Most Hollywood people probably aren't as candid and honest as I am about things. I prefer to just be open about as much as possible. I believe other people learn from my successes/mistakes and in turn relationships build.
First off, let's be honest, AWAKENING has received around 2,200 hits on youtube to date. The responses, though, have been great. A ton of people have responded that they were impressed. One of the local newspapers ran a really large story about the project with some pages in the entertainment section that were mostly full of very large pictures from the set. Local people responded by coming up to me in public and thanking me for posting it online for them to see. People were surprised that we were able to pull it off.
Last night the turnout for the AWAKENING Release/Networking Party was meager. With all the chatter about coming to the party, very few came to the party that weren't part of the cast. Many of the cast had already been committed to other obligations and couldn't attend. -That happens. This party was for the cast/crew, I'm not upset that some weren't able to attend.
When I evaluated who attended and why I found that no one attended because of the newspaper stories. Even though people talked about it, they didn't show up. No one came from the radio interview I did that broadcasted 3 days straight. Of the people who were personally invited (we passed out over 100 invite business cards), only 1 family attended.
What would I have done differently? Just have a room that fits only 50, or dependent on the production, just don't do one at all. I wanted to make sure I had enough room for all the people who had been involved (40 cast/crew) and for their guests. That's why we made a point to have seating for 100+. We then decided that we would open it up to the public. At the end, I don't think the public responds well to this kind of event, even though it was a one-of-a-kind event for this area of Michigan.
There were other factors that played a part in the smaller than expected response. The recession has kept a lot of people from wanting to get out and do things. The tragedy in Japan has people glued to their TV screens (which makes perfect sense) and Governor Snyder's proposal to kill the tax incentive has created a lot of nervousness and negative feelings in the film community and about film production in general. (to reiterate where I stand: My productions have never directly benefited from the tax incentive.)
There's something great that did develop out of the AWAKENING Release/Networking Party. I was able to meet others on a more personable side. When we did AWAKENING, I was just the commander-in-chief of the production. It basically was, "do this", "do that", "cut", etc. I didn't have time to really get to know anyone. But I did perceive, by the way individuals held themselves, what different people were like. So I made some much better connections with cast/crew people from AWAKENING, and met others who were interested in The House. There was some great conversations.
But to reiterate, this party would have been a much better experience had we gone with a smaller atmosphere. It may have also help to bring people into conversations more. The lack of numbers also had an influence on my enthusiasm/focus when speaking.
AWAKENING's response on the internet. I think what has bugged me the most has been the hit counts on youtube. It's not so much the hit counts themselves, but who the hit counts are. When I look into "insights", I can find out who is watching it and where they found it. Of the hits on youtube, almost exactly half come form a site called irove.com. It's this site where this guy trolls through youtube to find odd and different video clips and posts them on his site. I don't know much more about the site. With Facebook it was about 300 hits, the Detroit craigslists (we posted the link with the ad we posted about cast/crew for our next project so people could see my most recent work) 284, and then it dwindles down. With twitter.com it was just 92 hits. (In 2009 I had over 3,000 people watch a clip of AMNESIA in a couple weeks with just a few posts per day.)
Basically, with my invites to people I know, with the people in the cast/crew who posted about it on the internet, there was only 300 views. With the newspaper's sending people to our site to watch it, that number was low too. I'm having a much harder time to be able to figure out the real number here and wonder if in fact some how the views from our site don't count for some reason. If so, then our numbers may have been much higher.
My main point is that after all the promotion, my careful planning, it had very little effect on getting people to watch and share it. The important emphasis is the word "share it". If people really love it they share it. It's the natural human thing to do.
The natural artist thing to do is respond with, "WOW, I must really suck!". But, let's be more objective about this. When I look at demographics, that's when I start to become concerned with the real problem with AWAKENING. It shows that 67% of the people who have watched AWAKENING were males. Of the male population that watched it, over half are between the age of 44-64. Completely the wrong population of people to watch AWAKENING.
Now, I do think that I'm ahead of the curve on this micro-pilot medium. People keep calling it a short or a trailer. That's because they are just relating it to something they are familiar with.
One of the side comments I'm going to make is that I beleive that social media, like we thought it was 2-3 years ago, isn't what it is today. First off, Twitter has become a massive amount of link feeding. People either autotweet links or their blogs, facebook pages, etc are feeding links (people are busy doing other stuff than chatting on twitter like they did back in 2008), and with Facebook a large amount of the people on there aren't "really" on Facebook. They're on a Zenga game like Farmville and it feeds into Facebook, giving the impression that people are on when they really aren't. The fact is people don't really want to talk to "everyone" for months, years on end. The average person just wants a few close friends. I had already been noticing this trend away from SM about a year ago.
Had AWAKENING been released in November 2008, it might have gone viral just by tweeting about it. It may have gone viral on Facebook in 2009. But now... less likely. On those sites things are much more gradual.
My biggest concern is the issue of audience desire. Do people really want to see the next thing I make? I had mentioned before about finally creating the UTOPILAND micro-pilot that I had shelved. I beleive I can find enough VFX artists to help me make it, but even if I found all the money to do it, would anyone really want to see it? That's why I am seriously considering doing a crowdfunding campaign. I want to know whether this concept really has the demand to even make it into a micro-pilot, or if it would just be "shouting into the wind".
With the UTOPILAND micro-pilot I wouldn't publicize it with the local media outlets. I probably would even hold off on much of any mention on Facebook, Twitter, emails. My main focus would be sites like motiongrapher.com and Spyfilms, etc. If they loved it, then would write a post about it.
With THE HOUSE, things are different because there is a much more in-depth plan with it because it's a feature film. We would do a micro-pilot and other character "scenes" that would be posted a long time before the release, to build the demand.
Basically, with micro-pilots, the key is to just constantly make more. The more you make, the higher chance that one of them gains enough attention with the right demographics, to make a real impact.
Monday, March 14, 2011
Thursday, March 10, 2011
Review: The Walking Dead- The Good, Bad and... The Dead People.
I'm going to make a disclaimer first: I'm not a zombie flick fan. That said, I wanted to give a review on the pilot episode of Season 1 of The Walking Dead.
First, I missed The Walking Dead when it first aired. I also missed the marathon that AMC had about a week ago. But my composer friend, Hans Karl, mentioned that I should check out the show because he saw some similarities between it and AWAKENING. (No there's no zombies in AWAKENING, all my dead people stay dead). But there are a few similiarities.
The pilot episode titled, "Days Gone By" clocks at about 1hr 7 mins. Compare that to the pilot episode of LOST that was 42 mins for Part I and 42 mins for Part II. The opening of both LOST and The Walking Dead pilot episodes both start off with the great concept of throwing the audience and main character into the middle of a big concept by having them wake up. With The Walking Dead he doesn't wake up on the first shot, but eventually that's what happens.
The Good. One of the things that drew me to see the pilot episode of The Walking Dead was the epic scale of this concept. Like LOST, the pilot teasers and screen shots didn't look like the "traditional" TV show but more like an large scale movie-like TV show. I liked this as a concept. This was the high point of the TV show... But....
The bad part of the pilot was the fact that even though there is this large scale epic feel to the TV show, we don't get to Atlanta until the end. The beginning started pretty big with the character waking up in the hospital and discovering that he woke up to something unbelievable. But that middle section is where things drag. This is also the part that makes the pilot go from the 42 minute long episode length that it should have had to the 107 minutes that it is. I feel that they could have kept the dad and son that find the main character to just simply characters that push the story plot forward. My thought as a storyteller was, "get the main character to Atlanta ASAP!". Give me the big stuff. The reason I'm watching is to see where he's suppose to be going.
They could have really developed the entering of Atlanta. That shot of him on the highway going into Atlanta was cool. I wanted to see that. But it was basically just a couple shots. They didn't really develop that part. There wasn't really much of a development of the urgency to warn him not to enter from the group outside that heard him on the CB.
My favorite part was the when he entered the city. The ending was great. It was intense. I wondered if he was going to surivive, even though I knew that he would. The whole thing with the tank was a great and even the last piece with the voice.
But my concern goes back to the length of the middle section between when he woke up and getting to Atlanta. There was also the opening scene with the child zombie that I debated whether that was necessary either. I wonder if the producers were concerned that it would be compared too much to a LOST opening if they started right off with him waking up. But my feeling was that the child zombie scene was either in the wrong spot or was unnecessary. I know the it would have been seen as a "shocker moment" for television. But the problem was that by the time I saw the pilot episode that specific scene had been shown so much on youtube by fans that it lost it's shocker effect on me.
The Ugly. My serious gripe is not with the show. I thought over all the shown was spectacular. I would never had watched a zombie TV show if they hadn't done something unique with this story. But it's what they did with the show after it aired that bothers me. The producers of LOST and ABC did an brilliant move with their episodes. Right after airing they would be available online, for FREE, with limited commercial interuptions. This service is provided by Move Networks. By doing this LOST continued to build a larger and larger fan base online for each season. Even now people in other parts of the world are finding episodes and watching them.
But AMC made a serious mistake. If you want to watch any of Season 1's episodes you have to go to Amazon or itunes or Cinmea Now's site. It cost about 1.99 per episode. First I tried Cinema Now, I paid the 1.99 download fee. Then went through the pain-in-the-butt process of trying to watch the thing. At the end I got frustrated and sent them an email about my frustation. Then I went to Amazon and finally watched on their streaming service.
Here's my beef with this process. First, by creating a pay wall you seperate an potential fan of season 2 from getting addicted to the show. Second, I already get cable. I'm paying about $25 for my cable, which includes AMC. Why do I have to pay another 1.99 per episode, to download, so I can see what I missed? Why can't they offer a streaming service option like ABC does by working with Move Networks. I'm pretty sure Move Networks advertising would equal the 1.99 per episode fee that I had to pay to Amazon or the other options. I didn't want to own a copy, I just wanted to see if the show was worth all the hype. AMC should have made a sizeable profit of the advertising from the original airing that any money after that is just extra. Wouldn't it be of greater value to the show to multiply their fan base by offering a FREE, with limited commerical interuption, option, then "nickle-and-dime'ing" customers over a 1.99 per episode charge? I would think fans for the next season were of a greater value. Maybe I'm wrong.
This is my review of the pilot to The Walking Dead., Season 1.
First, I missed The Walking Dead when it first aired. I also missed the marathon that AMC had about a week ago. But my composer friend, Hans Karl, mentioned that I should check out the show because he saw some similarities between it and AWAKENING. (No there's no zombies in AWAKENING, all my dead people stay dead). But there are a few similiarities.
The pilot episode titled, "Days Gone By" clocks at about 1hr 7 mins. Compare that to the pilot episode of LOST that was 42 mins for Part I and 42 mins for Part II. The opening of both LOST and The Walking Dead pilot episodes both start off with the great concept of throwing the audience and main character into the middle of a big concept by having them wake up. With The Walking Dead he doesn't wake up on the first shot, but eventually that's what happens.
The Good. One of the things that drew me to see the pilot episode of The Walking Dead was the epic scale of this concept. Like LOST, the pilot teasers and screen shots didn't look like the "traditional" TV show but more like an large scale movie-like TV show. I liked this as a concept. This was the high point of the TV show... But....
The bad part of the pilot was the fact that even though there is this large scale epic feel to the TV show, we don't get to Atlanta until the end. The beginning started pretty big with the character waking up in the hospital and discovering that he woke up to something unbelievable. But that middle section is where things drag. This is also the part that makes the pilot go from the 42 minute long episode length that it should have had to the 107 minutes that it is. I feel that they could have kept the dad and son that find the main character to just simply characters that push the story plot forward. My thought as a storyteller was, "get the main character to Atlanta ASAP!". Give me the big stuff. The reason I'm watching is to see where he's suppose to be going.
They could have really developed the entering of Atlanta. That shot of him on the highway going into Atlanta was cool. I wanted to see that. But it was basically just a couple shots. They didn't really develop that part. There wasn't really much of a development of the urgency to warn him not to enter from the group outside that heard him on the CB.
My favorite part was the when he entered the city. The ending was great. It was intense. I wondered if he was going to surivive, even though I knew that he would. The whole thing with the tank was a great and even the last piece with the voice.
But my concern goes back to the length of the middle section between when he woke up and getting to Atlanta. There was also the opening scene with the child zombie that I debated whether that was necessary either. I wonder if the producers were concerned that it would be compared too much to a LOST opening if they started right off with him waking up. But my feeling was that the child zombie scene was either in the wrong spot or was unnecessary. I know the it would have been seen as a "shocker moment" for television. But the problem was that by the time I saw the pilot episode that specific scene had been shown so much on youtube by fans that it lost it's shocker effect on me.
The Ugly. My serious gripe is not with the show. I thought over all the shown was spectacular. I would never had watched a zombie TV show if they hadn't done something unique with this story. But it's what they did with the show after it aired that bothers me. The producers of LOST and ABC did an brilliant move with their episodes. Right after airing they would be available online, for FREE, with limited commercial interuptions. This service is provided by Move Networks. By doing this LOST continued to build a larger and larger fan base online for each season. Even now people in other parts of the world are finding episodes and watching them.
But AMC made a serious mistake. If you want to watch any of Season 1's episodes you have to go to Amazon or itunes or Cinmea Now's site. It cost about 1.99 per episode. First I tried Cinema Now, I paid the 1.99 download fee. Then went through the pain-in-the-butt process of trying to watch the thing. At the end I got frustrated and sent them an email about my frustation. Then I went to Amazon and finally watched on their streaming service.
Here's my beef with this process. First, by creating a pay wall you seperate an potential fan of season 2 from getting addicted to the show. Second, I already get cable. I'm paying about $25 for my cable, which includes AMC. Why do I have to pay another 1.99 per episode, to download, so I can see what I missed? Why can't they offer a streaming service option like ABC does by working with Move Networks. I'm pretty sure Move Networks advertising would equal the 1.99 per episode fee that I had to pay to Amazon or the other options. I didn't want to own a copy, I just wanted to see if the show was worth all the hype. AMC should have made a sizeable profit of the advertising from the original airing that any money after that is just extra. Wouldn't it be of greater value to the show to multiply their fan base by offering a FREE, with limited commerical interuption, option, then "nickle-and-dime'ing" customers over a 1.99 per episode charge? I would think fans for the next season were of a greater value. Maybe I'm wrong.
This is my review of the pilot to The Walking Dead., Season 1.
Monday, February 28, 2011
My Film Production Announcement A.K.A. “When Things Get Tough, Push Harder”
Originally I was going to back off a bit after releasing AWAKENING. But I started to get excited about one of the projects I had pushed aside. I saw some of the actors in AWAKENING and thought, “what better talent pool of actors to work with than the ones right here.”
As I was set to release AWAKENING on Feb. 28th, I made sure to try to dodge as many important events as possible. I didn’t want to release in January because of Sundance. Everything seemed perfect. Then Gov. Rick Snyder (Michigan ) made his big proposal. In it he was basically is killing the Michigan Film Tax Incentive and many, many other serious cuts to other programs. Even though I didn't benefit from the Film Tax Incentive, a thought came to me, “If you’re going to make something happen, make it happen NOW!”
So… Here it goes:
UTOPILAND: It was the first micro-pilot I was planning on making It has a AVATAR-sized feel to it (not blue people, I mean the scale of the story). Utopiland is the story of a world that lives in skyscrappers. The rich living on top, the poor on the bottom. It starts with a body that falls from the top of Utopiland. Who this person is and what happens to him will change his world forever.
Because of the scale of UTOPILAND, after many discussions with some CG artists, it just seemed like something way too big to tackle without a sizeable amount of money. If it was made it would probably redefine what Indie filmmakers could do, but it was just so big. Finally, after seeing MODERN TIMES, I was inspired. I figured out how to pull off this micro-pilot and make it look epic without making the work itself epic. To pull this off I am going to take another shot at the crowd funding world, but do everything different. I’m not going to just have a crowd funding campaign, but make it into something that is a real social experience where the supporters become part of the movie. Sound different? If you like this idea, let me know.
The House: This is the feature film I had struggled to make since Fall 2008. First I tried the traditional investor route, then I met a great actress/friend named Christy. We were going to have Christy play the leading lady part of Anne Peterson. But the investor money just wasn’t coming. Then I came to simple conclusion. There are tons of talented actors right here in Michigan. I had some incredible talent on AWAKENING, and that was just a small amount of the talent that is here. So, even though it would have been great to work with Christy, I finally came to a conclusion, for the sake of economics, I wouldn’t be able to work with her on this project. I would use all local actors. I am going to shoot the vast majority of the film in Michigan and make it look like Maine. Then I will shoot select scenes that have to be shot in Maine, in Greenville, Maine. I'm not well connected or rich but, like many other Indie filmmakers I know, I get really creative in what it takes to make a film look great.
If there is anything I have learned growing up it’s simply:“When things get tough, push harder”.
Below is AWAKENING for everyone who wanted to see it:
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