Photo by Phil Loeb
Tongal is a proud sponsor of this year’s Outfest Los Angeles LGBT Film Festival. With over 190 films screening across LA - along with dozens of panels and industry events - it’s hard to pick our favorite highlights.
The Community team kicked off the fest by attending a packed Opening Night screening of God’s Own Country by first-time feature filmmaker Francis Lee. Lots of
As soon as we arrived for Opening, Marissa and I had a brief fangirl moment when we spotted the incomparable Kristin Chenoweth just a few feet away. She was there to present this year’s Achievement Award to television writer and producer Bryan Fuller. Bryan Fuller is responsible for creating some of television's most memorable and groundbreaking LGBTQ characters, with shows such as Dead Like Me, Wonderfalls and Pushing Daisies, and more recently the highly stylized and alluring Hannibal and the deeply mysterious and mythological American Gods.
As Fuller accepted his award, he spoke about the near-impossible journey he embarked on 20 years ago to represent LGBTQ characters both on the big and small screen. After years of having gay characters repeatedly turned straight by the powers that be, he finally started to make slow but steady progress, citing Pushing Daisies as one of his first major breakthroughs.
Christopher Racster, Executive Producer of Outfest, followed Fuller’s acceptance speech with a poignant statement about how the reasons for Outfest thirty-five years ago still hold true today - and though this has been a momentous year for LGBTQ films, with Moonlight winning Best Picture, there’s still much work to be done.
After the screening, we headed over to the after party where we had the chance to meet with filmmakers from all around the world.
Our sponsorship culminated in a Tongal-led workshop titled Cash In Without Selling Out: Authentic Branded Storytelling, teaching independent filmmakers and creators how to break into the advertising industry without having to give up their individual approach to creative. We covered a range of topics from how to work with brands both on and off set, how to tell engaging and authentic stories in short form, as well as best practices for creating content for different platforms. Much of what we discussed has been a culmination of learnings we’ve gained from working with our own community of filmmakers and from the insights our Strategy Team have put together over the years.
After our presentation, we were joined by filmmakers, Brendan Beachman and Paxeros Creative, lead by Chelsea Bo and Sean Drummond, for an extended Q&A to talk about their personal experiences breaking into advertising and how they find work and keep busy in such a competitive environment.
Photo by Phil Loeb
The purpose of this workshop is to give filmmakers the tools for getting started in branded content and help them identify skills and resources they already have to make the transition a lot easier - as well as teach them how to market their unique visual and creative styles to brands. If you missed out on the event, you can still watch it via our Facebook page here: http://bit.ly/2umOJ3E
We’re very proud to be a sponsor of Outfest this year and to support diverse voices in all forms of media. If you haven’t checked out Outfest yet, there’s still three days left to see some incredible films, including Closing Night’s Freak Show by director Trudie Styler, starring Alex Lawther, Bette Midler, Laverne Cox, and Abigail Breslin.
