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   previous issues: Issue 9, Nov. 2002: "We're Back! We're Bad!" Issue 11, Dec. 2002: "It's a Disturbingly Merry FF Christmas!" With Sergio and Jesse Sorgatz. Issue 12, Jan. 2003: Radio Man vs. Mega Man, Interviews, and The Two Towers Issue 13, Feb. 2003: Lisa Renley and Alan Winston Interviews, Films by Jason Gutierrez, Radio Man Live!, Squiffy Cartoons, and Donald Washington Issue 14, March 2003: Monkey Make Movie 2 and 3, Roscoe Gortsky, Ghostbusted 2, Talking to People About Star Wars Issue 15, April 2003: The Journey of Truesong, Pirates of Film Issue 16, June 2003: Big Camp Fastforward special! With Monkey Make Movie 4 and 5, James and His Toy Robot comic special, and Forum Fun Issue 17, July 2003: Indulgence Trailer, Monkey Make Movie 6, For Science, Torgo: Special Edition, and Ghostbusted 2: Final Cut Issue 18, September 2003: Teenage Bingo Brigade, Radio Man Live Without Pants, The Sugarhigh Crusade, The Tao of Cow Issue 19, November 2003: Camp FF 3 Video, Lover's Poison Issue 20, January 2003: Camp FF 4 special, Ghostbusted 3 clip, Gods of Los Angeles clips WORDS VIDEO FEATURES AUDIO FORUM CHAT TOOLS ABOUT US LINKS   addled mind in the forum! |
 here we are now. entertain us.     FFRevolution (or Fastforward) is a community for filmmakers, and a light-hearted digital magazine celebrating the best from the underground filmmaking movement. We don't take ourselves seriously here. Most of the movies featured here are comedy films, and that's no accident ... amateur comedy films just tend to be a little faster, a little more entertaining. We want to convey through comedy the real love we have for amateur filmmaking, and the joy it can bring. The entire staff is made up of filmmakers, some with seven or more feature-length projects to their name. We shoot on digital video, and we shoot with no money in our pockets. And we're learning and working to make our films better and better. And it's exhausting, and at the end of the day, we need to relax and know that there are other people out there doing the same crazy thing we are. FFRevolution gives us that chance.   Our goal, above all, is to entertain you. You will find this website chock-full of movies to watch, short videos shot just for this site, funny and interesting articles to read, songs and comedy shows to listen to, twisted artwork and anything anyone visiting this site wants to come up with. This community is here to encourage creativity, and you can send me literally whatever the hell you want, anything in any format. We're a modern art museum. Feel free to SEND ME ANYTHING. If it's a creative piece, and it makes me laugh or I just plain like it, it goes up on the site enshrined for all to see. We want to surprise you. We also love to hear when a filmmaker has a new project out, and you can shamelessly advertise your newest and best work in the forum. 
I spent a long time at other filmmaking sites on the web, and the main thing that bothered me was that they had no sense of humor. They were about as much fun as a marble sculpture. And that restricts creativity. For me the viewing of a good film is a joyous act. I laugh out loud when something amazes me. And talking to other filmmakers for me is spending time with some really clever, funny, rowdy friends. Films were made to be seen by an audience of real people who haven't seen the film before. And aren't being forced to like them. Filmmakers work harder when they have someone besides themselves to entertain. If an artist can't laugh at himself and his own work, then he can't grow as an artist ... and a filmmaker website would be a lot more fun if it could let its hair down and, well, party.
In 2001, on a suggestion by Mike Stoklasa, I created a spoof site called Fastforward, that was all joke news about the no-budget world ... "Filmmakers Slip into Madness" etc. I created a new issue a day for a week, and it got a lot of people to start laughing. And the rest of the sites remained as serious as ever. And boring. So about a dozen of us were complaining about how deathly dull all the filmmaker sites we visited were. And one day I was complaining a little more than usual. So Warren Blyth starts bugging me, why don't your just start your own site at Fastforward and we can run it the way we think it should be run? So voila - FASTFORWARD. The cure for the common film site. Hope you enjoy it as much as I do. Welcome to the Revolution.   
Bonus Article: WHY "REVOLUTIONARY?" By Garrett Gilchrist When you first start to make movies in, say, high school, you can feel very much alone ... I grew up in a small town and no one else was making movies but me. I know how glad I was when I first discovered, through the magic of the internet, just how many people were doing the same thing. In time I became connected with hundreds of no-budget filmmaking groups across the country, and made many friends. I've moved to Los Angeles now, and feel far from alone ... rather, I feel surrounded. The vastness of this movement is clear to all of us. Make no mistake, the digital revolution is here. I used to use the word "revolution" as a joke. But hundreds of thousands of young people all across the nation are picking up camcorders and creating their own films, in a quality level that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. And it works both ways - many Hollywood filmmakers are shooting with the same cheap cameras a broke college kid would be. Clearly the face of film is changing, and will change more in the future. It is these young people who will be the great filmmakers of tomorrow. You can see that the more films they make, the better their films get. These young people will not go into Hollywood not knowing how to direct. What we will see from the best of them is original style, purely original cinema ... revolutionary entertainment. What I love to see most in a no-budget movie is originality. I like to think that the point of all good art is to provide an alternative viewpoint. If we were all doing this for a living and shooting ten million dollar indie films, I would still point out that it is our job to look at what Hollywood does and do the opposite. To shoot a movie for no money, at any level, is a revolutionary act. It is personal self-expression on the smallest media level, which is and always has been the level of the counterculture. There was a time when everyone wanted to start a garage band, to start a xeroxed magazine. Today everyone wants to start a film company, to start a magazine on the web. And as there were lots of bad garage bands, there are lots of bad films.  
There is a certain belief in many circles that if you don't have the money to make your film look "professional," you shouldn't shoot a film at all. And a lot of money is spent in these circles making the set look "professional," and the director and his crew themselves look "professional." These people are putting their money in the wrong place, because it doesn't matter how cool and "professional" the director may look onset if the film itself isn't up to snuff. It is professional-looking, perhaps. Slick, and empty. Those who put the most effort into making themselves look good tend to make movies that don't look or play well at all. Because all their energy is put into what's behind the camera, not what's in front of it. And many of the best filmmakers I know (and this is true in Hollywood too sometimes) themselves look quite terrible when they're making a film, they look beaten-up and barely alive, yet the actors and the visuals and everything that's in front of the camera are wonderful. The actual film comes out brilliant. And that's what really matters. That's what the underground filmmaking movement is all about. You don't go "underground" without getting a little dirty. I would far rather see an original, quirky, interesting film shot by someone who's young and learning, than a professional film that's like a dozen other movies I've seen before.  Many of the films I like most, and many of the films you will see on this site, are not slick at all and look like they were shot on toilet paper. But they have a spark that makes them more heartfelt and interesting to watch. And here is my rather odd suggestion to you as filmmakers ... DON'T do the same thing the professionals do. Find your own way of working. Be raw. Be real. Be true to yourself and your own limitations. Find your own story to tell and your own way of telling it. Shoot for cheap. Smell bad. Be unprofessional. In the next generation of independent film, if we want to survive in the sea of passionless product, we need to do everything we can to ignore what the mainstream does and be as unprofessional as possible. 
Because in the counterculture, it is the slick but empty work that is irrelevant. That is ignored, and rightfully so, for there is enough of that in the mainstream. You can seek to make better movies, but the minute you aspire to carbon copy someone else's work in the effort to look cleaner and make your work more palatable, that is the minute your work becomes irrelevant. You are shooting on video, and your work will never look like a 35mm film, so the need is for content, acting and real original stories, above all. At this level you need to be far more original, far more exciting than the movies you grew up with, because your versions are going to look like crap and unless they have that spark, they are crap.
This website is dedicated to the films and filmmakers that have that spark. That pursue their own fascinating, bizarre, quirky vision. That make movies that shock us, that make us leap out of our seats. That make us laugh. Oh god yes, the films that make us laugh. The films that make us feel something. Welcome to Fastforward, filmmakers of tomorrow! Remember: You are the counterculture. You are revolutionaries. Start acting like it, or be trampled by those who do. Viva la revolution, Garrett  |
