^{Blog posting written by Brian McCormick, Film, Photo & Visual Arts '12, FLEFF Intern, Wilbraham, MA}

What an exciting (and warm!) day to kick off FLEFF 2011!

Today was the premiere of the Uncorked! webisodes at Cinemapolis and the Opening Gala for FLEFF at the Fingers Lakes Wine Center.

I showed up at Cinemapolis around 6:40PM and the theater was PACKED (the premiere scheduled for 7:00PM). There were students, faculty, actors and actresses, members of the community -- a fantastic turn out.

Once there was a "seat" in every seat of the theater, the webseries kicked off with a bang -- the audience was rolling with laughter within a minute. Having personally worked as crew on these webisodes, I was very ecstatic with the warm reception it received. The webseries is certainly a great visual example of the beauty and allure of the Finger Lakes.

After the first five episodes were screened, the cast and crew stood up to do a Q and A with audience, followed by a screening of the remaining four episodes.

I got a real taste of the unique FLEFF experience when supervising director of Uncorked! and Park Productions Carol Jennings announced to the crowd: "This is the only time someone will tell you to do this, but please, take out your cell phones!" By this she meant to get online and go to the webseries' website, and to send that link out to people -- a certain kind of viral, social media approach that we will keep on seeing variants of during this festival.

Following the Uncorked! screening was the FLEFF Opening Gala at the new Wine Center. This was a great hour or two for people to mingle, eat food and drink fine wine. Meanwhile, a large HD monitor set up in the corner of the room projected the number of hits the Finger Lakes Uncorked! website was receiving. I watched as a few children sitting by the screen yelled out the numbers "998 ... 999...1,000!"

Can't wait for tomorrow's events!