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"

Writers write.

Today's blog is inspired by a question from "Anonymous".  I don't know how long the question was there unanswered because it had fallen into my spam folder, probably for mentioning another blogging platform.  Anyway, part of the question was, in part, "Any advice for aspiring writers?"
(You can find the entire question on the helicopter blog)

My answer to this question was as common and cliché as the question itself.

Just write.

I know,  you've read it before.  It's the answer all writers and self-proclaimed writers (I am more self-published than second party published in every area of my writing) give when confronted with the question.  This isn't because we're plagiarists. It's not because all writers lack imagination.  It's not even because we were all given the same advice and then never thought about it again.  The reason most writers give this answer is because it's a simple, but powerful, truth.  If you're writing, you're a writer.  You may not be a good writer.  You may not even be a coherent writer, but  we all have to start somewhere.

Another thing authors, screenwriters, poets, columnists and writers of every sort will point out is that writing is one of the few passions people can pursuit without any significant financial investment at all.  If you have some time to set aside, a pen and a pad, you can get started in writing something.  Sure software and apps help make it faster, check our spelling and now ever our grammar, but to just write and find you voice, all you need is about $2 worth of supplies and someplace quiet and well lit to work.

My first 40 or so first short stories were written on legal pads with disposable pens.  My sister and my Mom eventually typed out a few of them on a word processor for me the first times I submitted them and had them rejected by publishers.  Three of those stories became the first three short films I did when I "returned" to filmmaking after the disaster that was my first feature movie.

And that brings me to my next point.

Trim down your obstacles to work on your rough spots.

"Z: The Last Letter" is a black and white silent movie about a dog and a mail man.  There is no spoken dialogue and it was all shot outside, during the day.  It is also based on one of those short stories I wrote way back when I had first gotten out of college and thought I'd try to do some writing before I got a "regular job".  You can watch it on Amazon Prime.

I had produced a feature horror video a few years earlier and hit the same pitfalls many of us did before digital made picture quality easier to maintain and tips and tricks were everywhere to be found online.  My lighting at night wasn't enough, the microphone I used barely captured audio from more than a few feet away and I tried to produce a story well outside of my budget or level of ability at the time.  So, I decided to make some shorts and work my way up through my weaknesses.  By eliminating lighting at night and recording sound on location I eliminated my two biggest production problems and was able to concentrate on the story and character direction.

I think this can be applied to writing as well.  If you want to write a novel, start with some short stories.

Maybe you have trouble composing complex plot lines, or intersecting stories. Maybe your weakness, as is mine, is character development. Perhaps you have some difficulty with describing locations or surroundings in a satisfying way.  Try what I did with the shorts.  Choose what you or your readers feel your weakest spot is and eliminate it from work you plan to publish or submit to others for publication. For now. Take this same area that  you need practice in and make it the center of your personal projects.  

Which leads us to my next point.

Let others read your work.

If you're like me, the trouble here is finding people who aren't aware of or worried about your fragile ego.  I know, how could a mega talented, handsome, charming, modest demi-god like myself have a fragile ego?  Well, I do. I can prove it.  Remember those 40 or so short stories I mentioned?  How many have  you ever heard of or seen printed here?  

Exactly.  Once those first rejection letters came in, I more or less gave up.  For a good long time.  Eventually some got published on websites or in small printed publications, but I never felt they were very successful and so I sort of stopped writing for awhile.  Not writing meant, you guessed it, I wasn't a writer.

You need to let people read your stuff and give you constructive criticism.  Not all criticism will be constructive and that you'll need to ignore.  The most useless stuff will often come from other writers who really love your work, but sort of hate you.  Learning what to take to heart and what to ignore is probably the most difficult part of starting out.  Let me give you some rules to live by as a writer.

There are no rules to writing.

This is obviously not true.  If you want people to understand what you write and you want the experience to be somewhat enjoyable and easy to follow, the basic rules of grammar and spelling will apply most of the time.  Knowing these rules and learning when to break them will also allow you to add flare to your writing and give your characters some depth.

That said, writing being a creative endeavor, any other rules helpful writing instructors may give you, such as, "You should introduce all of  your main characters within the first act of a play" or "Never introduce a plot point that isn't going to develop and resolve by the end of your story" are to be looked upon as guidelines and NOT hard and fast rules.

Basically, aside from proper grammar and spelling, my only hard and fast rule in any art form is that there are no hard and fast rules in any art form.

Being creative is about bending or breaking conventions.  Knowing when bending or breaking a convention actually works for readers or an audience is where the talent portion comes in.  That goes back to the need to have other people read your work.

You know what you're trying to say with your story, so often things that read as fine to you will still confuse other people.  It's like a family in-joke that makes you and all of your cousins crack  up, but when a friend who doesn't know the background of the story is around they get that blank stare while the rest of you chuckle.  Your readers may not have the same context as  you and you need to be aware of that.

Writers read.

I do not read enough to be an excellent writer.  My interest in reading came late in life and for screenwriting I grew up during a golden age of mediocre television. The fact that I watched more TV shows than movies as a kid definitely presents itself in my earlier screenplays, which play out more like old anthology episodes than films.

Read what you enjoy, but occasionally read stuff that bores the heck out of you in order to expand your perspective.  Read the classics.  Read things assigned widely in schools.  These will put you in touch with the "collective unconscious" of many of your readers.  Read the news, if you can find anything that qualifies.  Read nature magazines, fashion magazines, car magazines and magazines and websites about things you have no interest in at all.

If nothing else, reading so many things that don't interest you will inspire you to sit down and write something that does.  Hopefully it will interest other people too and you'll be on  your way to being a published writer.

Either way, you will have written something and thus, on that day, you will be a writer.

This is an inside HFP episode about "Z", but to watch the film
Please visit the Amazon links above.
It's still free with an ad, but I think you'll find the quality there
a bit better, and honestly, I'll make a bit more if you're
signed into your Prime Account.

How Long Should an Episode Be?

Like a blog, the length of an episode of a show should usually fall within certain guidelines.  I generally have trouble adhering to both.

400 words or so seems to be about what someone is willing to read online before moving on to another subject.  Sure you can truly engross them and them keep them longer, unless they're reading at work and HAVE to move on to something else, like...well, work.  Online TV is a bit more tricky.  A lot of people, including myself, won't even start to watch something if they see it's more than 3 or 4 minutes long.  Who has the time?  Our "Jason's Jungle" episodes on "The Weird World of HFP" are generally under 4 minutes, but that's because they were made way back when dial up was king and nobody could really watch a video that was much longer unless they let it load it over night.  (Makes you wonder what that era of internet "adult films" did to the performance times of men).

Some shows I have near total control over, like, "The Simplest Things".  I'm working on an opening for that that will take less than 30 seconds, so that a 2 or 3 minute episode will run less than 4 minutes with opening and closing credits.  But "Cult Goddess Magazine - TV" is another story.  This is a show based on a down loadable magazine.  Interviews that can run for 30 minutes.  It's organic.  There's questions, well thought out answers and banter.  Do I post one long 30 minute episode?  The shows earning potential immediately goes up per episode because we can post more ads, but that's a lot of time to watch stills float around and a lot of stills to come up with to fill that time.  Do I break the show up into parts? 

The advantages of breaking the interviews up are many.  It means that each interview gives me more episodes, which this early in the game is important as we build a viewership and work on fitting producing the shows in with work for outside clients and producing movies.  Shorter shows also mean people are more likely to pass the video around.  Post it to their Facebook and so on.  And then there's the "cliffhanger" effect.  Someone who was interested in the interview will come back next week for the rest, however, there are drawbacks too.  Some of them from the same elements.

If someone isn't enjoying a particular interview, we've lost that viewer for weeks, maybe for good.  Maybe they're the type who likes to see things all once.  For them I've created a playlist that will hold all of the eps right on the Cult Goddess Magazine homepage.  I'm finding that even with breaking a show up getting it under 4 minutes with an opening is near impossible.  With introductions, and answers beyond "My favorite color is blue" an interview is bound to run at least 5-7 minutes per topic.  So, for CGM-TV the goal is to keep each episode under 10 minutes and see how it plays out.  Hopefully people will like it and spread it around a bit.  This week's episode with Debbie Rochon focuses on "Alien Vengeance", contains video of her as Col. Onyx and some never before published photos of her as the character.  All in just about 8 minutes.

We still have 2 or 3 more shows to bring you this year.  "Direct from the Director" will showcase independent, underground, micro budgeted movies with intros from their directors.  That means free movies for you...possibly also in parts.  That will start out as part of the "Weird World of HFP" lineup.  "Alien Vengeance: The Series" is still in production, but will be it's own show coming out simultaneously with WWofHFP each week and I've been tossing around the idea of a guy's cooking show with making simple stuff.  Something even an idiot could make.  Or maybe some grilling.  I actually dreamt about grilling Saturday night.  What else would  you guys like to see?  (Assuming someone is reading this, as we're way past 400 words).  Movie reviews?  A show about cars?  More animal stuff?  Let me know in the comments below.  I'm at your disposal.