Ladies and gentlemen: prepare for horn tooting.
So first the backstory. My filmmaking wunderkind wife Courtney and I (the money backer husband) entered the 48 Hour Film Project in Austin back in June. The rules are simple - you have to make a movie from start to finish in 48 hours. It has to be 4 to 7 minutes long, you pick your genre from a hat, and everyone has to use a predetermined character, line of dialogue, and prop (to make sure you don't just use some old film you shot.)
Our genre was comedy, the character ended up being a trainer named Millie Turner, the prop was a fishing pole, and the dialogue was "How did you know I was here?" Our resulting film, "Psych 101", can be found on YouTube (UPDATE creases was kind enough to find the link for me, it can be viewed at http://youtube.com/watch?v=KoIy1Y4qc1o.)
They showed the films originally on June 29, and from there they were judged professionally for a number of awards. Well, the awards show was this past Monday, and we cleaned up nicely!
We won awards for Best Original Score (by yours truly), Best Writing (the whole team, led by myself), Best Use Of Prop, and Best Use of Dialogue - these last two are pretty great to win for this contest, since they are so emphasized, and doubly so because while a lot of entrants view the requirements as obstacles, we go out of our way to make them an integral part of the story.
Unfortunately, we didn't win the top prizes (Best Director or Best Picture), but after the show one of the judges came up to Courtney and told her that both of those prizes had been 2-1 split decisions, and we had been the 1. So, a little consolation (and the winning film was very good, so we didn't feel too bad about it.)
So now I can say I'm an award-winning writer and composer. Hey, you gotta start somewhere ...