Harry Bossert and the 26th Santa Barbara International Film Festival
Story Published: 08th Feb 2011
Our very own Harry Bossert in Year 11 was recently invited to attend the 26th Santa Barbara International Film Festival in order to show the film he made in response to a song written and performed by Parry Gripp.
An extract from the local news-press paper in Santa Barbara
"Asked earlier in the year who had been slated for the coveted spot of pre-screening credit film - which displays the SBIFF logo and sponsor - Executive Artistic Director Roger Durling was surprisingly cagey.
Last night the Arlington audience saw why. The film is a LEGO-Animation set to "Megaphone", the Parry Gripp song that mocks SPIFF's own history of confusing ticket practices, rising tempers outside sold-out shows of local filmmakers, and sometimes pushey volunteers. Parry Gripp, the Goleta native who fronted the rock band NerfHerder, wrote the song in 2009, but a year later 14-year-old fan Harry Bossert made his own animation and posted it on YouTube.
And now in January 2011, after much negotiating, the starstruck Bossert, fresh off the plane from London (he lives in Surrey to the south), stood next to Gripp. Could his friends back home believe it?
"I just told them what had happened," he said. "I don't really understand what was going on at first. And the closer toward the date it slowly set in and right now I am completely buzzing because it is finally happening." His parents were farther up the carpet, letting their son have his day on the red carpet....
Santa Barbara Film Festival www.sbiff.org/