Health & Consequence
I have gout. It’s been fun. On some days I hurt so bad a bed sheet on my big toe hurts like it’s been smashed by a semi. Once the ER visit was over and I got medicated, my left foot had already swelled to 4 sizes too big for a shoe. Then after two weeks, I had another attack of the gout this past week in my right foot and used my last pill from the prescription that miraculously helped out to where I can walk again now, but with a limp.
The birthday of 2006 was fairly uneventful, but nice. Brandy took me to a nice lunch at CapCity Diner and Phil got on ABC/FOX Channel 6/28 News and pumped Horrors of War. Freakin’ sweet.
Spent Friday all day at Johnny Wu’s house in Cleveland working on encoding an uncompressed Quicktime MOV to DVD without hassles. He had managed to make the file look good where I could not in a test, so I needed to go to one of the only peers who knows more than me about MPEG2 encoding that won’t charge me phone sex line rates to get answers.
Johnny Wu’s house is not unlike my own. During the day, Christine Chapman was editing her latest short RUBBLE, Donald Gregory stopped in, and multiple journalists blew through to ask questions about the LOOK AT MY SHORTS III FILM FESTIVAL, since Johnny has started to hype it on the Northcoast. Now I think truly Johnny Wu and his house being a hub of filmmakers mirrors he way people congregate & edit projects here at my house week in, week out.
What’s next? I keep getting asked a lot what am I going to do next now that Horrors of War has finished. Well, the truth is Horrors of War is finished as a movie, but the work is only half done. The crowning mistake most filmmaker make, if they ever get to have a completed feature, is not following through. There’s more to successful filmmaking than just making the film. If you’re not your film’s #1 fan, who else is going to be?
Promoting a film is a full time job. I’m still editing and shooting web docs for the movie’s eventual DVD and currently releasing them online. These are very effective promotional tools. There, I’ve said it. Yes, of course they are promotional tools and not just informative and educational pieces. The educational ones bring people to the site that otherwise would not come to a WWII Sci Fi Horror movie’s site. Proof of concept? On the Internet, an ASC Cinematographer I’ve never met or even emailed, linked some people to our web docs on editing because he said they were the best explanation on the basics he’d ever seen. Sometimes you get a twofer, promoting and helping at the same time.
Continuing to promote with the new EPK’s, a real nice DVD affair with web docs, TV appearances, clips, trailers, and 18 minutes of raw B-Roll (so TV news crews have something raw to work with in their edits), these will go to printed press worldwide, and regionally to TV news. We’re still finalizing the printed press kits that will accompany the DVD EPK. Good material opens doors, great presentation blows them off the hinges.
Julie Washington from the Cleveland Plain dealer asked me at Johnny Wu’s who taught me how to do all this, EPK’s, write press releases, and promotion. She was sure I had a background with a PR firm or at least several Journalism classes in college. The truth is I failed one quarter of Journalism 101 when I was a sophomore at Coronado High School in El Paso TX. I have no idea, other than using some deductive reasoning on how to find a story angle within the production or release of a movie.
It was a huge compliment from Julie and thus far my marketing efforts have been largely successful. I have heard recently from TJ Cooley that he and many others don’t like my self-promotion techniques. While I respect the opinion (and respect the forthright nature of TJ to say it to my face in person), it works for me and I’m not really going to change how I do things since it’s been effective.
I strongly believe that if you’re not your own cheerleader, no one else is going to get in line to do it. It’s like the films & filmmakers involved every year with Look At My Shorts – when they feel like not promoting the festival, it projects an image of “Well, if the people making the movie aren’t enthused about people seeing the movie, maybe it’s not that good…” and then they don’t get all that jazzed about seeing the movies. What a shock! OF course the flip side is always from your peers making assumptions “Well if they like they’re own movies enough to promote it, then they obviously think they are better than me! Screw those arrogant dickheads…”. Assumptions. When you make assumptions you make an ASS out of U and MPTION. ((crediting my sources – Shane Black from his $4 million screen play for The Long Kiss Goodnight))
You don’t have to be arrogant to like and promote your own movies, and if you’re more concerned about what other filmmakers think than getting a lot of people to see your movies, then you probably will have a hard time dealing with the realities of the business of filmmaking. You’re more likely a hobbyist that worries more about the sewing circle perception of you than making an audience base for your film projects.
Be forward thinking as well kids. If you have printed press and TV news appearances, this legitimizes you as a filmmaker. Your self-proclamations of being a filmmaker are great, but with newspaper writers and reporters calling you a filmmaker can at least make potential investors take you more seriously. Someone other than yourself views you as a filmmaker, and that is worth gold. You may think that it’s arrogant, but I don’t care as it helps me immensely with a meeting where I am trying to convince someone I will promote the movie they are investing in, I can show proof that I do promote and have done so effectively.
The reason no one takes the film scene seriously in Columbus lies mostly in it’s own self reflection. If you don’t like what you’re doing or are afraid to promote it, then no one else will jump up to do so.
To answer the original question (What’s Next?) The answer is another feature film to be shot in 2006. Stars are aligning pretty well to make that a reality.
The New Look at My Shorts Film Festival is 2 weeks away from today. We’ve definitely found a home with THE SCREENS. After the Horrors of War screening, and the capacity audience, it wasn’t hard to negotiate a good price. The Continent theatre has plenty of free parking, it’s right off the highway, there are shops, bars & restaurants nearby, and the theatre itself is really nice. In the current multiplex saturation and downed box office trends, theatre managers should be welcoming alternate programming and ideas.
My experience thus far has been that Jeff Frank of the Drexel theatre group was very supportive of several of my earlier endeavors with screenings. His main theatre, the ARENA GRAND was home to the screenings of NEW WORLD and the first LOOK AT MY SHORTS FILM FESTIVAL. We had to turn away 65-70 people at the door because we were over capacity in the small 110 seat theatre, and that included near violating codes with people sneaking in and sitting on the floor or in aisles or in handicap spots with folding chairs. We paid the rental cost of the theatre and they made all the $$ from the concessions from a sold out show. How do the managers repay us when we want to do LOOK AT MY SHORTS II? How about more than double the theatre rental costs. They’ll never ever get my money again. Jeff Frank is supportive, but no one else on his staff seems to be.
For LOOK AT MY SHORTS II, we went to STUDIO 35 and their one screen, old school independent run theatre. They didn’t seem to take us seriously because they didn’t show up until 10 minutes to start time and 50 people were waiting to get in. We paid extra for the marquee, which didn’t say LOOK AT MY SHORTS until 20 minutes after the movies started. This festival played to a 350+ people crowd and their bar & concession sold tons of food. When I went to them for a follow up, they wanted to charge us double for half the time, claiming that it cost that just to turn on the lights. I was a manager at movie theatres for more than 5 years, so I have some idea what the costs are, and that ain’t it. They’ll never get my money ever again either.
So now, we’ve found a good fit. A nicer theatre than all the previous ones with by a large margin the best projection from digital sources, and with management that understands that there is a market for independent, home grown entertainment. Everybody wins.
Well, that’s all I got in me right now. No news from the SciFi Channel. This might shock people, but I think you’ll probably read about it from me in more than a few places when we hear something, even a rejection. We didn’t make it into the Fangoria Weekend of Horrors in Chicago. Anchor Bay controls the screening room and we’re not with Anchor Bay. That’s okay.
-Ross
2006 THE YEAR OF THE BOOTASTICAL JOURNEY THROUGH TIME
