The Los Angeles Music Video Festival (LAMVF) is the brain child of recent USC grad Sami Kriegstein. Two years in the making, LAMVF was conceived solely to celebrate the art of the music video.

With the main event scheduled for Sunday, September 26, 2010 at the Downtown Independent Theater, Sami has been building the hype with several mini-events held throughout the summer. Dubbed “All Your Friends,” the mini-events are hour long, monthly screening/concert showcase fundraisers highlighting exclusive “video-syncs:” simultaneous live accompaniment by an artist to one of their existing videos. The latest of these will be held this coming Sunday, June 27th. We hope to see you all there, since they’re a ton of fun. BUY TICKETS HERE~!~

Sami sits down with Serious ‘Stache for an exclusive interview to tell us how she did it. Videos from last month’s “All Your Friends” event can also be viewed below.:

1. How was the festival born? Has this concept been something you had been wanting to get started for a while, or was it more along the lines of a sudden inspiration?

It was a sudden inspiration that I had about 2 years ago. I realized that everyone I knew was either an aspiring musician or an aspiring filmmaker, and that everyone was making music videos…but no one was really watching them. I hadn’t seen most of my friends’ videos and I tend to make an effort to stay on top of their creative projects. So I thought about it and poked around a little and discovered that this festival didn’t exist yet and decided that it should and here I am.

2. Are you the sole founder? What kind of work went into establishing the festival/planning for it/getting it set up

I’m the sole founder but I already have about a dozen people to thank for helping me get this far…and the festival hasn’t even launched yet. I was approaching graduation and grappling with the question of what I wanted to do with my life, and I couldn’t decide (and I still don’t know) but I knew that this festival was something I needed to do at some point. So I sketched out a business plan and talked to a bunch of people involved in this sort of thing and decided that “some point” might as well be right now. The planning for the festival has been really intuitive. Surprisingly enough there is no instruction manual for starting a film festival, so it’s a lot of guesswork. I’m sure there’ll be a huge learning curve.

3. How did you facilitate submissions & how many submissions did you receive? Are submissions still being accepted? How selective were you able to be in terms of what will be featured or not?

We will put out our official call for submissions July 1st, if everything goes smoothly. I was lucky enough to be introduced to one of the founders of filmfestivals.com and fest21.com, which is, among other things, a platform for festival submissions (it’s the main competitor to Withoutabox). We are in the process of setting up the submission system as we speak. My personal taste in music videos is very eclectic, which will probably be reflected in the submissions that are accepted into competition. But I’ll have a team working with me, so it won’t be a unilateral decision-making process, by any means.

4. Tell me about “All Your Friends” & how it functions as a good precursor to the video-fest & how it differs from the main event?

I gave myself the summer to launch this festival, and I decided that the most important thing I needed to do was establish the LAMVF in a tangible way in the community. The concept of monthly mini-events appealed to me because they would help me build relationships with filmmakers and musicians and just as importantly, with the festival venue, the Downtown Independent. Also I needed some event-planning experience. My idea is to have a bunch of different kinds of mini-events, and “All Your Friends” is just one, that involves me (predictably) reaching out to all my super-talented friends, and friends-of-friends, and asking to screen their videos. There is also a live-music element, so the showcase works out to be half music videos, half concert, and we end with the musician playing live accompaniment to a video. I call it “video-sync” and it’s so much fun to watch. Just a totally unique musical experience.

The difference between “All Your Friends” and the actual Festival is that “All Your Friends” is a showcase: there is no competition, just celebration.

5. What kind of turn out are you expecting/hoping for, and what are you doing to promote the event?

I really have no idea what sort of turn out to expect. I hope it will be a big one. Huge. I hope everyone in L.A. comes to see these videos. But it’ll probably just be a bunch of hipsters and my parents.

6. Are there prizes/judges? If so, what & who?

Those are all TBA but I can say this: the prizes are one-of-a-kind and the judges are really incredible.

7. Is there any sort of trend you’ve been seeing in the videos submitted this season? Any sort of common influence you can pinpoint that seems to recur often in any of the videos?

Too early to say. Ask me in 3 months.

8. How did your interest music videos as a medium come about? Do you make any music videos yourself, or music? Why are music videos still a relevant medium & how has the internet caused the everyday music vid to evolve?

I don’t remember how I first fell in love with music videos, but I know that by the time I got to high school I liked them enough to ask for the Director’s Label Music Video Collection for Chanukah. I got the 3-disc set of Michel Gondry, Chris Cunningham and Spike Jonze, and I played the shit out of those DVDs. I just couldn’t get enough of them. I think music videos are such elegant creative units. They’re totally self-contained, and still somehow totally flexible. And they’re universally accessible. Which is why we’re seeing so many more being made, now that iMovie has turned everyone into a filmmaker and YouTube has given them all distribution. I just searched “music video 2010” on YouTube and got “millions” of results. “Music video June 2010” already has 450,000. In launching this festival, I’ve met a handful of people, usually in their mid- to late-thirties, wearing expensive-looking sneakers, who claim, “music videos are dead” because “there’s no money in them anymore.” Which sneaker-dude knows, because he used to DP for Savage Garden or something. No offense to him, but I find the argument made by the 450,000 music videos released this month alone far more convincing. Music videos aren’t dead, they’ve just moved from our TVs to our computers and iPods and phones.

9. Are all of the videos submitted for the festival for new/contemporary bands who would not otherwise have resources to produce a music video, or are there any new interpretations on old videos from established bands? Do the submitted videos have to be produced exclusively for the festival?

We require that anyone who submits a video possesses full rights to screen it, including rights to the music. That is the only limitation. Normally, there might be a prerequisite that a video have been produced within one calendar year of a festival; but since this is our first festival and we have a relatively short submission period, we’ll probably open up the competition to all music videos, regardless of when they were made.

10. What has been the most challenging aspect of producing this event?

Managing my own expectations. I have such huge aspirations for the festival but I know I need to start small.

11. Are the bands that are featured in the video mostly local? or are you getting submissions from all over the country?

We’ll be accepting submissions from all over the world, and offering international and US categories for competition. But the heart of the festival lies with local bands and local filmmakers.

Underwear by FM Belfast (Music Video) from Daniel Scheinert on Vimeo.

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