Joe M. O'Connell: Dallas VideoFest's AltFiction goes online

Tuesday, March 31, 2020

Dallas VideoFest's AltFiction goes online

I'm getting almost daily notices of film festivals pushing back to at least the summer. More interesting in the here and now are the fests that are going online. The latest is the Dallas VideoFest's AltFiction which will be online for FREE.

Here's the skinny from the press release:

Dallas VideoFest’s Alternative Fiction (http://videofest.org/Alternative-Fiction/ April 2-5) partners with Falcon Events, Dallas-based event producers, which specializes in producing live online and virtual events, to deploy the latest live online technology via a secure and robust platform to create a virtual film festival experience in your living room.

“We are recreating the festival experience, showing films, and connecting filmmakers with their audiences, with technology that is just right for the moment,” said Bart Weiss, founder and artistic director of Dallas VideoFest.

Alternative Innovation

Falcon Events has the technology and capability to include film introductions from the Festivals’ film hosts as well as Q&As following films. Viewers will be able to hear and potentially see the filmmakers as they answer the viewers’ questions. Falcon Events has very strict protocols in place to ensure each film’s content is not copied, and each film will only be available live.

Dallas VideoFest has been innovating with technology since 1987, such as showcasing HDTV and VR in 1988, exhibiting interactive media, and pioneering using files instead of videotapes. We are constantly looking for new easy to connect with audiences, and this is the technology perfect for this moment in time.

“In this time when we are literally homebound, we are looking to be inspired. AltFiction’s narrative films will prove entertainment, inspiration and will be the cure for cabin fever,” Weiss said.

Movie lovers can go online and watch great films at specific times. Like traditional film festivals, there will be questions and answers and intros to the films from hosts and from the filmmakers, but these will be done on video (and unlike the films themselves will be viewable later online). Audiences can ask questions of the filmmakers and have them answered in real-time.

Here's how you do it:

Sign up at OnlineFest.us
Browse content
Register for screenings you want to watch
Log back in before the event start time to begin viewing (an email reminder goes out 30 minutes prior to the start time)

In addition, viewers can expect a seamless switch into a filmmaker Q&A using a text-based tool that allows attendees to submit questions online.

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What they're saying about EVACUATION PLAN

"Tales alternately gentle, dramatic, surrealistic, that collectively affirm the beauty of being alive, even as they acknowledge that all of us face the necessity of making our own 'evacuation plan.' "
-- Brad Buchholz, Austin American-Statesman

" The chapters about Matt and the short stories demonstrate O’Connell’s ability to develop sympathetic, true-to-life characters using intriguing details and compelling dialogue. The stories remind us of those times when a brief encounter with a stranger left us wondering about that person’s past. In Evacuation Plan, O’Connell satisfies that curiosity. "
-- The Texas Observer

"It was very hard for me to put this book down. It carries us through the deepest meaning in life and most painful, most hopeful memories for a wide range of fascinating characters. Based in a hospice, this book could have easily resorted to cheap sensationalism, or whacked us upside the head with stereotypic melodrama, but instead it was respectful, honest, and tender. The characters will stay with you - you may even recognize some of them within your own life. "
-- Award-winning author Carmen Tafolla

"An excellent, thought-provoking diversion from our own inevitable plummet toward the grave, and we highly recommend it to you, the living."
-- Wayne Alan Brenner, The Austin Chronicle

"O’Connell has drawn some colourful and believable characters. The material relating to the hospice and terminal care rings true, all the way to reconciliation and forgiving."
-- Dr. Roger Woodruff, International Association for Hospice & Palliative Care

"The tales are nicely written, and some are quite compelling; “The Male Nurse,” for one, is a dreamlike reverie."
-- Texas Monthly

“Evacuation Plan: A Novel From The Hospice by Joe M. O'Connell is nothing short of remarkable … a novel that walks hand-in-hand with death and yet, somehow, the reader finishes the book feeling inspired to live.”
– The Paisano

"A wonderful blend of lives ordinary but with sometimes extraordinary elements. We all share these stories of life in some way, despite moments of harshness or unforgiving pain. There is always a common thread of humanity and ultimately forgiveness to be found, even if it's in the last moment of life."
-- Elaine Williams, author of A Journey Well Taken

"Reading Evacuation Plan is akin to unwrapping a series of small perfectly-chosen presents. Both human and humane, The book resembles a modern Spoon River Anthology with its vivid, touching glimpses into the lives of those in and around a hospice."
-- Tim McCanlies, screenwriter The Iron Giant, writer/director Secondhand Lions

"In Evacuation Plan Joe O'Connell does for the process of dying what Sherwood Anderson did for middle America in Winesburg, Ohio--he shows us in brief flashes the aching beauty of the grotesque, and shows us how extraordinary small lives and quiet deaths can be."
--John Blair, Drue Heinz Literature Prize winning author of American Standard

"Here's a book so rich with stories of the living, so filled with people's bountiful problems, as well as incidents of wry forgiveness, one realizes over and over the circling forces of life's completeness. It's not a sad tale nor a needless feel-good account but a balanced, sometimes comic, affirmation of what is here and what we all know is waiting."
-- Carolyn Osborn, award-winning short story writer

"The broken, the hopeful, the frustrated, the clueless, and the forgiving touch one another with words, remembrances, and hands. Inevitably, readers will quietly wonder about their own evacuation plan."
-- Will's Texana Monthly

O'Connell's protagonist skillfully navigates under the guise of a writer seeking raw materials for his craft in the stories of the dying, but mines and refines instead the stuff we're all made of. In this finely crafted novel, we come away with much more than the astute observation that many of the best stories begin at the end. But, then again, that notion is also worth a lot.
--Jesse Sublett, cancer survivor, rocker and author of Never the Same Again

"Joe O'Connell's Evacuation Plan--this Decameron of the hospice--encompasses a paradox. Death comes for everyone, but death is the only human universal because everyone dies, and witnesses dying, with private, unspeakable shame. Yet there are a few minutes left to speak. As people die, they tell stories which spawn new stories, which remind us that death is agony, a violent struggle, but so is living."
-- Debra Monroe, Flannery O'Connor Award winning author of Newfangled and Shambles

Joe M. O'Connell

Tuesday, March 31, 2020

Dallas VideoFest's AltFiction goes online

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