Young filmmakers taking it to the streets

Hey, check out these guys I stumbled across the other day on the sidewalk here in Chicago:



They are Dan Shubert (on the left, age 13) and Pierre Spada (on the right, age 12), two independent filmmakers and already veteran contributors to the Chicago International Film Festival (short-film division), through their production company "awHat." They currently have a 30-minute script written for their next production, an existential thriller called The Pond, and are trying to raise money so that they can actually film it and submit it to next year's CIFF. And how are they doing it? Why, they're literally setting up on the sidewalk on the weekends, and showing people their previous films using an iMac and external speakers, hoping that some will be impressed enough to donate some of the money needed to start their new production.

Right on, awHat! Man, there's not much else that brightens my day like randomly running across situations like this here in Chicago - young entrepreneurs in the arts, determined to get their projects produced by any means necessary, even when all traditional routes of financing and support have been exhausted. The arts can always use a couple of more people like Dan and Pierre.

(I'd direct you to their website, so that you yourself could help support them, but unfortunately they don't have one. See - yet another reason why all artists should have one kind of web presence or another, for no other reason than that impressed people like me can link to it.)