Authoring and Marketing and Bears. Oh My.

Well, no, not bears.  That was "Indiscretions".  But on "Jack vs Lanterns" we're  up to the point where the movie is finally finished and I have to move in to getting it out to the public.  For a lot of filmmakers this would mean hitting festivals to try and drum up some buzz.  For me that would mean spending more money on entry fees and waiting longer for the movie to start paying off.  This movie has been in post way too long for me to wait another year to start selling it, no less adding another 25% to the budget spent on very unsure entry fees.  (It's not really a "festival baby" kind of movie.) Add to that the fact that the cast is scattered to the four corners of the country (well, three) and very busy, so lining any of us up to be present at conventions or festivals means we would have to get into some very specific shows.  If any conventions want to host us after it is available for public consumption, I'll gladly work with them the best I can, but my impatience is showing here.  I do think a panel on the still sub-$5k feature would be helpful since so many people now try to raise more than that for shorts.

So, that moves me on to getting the DVD authored, the cases designed (we usually have two separate designs), I worked on a Blu-ray version and of course we have our VOD files being reviewed.  The reason I have two DVD case designs is simple.  I go with a higher ink consumption design for the discs available through CreateSpace.  For the ones that I'll be printing on demand here and for the cast I go with a design that uses high contrast on the back. where the description is.  Also, it's easier to use CS's designs since they'll be adding graphics after the fact and inevitably it will overlap with something in my design no matter how much I follow the downloaded templates.  (I swear they move that "DVD" box every few months.)  Both versions are DVD-R, but the ones I make myself are generally only available for a limited time because I eventually get burned out on making them in small batches.

High Contrast Back panel for in-house DVD-R case.

This time around I also tried something new.  Blu-ray.  A lot of the movie is just gorgeous and I want people to be able to own it in HD, not just stream it that way.  But, up until now I have only used BD-R's for screeners.  No menus.  No extras.  So, I foolishly believed the disc could hold the 25GB advertised and that the files were the sizes they said they were.  I had the brilliant idea to fit both "Lumber vs Jack" and "Jack vs Lanterns" on one Disc.  With loads of extras.  And in the initial set up it looked to be working.  I kept track of the memory the whole time, but after the encoding, the numbers all shifted up and the disc wouldn't burn because there wasn't enough room.  I started cutting content. This took two days partially because there were a lot of menus involved and I also tried more compression on some of the extras.  In the end all I had left was "Jack vs Lanterns" and a blooper reel from "Lumber vs Jack".  I was pretty disappointed.  So, there may be a BD-R version available, but it probably won't have as many extras as the DVD, which I don't like.


Now I'm in the waiting game.  I'd love to give an official release date, but with closed captions for 1hr and 45 min of movie waiting to be proofed by Amazon and knowing that they may think my rating is "inappropriate", I don't want to give a date until all of the files are approved.  I should know more by mid-week.


My question now is, how do I get the word out?  How much do I spend and how much do I try to do with press releases and teasers?  How do I keep the message that this is a monster movie with a retro tone rather than a blood and guts gore fest or an edge of your seat horror film?  The movie is finished, but the work isn't near done.  And these aren't my favorite tasks.

Catch the original On Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/v/hocusfocusproductions



Thoughts and suggestions in the comments would be great.

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.