Consider Tuesday night another notch in Austin’s bedpost of filmmaking opportunity as the Austin Film Festival debuts its new year-round Conversations in Film series. This first installment “Script to Screen: Making the Short Film” will target the writers among us, but will also be useful to directors and filmmakers who need distribution tips for their shorts.

Three Austin area award-winning filmmakers will lead the discussion, as well as screen their most recent/notable shorts:

• Steve Collins is the writer/director of Gretchen, a feature length film that won the Best Dramatic Feature award at the 2006 Los Angeles Film Festival, and had a strong showing at SXSW that same year. Gretchen is a reprise of Collins’ earlier work, Gretchen & the Night Dancer, an award-winning short about an awkward teenage girl who struggles with letting her boyfriend get to second base. Our favorite thing about Collins is that he wrote a movie called Mercenary of Justice that stars Steven Segal. Yep, that Steven Segal. Meeting Collins could be the awesomest experience of our lives.
• Jenn Garrison wrote and directed the Student Emmy award-winning short Checkout, a tale of a tempestuous love triangle amidst the scanning and stocking of a grocery store. You may also know Garrison from her days as a DJ at 101X, which brought about her brilliantly funny 2002 documentary Prize Whores, which chronicles a community of people who plan their lives around free radio giveaways. Hi-larious.
• Scott Rice, a 2003 UT alum, wrote and directed rom-com Perils in Nude Modeling, as well as the documentary The Adventures of Mad Matt. Both films were nominated for Student Academy Awards in 2004, making Rice the first person in history to be nominated for two Student Oscars in different categories in the same year. He’s kind of a big deal. He is also the man behind the mischievous Script Cops shorts, which you might have caught at last year’s Austin Film Festival.

Collins, Garrison and Rice will take you through the glorious process of not only getting that idea in your head down on paper, but also filming, producing, and distributing your short film. You should bring that cute little Moleskine notebook and write down everything they say, as it would cost you some serious dough to get this kind of insight at the 40 acres (all three filmmakers guest lecture at UT.)

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Script to Screen: Making the Short Film
A Conversation in Film presented by the Austin Film Festival
Tuesday, July 10th
Coldtowne Theater, 4803 Airport Blvd (next to I Luv Video!)
6 pm, $7 for AFF members / $12 for non-members
[Tickets]