Filmmaker Lucas McNelly is spending a year on the road, volunteering on indie film projects around the country, documenting the process and the exploring the idea of a mobile creative professional. You can see more from A Year Without Rent at the webpage. His feature-length debut is now available to rent on VOD. Follow him on Twitter: @lmcnelly.
While a lot of people take Memorial Day weekend off (and for good reason), we don't. Actually, we posted quite a bit of content. And since someone asked, I'm guessing other people might appreciate it being, well, summarized for them, especially since some of it has fallen off the front page. So…
Video
Part Five of our interview with Kris & Lindy Boustedt, an interview that at least I found really fascinating and helpful.
+ A Visit With Kevin Fox -- Without a single review from a film critic and virtually no festival buzz, Kevin Fox is successfully self-distributing DVDs from his house. And he's doing it with magazines. Yes, magazines.
+ Look At Me, I'm Popular!!! -- Just for fun, we took a look at our most-viewed content at the 3-month mark.
+ Seattle International Film Festival -- In which I snuck into one of the largest festivals in North America, then snuck into the VIP section, got drunk with Phil Seneker, and took pictures of actual VIPs (and a movie star).
+ VOD, FTW? -- I took a look at the process behind putting one of my own films on VOD, with the hopes that it might help someone else wade through the muck.
Old friend (and project regular, it seems) Phil Seneker sends me a message on Twitter saying he's got an extra ticket to the Opening Night of the Seattle International Film Festival, if I'm going to be in town and feel like going. I've got a couple of days until I have to be at the next project, so I figure what the hell.
The plan is to meet him at the event's Will Call area and the webpage says the event starts at 5:30, so I spend the day editing UP COUNTRY in some Seattle coffee shops. Around 3pm, I give Phil a call, but there's no answer. 4pm, no answer. I jump on a bus and head downtown to the event (which is more or less next to the Space Needle). I walk by the Red Carpet, where Ty Migota (THE SUMMER HOME) is shooting footage for something, but no Phil. Nor is he at Will Call. His phone rings and rings. No answer. Twenty minutes or so pass. Nothing.
Huh.
Finally, I figure Phil's not going to show and go looking for someone who's working, which isn't actually that hard. They pass me up the line. I explain who I am and who I write for and, simple as that, I've got a General Admission pass and two free drink tickets. Because, really, if I can't talk my way into a film festival, then there's really something wrong with me.
I'm inside maybe 5 minutes when I run into Phil, who's headed out to give me my ticket. Turns out he's actually working the event.
I figure I might as well help him out, since he's actually working, which involves very little. Mostly I keep track of his shotgun mic for him and point it at the podium during the introductory speeches.
One pretty interesting thing they're doing this year is partnering with Starbucks to offer a selection of SIFF shorts over Starbuck's in-store digital network around the country. Essentially, until the end of the festival (June 12), you can go to any Starbucks. Log into their Wifi and it'll take you to the digital network (it's easy. I do it pretty much every day) and you can watch SIFF shorts right there. It's a pretty fantastic way to get some of the shorts out there to a wider audience and actually provide some additional value for filmmakers.
SIFF's Opening Night Film is Justin Chadwick's THE FIRST GRADER. Phil and I duck out as it starts, fully intending to watch at least part of it…until we realize that the VIP section is still open and still serving.
The movie ends (oops) and the VIP section fills up with, well, VIPs. I take a bunch of photos and Phil shoots some b-roll. When you walk around a VIP section with a camera, people pose for lots of photos. They figure you're supposed to be there. And I guess, in a way, I was.
From what I can tell, it's not a bad festival they put on at SIFF. It's not really the sort of thing that seems, from the schedule, to program a lot of indies, but if you're in Seattle, it's a nice way to see a lot of world cinema all in one place.
And, hell, I still have my drink tickets.
Filmmaker Lucas McNelly is spending a year on the road, volunteering on indie film projects around the country, documenting the process and the exploring the idea of a mobile creative professional. You can see more from A Year Without Rent at the webpage. His feature-length debut is now available to rent on VOD. Follow him on Twitter: @lmcnelly.
If you've been following along from the start, you'll remember that earlier this year I took a ferry out to Vinalhaven, an island off the coast of Maine, to work on Andrew Brotzman's NOR'EASTER. It was very cold in the North Atlantic Ocean in February, and I think everyone pretty much assumed that would be our only ferry film. Because, really, how many people film on remote islands?
That's why it was a little surprising to find myself back on a ferry mere weeks later, this time heading for an island off the coast of Washington State. Is it a sign of a new island film movement in indie film? Were we all so enamored with LOST that we just had to find our own little Dharma Initiative?
Probably not. My guess is it's just a coincidence.
The West Coast film in question is Kris and Lindy Boustedt's THE SUMMER HOME. Written by the Boustedt's and lead actress Wonder Russell (CONNECT TO), it's a small character drama revolving around two nomadic characters who come across a house on the ocean.
We're filming on Lopez Island (but the film isn't necessarily set on an island. I think we just need a shore), hence the ferry, in the summer home of someone in Wonder Russell's family. The cast and crew arrives on two different ferries. In the first one: myself, co-director Kris Boustedt, DP Ty Migota, and AC Nicholas Davis. None of us have ever seen this location before, or anything beyond a couple of photos of the exterior.
Think about that for a minute. How many times do you check out a location before you start filming? Three? Four? But if the location is decently far away and you're working on a short turnaround, you might not be able to do a proper location scout. And without a proper location scout, you're pretty much just flying blind.
And the house is, well, it's pink. Really, really pink. Grandma pink. I'm not sure photographs could have done it justice, even if we had them, but here's one.
The schedule calls for our first shot on Day 1 to be a single person on a dock at sunrise, only the dock is a little different than we thought--chiefly there's a big huge post in the middle of it. The sort of thing you can't exactly shoot around to get the effect they're looking for. Well, not easily. So maybe shooting around it isn't the best idea. Maybe you use it to your advantage.
It's pretty clear that despite not having seen the actual location, these guys are well-prepared. I sat in on a couple of pre-production meetings and watched them go over and over the script, trying to squeeze every last bit out of it.
So maybe that's a decent substitute for not seeing the location. Sure, it's a hassle, but you have to compensate by scouting out the emotional locations until you know them like the back of your hand.
Will it work? We'll see.
Filmmaker Lucas McNelly is spending a year on the road, volunteering on indie film projects around the country, documenting the process and the exploring the idea of a mobile creative professional. You can see more from A Year Without Rent at the webpage. Follow him on Twitter: @lmcnelly.
Filmmaker Lucas McNelly is spending a year on the road, volunteering on indie film projects around the country, documenting the process and the exploring the idea of a mobile creative professional. You can see more from A Year Without Rent at the webpage. Follow him on Twitter: @lmcnelly.
Filmmaker Lucas McNelly is spending a year on the road, volunteering on indie film projects around the country, documenting the process and the exploring the idea of a mobile creative professional. You can see more from A Year Without Rent at the webpage. Follow him on Twitter: @lmcnelly.
Filmmaker Lucas McNelly is spending a year on the road, volunteering on indie film projects around the country, documenting the process and the exploring the idea of a mobile creative professional. You can see more from A Year Without Rent at the webpage. Follow him on Twitter: @lmcnelly.
No, not me. I'm stealing an idea from Film Courage and taking a look at some of our most popular content. So let's see, as of right now, what's most popular. At least, according to page views here. Who knows what's most popular on the sites we syndicate content to.
Articles:
Get Your Shit Together ... Well that's not so surprising. Turns out when you yell at lots of people, that gets everyone's attention. Seems reasonable enough.
VOD, FTW? -- Really? I guess it's not a shock, in and of itself. The big surprise is that the post has only been up a day or so. Still, people are mystified by the whole VOD thing. Anything that can shed a light on that is a good thing.
Conversations with Lucas: Marty Lang -- I guess people really like Marty Lang. Or maybe Marty is clicking on it a lot to see the profile of his face. It's just one of our automated syncs from blip.tv.
I Slept Here #13: Erie, PA -- I shared a bed (but not at the same time) with a famous actress and she tweeted it. So that explains that.
Videos:
Q&A: Sean Hackett's HOMECOMING (part 2)
Running scared
Meet Jenna D'Angelo
Conversations with Lucas: @CriticalTodd
The DREAM LOVER waltz
Filmmaker Lucas McNelly is spending a year on the road, volunteering on indie film projects around the country, documenting the process and the exploring the idea of a mobile creative professional. You can see more from A Year Without Rent at the webpage. Follow him on Twitter: @lmcnelly.
Married co-directors Kris & Lindy Boustedt talk more about the emotions of their $200,000 feature film falling apart and how they channeled that into something productive with their new short THE SUMMER HOME.
Maybe because it's I just launched a VOD rental of a film, or maybe it's because VOD was the subject of the recent #filmin140 panel, or maybe it's because it's just a coincidence, but I feel like selling your work has really been the topic of the week. And so it's fitting that I'm writing this from the living room of a filmmaker who's actually having some success selling his work online.
Kind of karmic, if you ask me.
The question then, is how is this filmmaker selling stuff? What are they doing that you can, in turn, do yourself? Let's find out.
Kevin Fox of Kevin Fox Films was on of our more vocal supporters during the Kickstarter campaign, which automatically puts him high on the list of people I want to try and meet. He lives pretty close to San Francisco, so with some time to kill, it seemed like the perfect chance to take him up on his offer to visit.
Kevin lives in "cowboy country", which is an important thing to note.
Every year he makes a short doc related to a rodeo that comes through town. He then sells said rodeo-themed doc to the western audience--a decidedly niche audience, to be sure. He describes the films as "not exactly CITIZEN KANE". So it's easy to disregard his sales as a fluke, but that would be a mistake.
There's a ton of videos in this market that are essentially "how-to" videos about roping or steering or whatever it is that cowboys do, so Kevin knew that he'd have to go an extra step to set his doc apart from those videos. He got on Withoutabox and started searching for a festival that catered to western content. But rather than just scatter-shot all of them, he dug deeper, looking for a festival that was young enough to be easy to work with and close enough that he could easily attend.
He got himself into the Modesto Reel Food Festival, packed the audience, and took home an audience choice award.
From there, he burned some screeners and sent them to people of note. But not who you and I would think of as people of note. People in the rodeo business. Places like Western Horseman magazine. Stuff like that.
Honestly, it's a pretty old-school approach. But think about the audience. I don't imagine cowboys are reading Ted Hope's blog out on the range. They have better things to do (nothing against Ted, of course). So in a way, he's catering his approach to how his audience lives--lots of stuff in print, whenever possible. Not because he isn't active on Twitter or Facebook or whatever (he is), but because his audience maybe isn't so much.
What he is able to do is use all that technology on the back-end. Anything he can teach himself to do at a professional level, he does. Everything else he outsources. He does all the fulfillment himself because his research has shown that he can be cheaper, faster, and more efficient than anyone he'd hire.
I know what you're thinking: that sounds awful. But it doesn't have to be, provided you get it down to something of a science. You also end up being on a first name basis with your mailman.
Kevin's approach is rather deceptively simple: he takes the lo-fi aspects of self-distribution and combines them with a Web 2.0 sensibility. He contacts people on Facebook to get inclusion in their print media. And, more importantly, he's much more likely to quote positive comments by his audience than he is by any critic or any festival or, really, anyone his audience hasn't heard of. But they have heard of each other--fellow fans, people in the rodeo industry--and that's who's opinion they trust. And so he plays to that strength. And he interacts with them not as a company that's putting out DVDs but as a human being, because people would much rather talk to a human being than a company.
He made an interesting point that on Twitter, he's much more likely to follow @lmcnelly than he is to follow @YearWithoutRent (for example), even if the content is really similar.
It's such a simple concept that it's easy to dismiss. But, you know what? Almost every time he goes to his computer, there's a new sale.
So maybe sometimes the old approach isn't such a bad idea.
Filmmaker Lucas McNelly is spending a year on the road, volunteering on indie film projects around the country, documenting the process and the exploring the idea of a mobile creative professional. You can see more from A Year Without Rent at the webpage. Follow him on Twitter: @lmcnelly.
Filmmaker Lucas McNelly is spending a year on the road, volunteering on indie film projects around the country, documenting the process and the exploring the idea of a mobile creative professional. You can see more from A Year Without Rent at the webpage. Follow him on Twitter: @lmcnelly.
Filmmaker Lucas McNelly is spending a year on the road, volunteering on indie film projects around the country, documenting the process and the exploring the idea of a mobile creative professional. You can see more from A Year Without Rent at the webpage. Follow him on Twitter: @lmcnelly.
If I'm going to be accused of being nothing but a self-promotional whore, I figure I might as well do it right. Kind of like the idea that if you get in trouble for something, you might as well go ahead and do it, you know?
Of course, the flip side is 98% of people think I'm not a self-promotional whore, so let's see if we can't find some value here while we're at it.
Pretty much every filmmaker I know these days is pondering the idea of digital distribution. The festival model is dead. Theatrical distribution is dead. The old world is crumbling all around us and if you're waiting for some studio executive to swoop in and give you a three-picture deal, you're out of your mind.
This is pretty much old news.
It's one thing to know the system is fucked. Any anarchist can tell you that. But it's something else entirely to figure out what to do about it. We're all still trying to find audiences and we're all still trying to figure out how to pay the rent (well, not all of us). And for every Ross Pruden who seems to have figured something out, the rest of us are just pretty much guessing, and very few people want to be the guinea pig.
Thing is, I've got a feature film that was pretty much designed to be a guinea pig, so I have no problem using it to try things out.
BLANC DE BLANC
Shot and edited in two weeks (on a budget of $970) as part of Reid Gershbein's #2wkfilm project, BLANC DE BLANC is best described as "a mystery born out of a dare--a jigsaw puzzle of a film that has confounded and delighted audiences around the world." At least, that's what we say about it.
Like most indie films, some people like it and some people don't.
VOD
There's a bunch of different places you can put your film. You can do Distribber, which lots of people I respect speak very highly of. However, when your film's budget is under $1,000, you become kind of wary of throwing $1,300 at distribution. Might we, going forward? Maybe, but I just don't see it happening. However, if you're budgeting a "proper" micro-budget film, I think it makes a lot of sense to work Distribber into your budget, if at all possible.
With the plan being to use a service that only took a cut, without any up-front money, we looked at a bunch of sites. Some of them looked good. Some of them looked like shit. You can probably guess which ones. The ones we seriously considered (and/or are considering) are:
YouTube
Personally, I think YouTube rentals are a pretty good option. They let you upload a 20GB file, which is convenient in terms of compression. Thing is, you have to be part of their partner program to get involved (as of now). I'm not in their partner program as of yet, although I'm working on it.
Open Film
I have an Open Film Pro account. It hasn't really been working, which is bad. However, last week their CEO took the time to reach out and talk to me personally about my issues, which he is now attempting to resolve. I'll post an update to that here when I get one.
I do know that they're working on a few very interesting things that I don't think are public yet.
On the tech side, they have a nice-looking player (see above) that's tweak-able in a couple of different directions. The website has a built-in donation button and you can set up your videos with buy/rent options.
Uploads via the web can be up to 2GB in size and works pretty seamlessly and has the benefit of giving you specs. You can upload a 5GB file via FTP (which never works for me) or send in a DVD (which strikes me as kind of a 2005 option). They will split ad revenue with you 50/50, but that's one of the other things I've never been able to get to work.
Dynamo
Used by Edward Burns and recently written up over at Ted Hope's blog, Dynamo seems to be the hip new thing. It's still in Beta, so you have to submit your project for acceptance. They say that takes 24 hours. It took maybe 1.
The uploader is pretty self-explanatory. I haven't seen a limit on the file size, but it let me upload a 4.78GB file without any trouble (other than how long something like that takes).
The access period ranges from 6 hours to 30 days. Down below you're asked for a description, some basic tagging info, and some basic credits. Once uploaded, you'll get this:
Not a lot of surprises here. You can bundle a couple of videos, in case you wanted to rent a full season of a serialized program. You can add a preview that viewers can watch before they rent. GeoBlocking let's you select who can and cannot watch your film, based on DVD Region, Continent, or Country. Ours says "yes" because I went in and actually selected yes on everything, just to be safe. There isn't really an explanation of what "Viewer Emails" does, but I'm guessing it's an automated email you can send to your viewers. I wrote a really basic one, so hopefully someone will rent it and report back on if they got an automated email.
From there, you can embed your video pretty much anywhere, kind of like this:
If the size isn't a good match for what you need, you can change it manually, which is kind of a hassle and the Facebook integration could be a lot smoother, but the video player looks nice and, above all, looks professional. For a Beta release, those strike me as pretty small issues.
As for stats, we haven't been live for long enough to get a pretty graph or anything, but the reports pretty much break down like this and seems to update more or less in real-time, unlike some other sites like Amazon, where I'm told it can take weeks for a content creator to get any data.
Obviously, it's way too soon to see any real numbers from this. It'd be nice if the share options were more robust and one could see, for example, what sort of success rate Facebook posts get vs. Twitter updates. Stuff like that.
We'll see how it works. For now, myself and the rest of the BLANC DE BLANC team will see if we can't get some traction on these rentals. Because, you know, it'd be nice to figure out ways to make this work.
Filmmaker Lucas McNelly is spending a year on the road, volunteering on indie film projects around the country, documenting the process and the exploring the idea of a mobile creative professional. You can see more from A Year Without Rent at the webpage. Follow him on Twitter: @lmcnelly.
A question I pretty much never get is "how can I spend more money?" It just doesn't seem to come up, and for good reason. The economy kind of sucks.
But a question I do get is "how's the budget holding up?". It's a smart question, because (idiots aside) most people realize that traveling around the country for a year on $12,000 (minus Kickstarter fees) isn't exactly a situation where you can channel your inner Scrooge McDuck.
So we look for ways to raise $$, mostly to keep the car on the road. It also helps if that method can be more or less passive on my part, as I don't really have time to deal with fulfillment issues.
So...behold: A Cafe Press Store where you can go and buy stuff and then finally fill a tiny, tiny little hole in your life. Or not.
You could also just buy a button or a sticker or something. Maybe a fellow follower of this crazy journey will spot you in a coffee shop and you can become friends. Or, even better, maybe he/she will be hot and you can hook up. And if that happens, you have to let us know.
Filmmaker Lucas McNelly is spending a year on the road, volunteering on indie film projects around the country, documenting the process and the exploring the idea of a mobile creative professional. You can see more from A Year Without Rent at the webpage. Follow him on Twitter: @lmcnelly.
A little bit after the 3 month mark for this little odyssey, I caught up with David and Karen over at Film Courage to give a sort of status update.
Filmmaker Lucas McNelly is spending a year on the road, volunteering on indie film projects around the country, documenting the process and the exploring the idea of a mobile creative professional. You can see more from A Year Without Rent at the webpage. Follow him on Twitter: @lmcnelly.
In part 2, Kris and Lindy talk about the value of adding collaborators to your team, be it editors or writers or whatnot, and trusting them to add something valuable to the process.
All of these people were really, really nice. Even the movie star.
more to come
Filmmaker Lucas McNelly is spending a year on the road, volunteering on indie film projects around the country, documenting the process and the exploring the idea of a mobile creative professional. You can see more from A Year Without Rent at the webpage. Follow him on Twitter: @lmcnelly.
THE SUMMER HOME is being shot on an island. Only, neither the director(s) or the DP has seen the location. So, they've got to come up with one the night before.
The most common production we hear from here at A Year Without Rent is documentaries that are in editing. It makes sense--docs take forever to edit. Thing is, it's not really that visually interesting to watch someone stare at a computer screen. So generally speaking, we always tell people to get back to us when they have something specific in their editing schedule (maybe a re-shoot? or vocal dubbing? foley work? something concrete, with dates). Or, if the project sounds really compelling, we see if we'll be in their neighborhood and can just stop by.
One of those projects is Michael Babiarz's HICKS ON STICKS, a documentary about a Canadian skateboarding tour twelve years (12!) in the making. Michael lives in Vancouver, so it was always in the back of our minds that if we found our way to Vancouver, then we should definitely get in touch.
Mike, being the go-getter that he was, beat us to the punch, tweeting that he was pretty sure he could get tickets to Vancouver Craft Beer Week, if I was so inclined.
As soon as we got to the event, it became clear that Mike did not, in fact, have tickets to the event (that we were an hour late for, due to a very close hockey game). Actually, the owner of the bar (pictured below) was under the impression that we were videotaping the event, which was news to both of us. But, I had a camera, and he had a camera, and so we videotaped the event. And by videotaped, I mean that we took pictures and capitalized on plenty of chances to drink free craft beer.
No one had a clue. The owner of the bar pretended he had heard about me somehow (we didn't believe him). We got pretty drunk on free beer, and the next day, Mike showed me the Super 8 setup for HICKS ON STICKS.
Filmmaker Lucas McNelly is spending a year on the road, volunteering on indie film projects around the country, documenting the process and the exploring the idea of a mobile creative professional. You can see more from A Year Without Rent at the webpage. Follow him on Twitter: @lmcnelly.
A drunk Michael Babiarz (PLAY WITH FIRE, HICKS ON STICKS) and I have somehow managed to crash a $50 a ticket event during Vancouver Craft Beer Week. They think we're filming the event. We aren't.
Filmmaker Lucas McNelly is spending a year on the road, volunteering on indie film projects around the country, documenting the process and the exploring the idea of a mobile creative professional. You can see more from A Year Without Rent at the webpage. Follow him on Twitter: @lmcnelly.
