Friday, March 23, 2018

Shooting with just one light.

Every so often I'll recycle one of my Inside HFP videos as a blog here.
Now that ads are gone from my YT page for awhile, at least here I stand a chance of earning a little from your viewership.  And we can all use a little more money, right?
It's why I try to provide free content, to save people money.

In this video I discuss creating a few lighting schemes with a $10(ish) clamp light you can get at any hardware store...and maybe some garage sales.  Do people still have garage sales?

More movie reviews, podcasts, interviews and behind the scenes blogs coming soon.

Thursday, March 22, 2018

Racing the Season

Last year about this time I wasn't "overselling" my cabin because I was trying to save it as a location for shooting Jack vs Lanterns.  I figured March wasn't really much of a time for us to have visitors anyway, so no loss of revenue by closing it to shoot. Well, much like this year, the weather was unpredictable and we lost a lot of those nights to rain or freezing temperatures anyway, so the shooting didn't get done.

Michelle Prenez Kicking bad guys in my "Blue Cube" for Jack vs Lanterns


Seasonal Work.

This past week I had planned to film out there, but we got a last minute booking.  I'm not so rich that I can turn down a few hundred dollars (like I did last year), so I decided to finally bite the bullet and shoot the remaining the scenes in my blue cube that I use for the Inside HFP episodes.

Having another  job that's basically seasonal causes a bit of a race at the end of winter.  I should only have two days of real work when someone stays.  Before check-in and after.  If there's very little turn around between guests, that drops to one day because cleaning up after one guests also involves checking the place out for the other.

Last weekend was our first guest of "the season", so when I got out there, the place needed some fixing.  A wind storm had destroyed a screen door and so we had to get it put back together with some new parts before the guests were due to arrive.  That guest managed to break a chair.  Fortunately, my next group is small and fine being down a chair because Nancy and I prefer to buy either Made in the USA furniture and/or sturdy used.  (This chair was one that came with the original set which came with the house.)  Newer stuff doesn't seem to be made to the standards we grew up with and buying used at least helps local charities or entrepreneurs and upcycling efforts. Things like this, however, eat into time that in the winter I would have had free for just editing and writing.  Unfortunately, I never seem to be as inspired when there isn't sunshine outside of my window.


The Solution?

I'm really  hoping to find a manager to take over this little unit here (we have one for our place in Florida), but I know from experience that they probably won't tackle small issues "in the moment" like I do and I like to be able to do that. I think it makes for a better guest experience.  It's just interfering with other projects too much at this point.  I spend a lot of time "on call" and I don't book the cabin as often I could if I didn't worry about not being on hand to deal with little issues that may crop up.  It takes a lot Nancy's time too.  At least a good portion of that time we're working together, so while other couples golf or whatever, we fix stuff and shoot movies.

New Projects.

I started the new podcast this week, right after our last guests checked out. You can read about it in the Cult Goddess Magazine blog.  Tina Berg is working on the next episode as I type this. We're sort of in "Pre-Launch" mode with it right now, doing some pilots while I get my feet wet, but it should become a regular thing soon.  I look at it sort of like an expanded version of "Cult Goddess TV" from a few years back.  If you are an independent director, actor, writer, special F/X artist, make-up artist, jack or jill of all trades or any other independent artist and think you'd like to be on the show, contact me with a DM.

If you have a guest you'd like to hear from on BCinemaTalks, comment below and we'll see if we can make it happen.

Last week I also released the movie, X-24, to Amazon. It's a short film, which we shot in one day just after Halloween last  year.  I'll tell you all more about it in another blog.  I need to go shop for chairs now.
Our UK readers can watch it on Amazon Prime in the UK here.

Look for this photo for the blog on the production of "X-24"


Thursday, March 15, 2018

Why Viewers Should Be Mad That Amazon is Paying Creators Less

This past month Amazon Video Direct (Now "Prime Video Direct") has moved "partners" to a tiered payment plan for content.  Whereas before titles were paid a set amount per hour viewed, now they are paid a floating amount, depending on how much they're viewed over the course of a set amount of time.  Effectively, smaller or older titles, stuck in tier one, will be earning about 65% less than they did last year.

Why the change?

According to the email Amazon sent me, this is to reward "more engaging" content.  The more people who watch a title, and they longer they watch it for, the more that title will earn per viewing  minute.  On the face of it, this seems like a reward for good content (or at least content the consumer wants) and makes sense.  

There is a flaw in this reasoning, however.  Since to move from tier one to tier two a movie must accumulate 100,000 hours in views, features can climb tiers more easily than shorts despite actual "engagement".   Let me give an example.  For the sake of ease, let's make our feature 2 hours long.  People start it because it has good cover art, but they fast forward through the boring bits and stop watching before the end because there's too many boring bits.  On average our fictional viewers watch an hour of the feature.  If 100,000 people do this, the movie will become a tier two money maker with only 50% engagement.

Now, a short film, 10 minutes in length, would have to be watched 6 times to equal one hour.  Let's assume for our example that nearly everyone loves it!  and 500,000 people watch it all the way through.  That's 100% engagement from 5x as many people, but the movie remains on the lower pay tier because of it's short format.  

The math doesn't fit the logic behind it.

Why should viewers care?

For "fringe" filmmakers, such as myself, this poses a conundrum.  On the Amazon Platform, unless we build our audiences up a great deal, for every title, the reward is going to be significantly less and it will definitely be less after six months or a year, when Amazon has added many new titles and ours drops back into the void.  

This leaves us two options:
1. Make movies with more mass appeal.
2. Make cheaper movies and shows.

As a viewer you have plenty of other platforms providing the top end of Hollywood and mainstream pictures.  The thing that was neat about Amazon Prime working with indies is that you could fish through some pretty unusual stuff.  Now, what you're left with, dear viewer with the slightly odd taste, is a bunch of filmmakers either trying to compete for mainstream viewers or having to take less risk to match the smaller reward they stand to reap.

Amazon recently raised the prices for Prime Membership and they're paying your content providers less.  You're being asked to spend more money while they force content creators to consider cutting costs.

Back to basics.

For me, the decision is easy.  I have a lot of scripts already written with only a few characters and some very basic locations.  These are now getting moved to the top of my production list.  It's going to hurt a bit to not be able to fly in the best fit for a role when I know I wrote a part for someone specific, but  spending more on the movie than it will make back in a reasonable amount of time is just bad business.  I'm not totally against bad business, but I do try to minimize it.

How can you help?

If you have a favorite show, movie, short or whatever on Amazon, YouTube, Vimeo, iTunes, Hulu or Netflix, share it.  Post about it.  Review it on that platform (even with a short few lines).  All of these demonstrate "engagement" and move the titles forward in searches.  After that, if others want to watch it, it can help keep the earning numbers up, allowing for future shows to be budgeted more appropriately. 

Don't watch movies on pirate sites.  Don't encourage others to do it either.

Like our Indie Streams page on Facebook in order to share your favorite streaming content and share links to reviews.




Monday, March 12, 2018

To Prime or not Prime? That is Today's Question

The question of whether "To Prime or not to Prime?" gets a bit muddled when Amazon now refers to all of their streaming as "Prime" instead of just the stuff you get included with your paid "Prime" subscription.  To those who thought this would be a project blog about whether or not to use primer before painting something, I apologize.  That would have been: "To prime or not prime?" and the answer is usually, "prime" whenever you can.  You'll enjoy a better end product with a longer lasting top coat.

On to the streaming video question! 

Why not just give it all away when you'll be paid anyway?

This was my initial approach to Amazon Prime when Amazon Video Direct initially gave me the power to include my movies as part of their "Prime" service.  It was actually something I had emailed them about several times about over the years, because it was obvious that people would be more interested in giving an unknown film a chance if it wasn't going to cost them anything "extra".  This is actually the excuse a lot of people use when you find out they've seen a pirated version of your film.  The conversation goes something like this:

PIRATE: I saw your movie the other night!

ME: Really? Where did you watch it?  Did  you buy the DVD or did see the HD version on Amazon? Or did you watch it on  my site?

PIRATE: Oh, I use this site where all the movies are free.  No commercials or anything.  It's great! They have every movie there!

ME: (Not trying at all to hide my disgust) So, a pirate site?  You stole my movie.

PIRATE: Well, I hate commercials and I don't like to pay for indie movies in case they suck, ya know?

ME: Oh, so if you liked the movie you'd be handing me money right now?

Pirate either skulks away at this point or tries to save face, but the fact is, people will watch media for free whenever possible, so if you can offer it for "FREE" and get paid for it at the same time, it's a good to way to build an audience for an otherwise obscure film.

And for nearly two  years it worked like a charm.  Most of my titles were older and Amazon Prime's low rate of 15 cents per hour still netted a fair amount of money for movies that had been pushed to the backs of people's minds for quite awhile.  Just being able to post: "Now available with Prime" for each new title I got approved was a marketing tactic that in the beginning which yielded a ton of traffic (by my standards, anyway).

My new title at the time, "Lumber vs Jack", had respectable and steady numbers for about 20 months and only recently started to wane. Recently, the numbers in views and revenue reached the point where Prime isn't currently worth it for "Lumber vs Jack".

So, what happened?

Two things have changed.  One change is very recent and the other has been coming for awhile.

One of the main obstacles for indies making the jump to Prime was the fact that Amazon Prime is seen as a "broadcaster" and thus requires closed captioning in order to be legally (and ethically) compliant. For many very small producers, such as myself, spending $3 per running minute of captioning meant investing $270 in a title that may have only cost $1000 to produce in the first place.  The platform was unproven and the titles still would need new artwork and an HD output file loaded.  Again, a lot of the older stuff would have originally been shot in SD and not everyone does their own editing.  So, for awhile, only the very prepared or innovative got their stuff to Prime quickly and on their own.  It took me months to get my first titles up and after that I averaged one a month for a little over a year.  That was with me redoing the artwork, upscaling and captioning between doing other work.  (Starting to get a feel for why "Jack vs Lanterns" had to wait on editing for awhile?)

Eventually, distributors saw an opening and an untapped market.  Become the company that can get indies onto Prime and you can start making money with a split right away.  So, old titles and indies were acquired at a rapid rate by some very clever people and before the first year was over a deluge of horror, sci-fi and old drive-in fare had been dropped onto Amazon Prime.  All of a sudden retro influenced movies like "Alien Vengeance" and "The Lunar Pack" weren't that unusual and charming.

The second thing that changed was the pay structure.  Movies are now paid in tiers and as viewership drops, so does how much a filmmaker is paid per minutes of viewing time.  With a combination of more competition, less visibility and less pay, it becomes a question of whether or not volume can still make up for the difference between showing a movie "included with Prime" or charging $1.99 to see it.

I would  need 10 people to watch a feature movie from beginning to end for every one who rents it in order to make the same money.  So, for awhile anyway, we're suspending some of our titles from the "Prime" program.

How do I decide which titles to leave on Prime?

The titles that are still pulling good numbers on Prime will stay there.  With the ebb and flow of how things go, that will change month to month.  If a movie is making enough (in minutes, Amazon has suspended income reports because even they can't seem to figure out their new payment system) it will remain as an option on Prime.  No sense in dropping an income stream, but once a movie drops to the point where a few rentals would yield the same income, we'll turn Prime off for awhile.

This creates an "urgency" to see the films that are available included with Prime while they are there.  A movie that is always available as Prime has no need to be purchased or rented.  You're creating your own "over supply" of your product.  Plus, "Back on Prime" gives you something to promote.

The risk.

Since "minutes streamed over a 365 day period", is how they determine which tier of payment a movie is on, turning it off of Prime for too  long, especially if it's pulling any significant numbers, can run the risk of your movie dropping a tier because it will pull far fewer numbers as a rental.  This means when it goes back to Prime you may actually be paid less per view than if you had left it alone.

So, experiment at your own risk.  With so many titles I have some flexibility to try things out.  If I learn anything concrete, I'll pass it on here.









Thursday, March 8, 2018

It's all done with mirrors.

100 !

This is my 100th published blog for the Production Diaries. In this space.
That's quite a few qualifiers.  I'm not sure if I did a production diary blog anywhere else, but I run two other blogs here.  Combined I don't think I have 100 between those other two.

This being my 100th post here I thought it should be somewhat special.  Not necessarily groundbreaking and certainly not "a look back", but not just one to make the numbers either, which is why it's been so long since the last post.  I wanted to wait until I had something fairly significant to share.  Significant besides, "Yay, I wrote 100 blogs!"

As for the "look back", that's what a diary is for.  If you want to look back at my old blogs, have fun.  There are 99 of them dating back a few years.

It's all done with mirrors.

Well, not all of it.  Not even a large percentage, really, but you've heard that phrase before and it seems to make sense here.

I'm not talking about magic.  Not in the traditional sense.  I am talking about the trick of fitting multiple cast members in a scene within a small space and not just showing the backs of heads half the time.  We used the method enough times and it seems like something indies can make use of, so I thought I'd share my recent experiences.

Jennifer Wenger and Michelle Prenez in Jack vs Lanterns

In this scene from Jack vs Lanterns, for example, I had started out with an upper angle on the floor with both Michelle and Jenn in a two shot. It was a neat enough angle, but they were either in profile or one of them would turn a bit and all the camera would see is the back of her head.  Plus, from Michelle's side I couldn't see that cool logo on her shirt. ;)

What would the British do?

If you watch as much TV from the UK as I do, you'll notice that they often use a mirror shot to create a mood, keep both characters on camera or just make things more interesting than a standard over the shoulder conversation shot.  With that in mind, I've learned to make use of reflective surfaces when I can.

Watch out for yourself.

And I mean this literally.  If you, like me, run your camera, watch out for your own reflection.  Not just in mirrors, but windows, well polished cars and chrome or reflective surfaces in bathrooms.  Nothing breaks the mood like a sudden appearance of a camera and operator in a car door.

With small monitors, like when  you're shooting guerilla style and using just what's on the camera, it can sometimes be hard to spot your reflection, so, when in doubt, give a little wave and see if you spot the movement.  Position cast and props accordingly.  Choose your angle, but run the blocking to make sure you don't suddenly pop up when someone steps away from that car's mirrored finish.

Back to why these are useful.

We have several short scenes in Jack vs Lanterns.  Usually these are bits of exposition, which I try to interrupt with either humor, suspense or action.  So, I tried to keep conversations short.  That also means that cutting from character to character for each line can make for a furious pace.  Now, quick paced can be good, but too quick can be jarring, especially when it's unnatural or obvious that you're doing to it to keep the speaking character on screen.

So, for these scenes where two or three of us where speaking to each other, but the only location that worked for the camera was behind someone, we used a mirror.  Like, in my bathroom. (There are three scenes in the movie that take place in bathrooms.  I had to borrow a bathroom as a set.)



All three of us had lines in this shot and there were reactions to those lines.  I did use some close ups here as well, but for a 32 second scene too many cuts would have been jarring.  Also, small room or not, an establishing shot is always useful to help the audience picture what's going on.

We had to rewrite and improvise here a bit and the results were, in my opinion, hilarious.  Hopefully audiences will agree.