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Flatland to premiere at the Sonoma Valley Film Festival

Flatland will be having its film festival run premiere at the Sonoma Valley Film Festival in Sonoma Valley, California, April 9-13, 2008.

It purports to be a great festival experience with three screening of Flatland, not to mention the food and wine that are part of this legendary event.

FLATLAND - Official Movie book released!

Princeton University Press has just a released a companion book to our film FLATLAND, titled FLATLAND - The Movie Edition.

It's really quite a lovely book: hardcover, with the full text of the original 1882 novel, along with color production stills from our film, the screenplay, and introductions written by yours truly and our producer and animator. Best of all, it's only $15 (or less).

You can buy the book at any local Barnes & Noble, on amazon, or at the Flatland Store.

Here's a cool picture of the book in stock at our local bookstore in Austin, Texas:

FLATLAND Special Educational Edition available on DVD

So we just recently launched a self-distribution system for the educational edition of Flatland: The Movie, at http://store.flatlandthemovie.com. We're updating the movie itself with new scenes, a second edition that we hope to offer sometime in the fall to the general public for home video.

Sales are brisk and encouraging! Lots of schools want this movie to use in the classroom, and the feedback from teachers has been great.

This Friday, Aug. 3, we'll be having a screening of the film at MathFest in San Jose, California.

Successful Sneak Preview of Flatland

The audience of Flatland, an all-ages film

We had a great weekend with not one, but two sold-out screenings of the sneak preview of Flatland The Movie, hosted by AFF.

It was a great time to celebrate this milestone. Now that we've had a chance to show our friends, cast and crew this cut of the film (and it was a rough cut, but not too rough to show), we are now working on cleaning up some scenes and doing a new sound mix.

Soon in June we'll be offering a special preview DVD for educators (math teachers, for example), and in the fall we plan to offer a general-release public DVD.

The Flatland creators, left to right: Dano Johnson, Jeffrey Travis, Seth Caplan

Flatland on KXAN-36 Sat. 5/19 8:00 am

I was interviewed on KXAN (NBC Channel 36), about our film Flatland.

We also got a nice blurb in the Austin Chronicle, which calls our film "warm" and "well-written".

A Triumvirate Weekend

This is a really big weekend (May 18-20, 2007). Not only because of the release of my movie FLATLAND, but two of my close artists friends are also having their work released this weekend.

Owen Egerton just released his book How To Best Avoid Dying. It's a wonderful and fantastical collection of off-kilter short stories. I am a big fan of Owen's writing. I optioned his previous book, Marshall Hollenzer is Driving, wrote a screenplay for it, and hope to direct this as a feature film.

Mike Akel made a very good and very funny film named CHALK. It's a mockumentary about first-year public school teachers. The movie begins by telling us that 50% of teachers quit within the first three years, and watching this movie you can see why. The film has a lot of heart-- Mike made this film in Austin three years ago for almost nothing-- and it went on to win awards at all major film festivals, received and Independent Spirit Award nomination, and is now being distributed by Morgan Spurlock. This is the opening weekend in Austin. Go see the movie.

The three of us began our respective projects roughly three years ago: Flatland, Chalk, and How To Best Avoid Dying. By completely strange and wondeful coincidence, our projects all are being released in Austin this same weekend. It feels like a very special time to celebrate our work being shared with a larger public.

But mostly I'm happy to call these two fine gentlemen my friends.

Mike Akel, Owen Egerton, Jeffrey Travis.