so you can put it on the front burner and get to work.

Well, refreshingly, the last few weeks have been full of pleasant surprises and progress:

Anniversary Present is starting to get some traction with film festivals (more on that soon) and after months of redesign work, the DVD is finally finished. Copies are now available for purchase on our website Human Scale Productions (just click the 'buy now' button under the Anniversary Present picture). But even more exciting, is that the film now has an international distributor! (we're working on the contracts for the deal now... so more on that later too.)

And on another burner, Charles Mann who we worked with in Africa and who brought us to the Communications Program of Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government to do some lectures back in 2001 has just put the finishing touches on a DVD of our hour-long documentary 'Lifecycles: a story of AIDS in Malawi' and will be distributing the film through his development education organization DevCom. The DVD will also soon be available for purchase on Amazon.

And last but definitely not least, we've been hard at work in our little DUMBO, Brooklyn creativity factory developing the website for our new company Chop Wood Carry Water, and we should be launching the site sometime in the next week... so say tuned...