Tomorrow is my favorite deadCENTER-related day outside of the festival itself: programming day. Yup, tomorrow is the day we program the entire festival, setting the schedule and venue selections for features and panels. The really fun part, though, is putting together the shorts programs. We get so many quality shorts of all different kinds and lengths that it becomes a struggle to slot them all into related sections. And it’s not just that putting this stuff together is logistically difficult – we all have our personal favorites, and since we’re all passionate about film, things can get heated. It’s like Christmas morning for people who like to argue a lot.

Personally, I’ve got a few films I’m ready to defend to the death tomorrow. One of them, a feature, I know I’m going to have a hard time convincing the others to program. But that’s the fun/point of programming day. It’s your chance to make deadCENTER your own. Winning an argument over whether or not a short makes it in to the festival means you’ve just put your own personal stamp on the festival. Cooler than that, it means that an independent film you saw at random during bag swap will now be up on a screen and thousands of people will now have the opportunity to see it. Very cool.

This will be my fourth programming day, and like the first three times, I’m going to lose some battles (ask me sometime about the fight I lost last year. I loved the film so much I stole the only screener copy we had after it was decided it wouldn’t make it), but hopefully I’ll win one or two as well. Whatever happens, though, we’ll all go get lunch at La Luna, enjoy the films we watch, and, at the end of the day, feel really excited about the great films we get to show to all you lovely people.

And that’s programming day.

-Ian

P.S. – We’ll be tweeting about all of this tomorrow. Follow us @deadcenter