I'd like to thanks everyone who's followed our project. I've enjoyed reading your emails and tweets!! Thanks also to those who attended festivals and watched our humble little documentary!

With the conclusion of the CT Film Festival comes the end of the LoliGIrls festival circuit. I've received numerous requests for the documentary to be put up on YouTube, and now that the festivals are done I will think on how to best release this short film. It will be available for the general public online, but where and when it still TBD.

You might be wondering where we plan to go from here. For those of you who haven't been following this blog, the LoliGirls crew has changed a little and is now the "American Lolita" crew. We've decided to take our little film and embellish upon it. Our goal is to shoot a 60-65 min feature length documentary that will examine the lolita fashion subculture as it presently exists in the U.S. The documentary will focus more on why girls choose to wear this fashion, and what it says about young girls growing up in America today. We'll examine feminism, cyber-bullying, eating disorders, the media's portrayal of women, among many other issues. The film will use lolita as its prime example, a foil if you will, to examine all these other issues as they exist in our society today.

I know that's probably a poor explanation of the project, but this is the nature of documentaries...sometimes you don't know how you'll enlighten an issue, the footage you gather will decide that for you. So we have been shooting here and there, slowly gathering broll that we can use for a funding trailer. This is probably the main difference between "LoliGirls" and "American Lolita". LoliGirls was a pet project, something fun I wanted to do with my summer last year (that of course grew into a much larger production), and I channeled quite a bit of my own money into the project to have it come to fruition. I didn't make a dime on LoliGirls. "American Lolita" is a larger venture, and we will need money to have it made properly. This means we will also need to make some money off of it to cover all the money we've already invested into the project. In order to raise awareness of the project, and hopefully to aid our funding efforts, we've decided to completely redo this website and also to create a 'mook'. The mook will celebrate the American Lolita (of course!) and contain essays, interviews, lots and lots of photos, articles, and an index of lolita communities in the U.S. The mook will be sold (we're hoping for it to be finished early 2011) online and possible at cons. Besides bringing in a little money that we can then funnel into the project, we hope for the mook to shine some light on our project and spark some interest.

The mook and website are still in their infancy, and within a few months I sincerely hope we'll make some significant progress on both.

So stay tuned!!!

So LoliGirls will be screened in Vancouver April 17-18! I haven't heard the exact film line-up yet, I will let you know when I know! Hopefully some lolitas from that area will be able to stop by! I'm not confident that I will be attending the festival (due to monetary reasons), but I'm still keep my options open.

Also, for a movie development update, after a successful art meeting on Monday we decided to use "American Lolita" as our working title for the movie! Hopefully this will makes things less confusing and help to distinguish between our completed short film and our soon-to-be-completed movie.

Be sure to check this site regularly, we are developing a brand new website that will look a lot more professional and will be easier to navigate. The site will make it easier to see the various projects that will accompany this movie venture, and we will also be sure to keep you updated on the progress of LoliGirls on the festival circuit.

I'd like to thank you all for your support in our efforts:)

Hello everyone and I hope you all had a safe and happy New Year's celebration!!

With the arrival of 2010, and also with the chaos of the holidays past, the LoliGirls team are getting back to work! Our goals for this year:

1) Get LoliGirls: The Story Behind the Frills and Bows into as many festivals as possible!

With each festival, our documentary isn't not only viewed and enjoyed, it's recognized. We're not only interested in feedback, but we're looking for people interested enough to invest money in the development of a feature-length documentary. Which leads us to our second resolution-

2) Develop and shoot LoliGirls: The Movie!

First step: create a funding trailer that we can use to approach potential investors. I'll admit that this is my first time raising money for a film (I don't think the fundable site for LoliGirls counts) so it will be a learning process. Fortunately, my associate producer is well-versed in this area of film making, so I'll be relying on her expertise to get us pass this crucial part of the film making process.

Now, I'd like to take this space to clarify a point. With the LoliGirls short, some folks expressed concern over us filmmakers making money off the film. They felt we were, in theory, exploiting them in order to make a buck. I completely understand this sentiment, however I have to explain something: in order to make a movie, you need money. And, you need to make money to pay back those you took money from. On top of that, you want to make a profit so you can apply that towards making your next movie. During the filming of our short LoliGirls, we made a negative profit. I financed most of the film out of pocket. Here's something for a little perspective- during one afternoon of filming I spent xxx. Have of that went towards drinks and food for the crew (it was blisteringly hot that day and we didn't want our talent to faint!), the rest went towards gas and camera equipment. That might not seem like a lot of money for a big production, but for this small project that started out as a weekend activity, it's quite a bit. Of course it was totally worth it, but my bank account took a bit of a blow last summer.

If you have any questions or concerns about the money raising/spending part of the filming process, please don't hesitate to contact me via our contact form:)


So here's a call out to all you lolis! Please let me know of any big lolita events and/or any film festivals in your area! We're still on the lookout for festivals to send LoliGirls, and we're currently searching the globe for lolitas and lolita communities to possible include in LoliGirls: The Movie! If you're at all interested please get in touch with us. You'll probably make it into the credits of the movie for your assistance:D

So from now on "LoliGirls" will refer to the short documentary we completed last summer, and the Loli Movie will refer to our next project: a feature-length (60+ min) documentary on Lolita.

I've gotten asked on numerous occasions how exactly I can make my short documentary into some full-length. I know it's hard to imagine extending our cute short film! But the Movie will be a lot broader and, although it will have some personalities, it will cover more of the history of the fashion, the philosophy behind it, and how it fits into the American J-Pop culture scene. So for research purposes I've been following a number of lolita blogs (lifestyle and non-lifestyle) as well as keeping an eye on larger communities such as EGL. I've also enlisted the help of a loli expert;)

Everything is still very much in the preliminary stages, but I'll post frequent updates on our progress here.

In January I'll most likely be visiting Tokyo Rebel in New York (camera in tow) to conduct some interviews. I was told that after Christmas they would have most of their Lolita lines in stock. Also, I'm going to work on getting a test screening of LoliGirls at NYU to get some audience reactions that will hopefully help me with the Movie concept.

So that's all the news for now!

Check out the LoliGirls Interview in Sucrerie magazine! (with a first look at the official movie poster!)

LoliGirls is now officially in postproduction! This means that I must capture all the tapes (over 20 miniDVs) and attempt to organize all the chaos. At the same time I've been organizing promotional material for the guests attending the September premiere! I know, it might sound like I'm getting ahead of myself planning for the premiere, but it's going to be a huge event with (maybe) a mini-fashion show and some other little events (they're a surprise) along with the first showing of the finished documentary. I've designed and ordered some special gifts for those who generously donated to our fundable site (they just came in the mail today, they look awesome!), which will be given out on the big day.

So when we started this project we estimated the documentary to clock in at 7-10 minutes. I'm still working on the editing script, but it's looking more and more like the finished product will be somewhere between 10-15 minutes (maaaaybe longer!). It's tough cutting down the footage, since I love it all, but I know in order to keep the attention of those who are new to the fashion I'll have to keep things tight.

I'm sorry I can't divulge any more info, but you can get your loli fix by visiting Victoria and Aly's blogs daily (you can find the links on the right-hand side of this page).