Reports from the SXSW front

The Aurora gals are fresh from their pilgrimage to Austin and the SXSW Film Festival with news and new friends to report on. Great to meet and see in Austin were fellow jurors (for the Time Warner Cable and Ovation TV Young Filmmaker Award) Bart Weiss (who has screened his Dallas VideoFest at Aurora numerous times), Marcy Garriot (accomplished documentary filmmaker behind the film Inside the Circle), our favorite East Coast organizational crush, Rootop Films, and our favorite West Coast friends, Wholphin, not to mention several of our Houston neighbors including artist Kelly Sears, Microcinema International, SWAMP, and Houston Film Commission, and the filmmakers behind the Anderson Fair documentary For the Sake of the Song. A highlight of the trip was Aurora founder Andrea Grover's panel on Indirect Collaboration: Collective Creativity on the Web, and though we missed these, we wish we had been able to see Matt McCormick's (who appeared at Aurora with the You Are Here seminar curated by Bree Edwards) film Some Days Are Better Than Others, and our Texas Filmmaker Production Fund Workshop Host Bryan Poyser's (of Austin Film Society) new film Lovers of Hate. If any of our readers are Austin-bound, you still have opportunities to catch some of these films in their final screenings. See the full schedule here.