It’s working well for me, but I’d thought I’d check in to see how this site/email combo is working for you. Any suggestions? Requests? Feedback? Too much info, not enough? Leave a comment or hit reply to this email.
The research is going well. I’m slightly concerned it might be too cold to shoot outside at the skillshare a week tomorrow, if this punishing weather continues.
John August is a guy who’s written a bunch of fantastical big studio scripts, and I just came across his website when he released a webisode he wrote/directed during the strike.
The Remnants from John August on Vimeo.
Don’t let the Reservoir Dogs-eque type treatment put you off, it’s 11 minutes of funny lo-fi sci-fi goodness even with the gloss of Hollywood connections giving it a slightly waxy taste. I also quite enjoyed his other lo-fi sci-fi directorial debut The Nines, and especially appreciate his sobering post-mortem on it. It reaffirms my belief that zerobudget is the way to go, as even Sundance-buzzed indie films aren’t making their budget back.
His how-to section is excellent, too.
Edit: Sorry, not Reservoir Dogs, Godfather-esque. Also worth checking out is August’s QandA section.
Dave has been talking to the ACTRA actor’s union about our situation, and while there are some lower rates for indie low-budget productions if you qualify, they didn’t go for our model of deferred, hypothetical money.
My unnamed source who had used ACTRA actors, then was able to clear it once he had a broadcast offer, was a bit of a special case. He started his movie as a workshop/improv kind of thing with a few people who were ACTRA. After the movie was made, he went to ACTRA and explained that he didn’t know he was going to actually make a movie — they watched it, believed him based on the style of movie, and allowed him to pay the actors TIP rates retroactively.
So it looks like we should go non-ACTRA & non-union in general: unions are one of those good things, like organic food, that I continue to feel ambivalent about. On a more practical tack, does this mean I should lean towards script ideas have have lots of smaller acting parts (Play’n) rather than ones with leads that will dominate the screen (Alleyologist)? Input welcome.
Dave was also able to track down some templates for all the releases we need at the Canadian Independent Film & Video Fund (CIFVF). He did it so quickly I suspect he might have Internet access via his frontal lobe. Or at least a hat like the guy at the top of the post.
I’ve just talked to a director who’s sold a movie for broadcast and gotten a theatrical release, and he gave me the off-the-record skinny on some of his experiences and cleared up some other legal things we were discussing here.
Superchannel was interested in purchasing the broadcast rights to his movie, but required them to have Errors and Omissions Insurance. An E&O insurance company protects the broadcaster against getting sued for stuff: say you have a brand name in the shot, a store, or a person in the background. If they see themselves in a movie they don’t like they call up Superchannel or whoever, but Superchannel shuffles them off to the E&O insurance company. They have to settle with the person, or deal with it somehow.
So in this director’s case, they had to submit the movie to the E&O company and they assessed the potential risk and charged them accordingly. There was a brand of a local beer who’s appearance they were able to clear with the beer company since it wasn’t presented in a unpleasant way, which reduced how much they were charged. So every location/extra/music/actor/crew release you have signed is one less risk the E&O company has to take, and thus charge the moviemaker for. He thought companies and individuals were much more likely to be perceived as a risk than public spaces — he’d never heard of people having to produce permits from the city for on-the-fly shots. He imagined the insurance would cost $5-$10,000 but wouldn’t have to be paid until there was a broadcaster offer.
The rights to his movie, which he thought was pretty average or standard, sold for about $50,000 to Superchannel. So, overall, I think it’s worth it to do the paperwork as we go, as it amounts to location/extra/music/actor/crew releases drawn up and signed.
He said that broadcasters sometimes do presales based on a script, but they expect it to trigger other much bigger investor money (ie. Telefilm, who would be impressed you have a broadcaster); that they often have content input, and while this is not control, one is behooved to take it seriously if one wants to continue the relationship with other projects — a “too many cooks” situation. He threw out $15,000 as a hypothetical presale number, but it’d be based on a small percentage of the budget. Doesn’t sound worth it for the amount of shopping-around effort and potential interference.
We’re having our second skillshare on Jan. 25 at 1pm. Want to improve your camera shooting skills? Do you have some skills you’d be willing to share? I’m thinking it’d be fun to shoot this trailer, though it doesn’t mean that’ll be the concept we’ll be going with. (It’ll give us some footage to edit for February’s editing skillshare.)
At 4pm we’ll have an alley tour with Graeme Parry, who gives tours like the one above and who Sean Lerner suggested when I was talking about making a movie with alleys. It’ll be an hour, and then we’ll go to dinner somewhere.
If you’d like to join us for some or all of the day, add a comment. Location is to be announced.
I’d bet that a number of you have seen Primer, but for those that haven’t, it’s a great example of a low-budget sci-fi feature that was shot for very little ($7000 and they shot FILM) over a short period of time with a tiny crew (most crew doubled as actors), but made a terrific, suspenseful mindbender of a film. Great inspiration, I’d recommend renting it.
If you want to know more, check out any of the following:
http://primermovie.com/index.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primer_(film) — Good info on production, but contains some early plot spoilers.
I’m not a huge fan of the trailer, but it’s at:
This idea of political reform occasionally comes to me, and last night I was thinking it might make for good sci-fi. It’s at a time in the future where technology allows for voting to happen on the fly. There’s no more routine elections, but rather everyone has the opportunity to vote on every policy in the government (through the Internet). But like today, people are busy, working, raising kids, going out, and also like today, it’s just too much effort to stay engaged in politics. So a person can give another (a friend, or someone’s values they share) the ability to vote for them (i.e. by proxy). Some people actively collect votes, and then they in turn can give the votes they’ve collected to more prominent people, and in turn, they can pass their votes on…etc
So what happens is, you have the guy in your office always trying to convince you to swing your vote over to them. He collects 80 votes from co-workers, friends, family, and puts them behind a well known local activist, who has accumulated a few thousand votes. The local activist might use their big vote count to vote directly on policy or they may put them behind an even bigger politician.
Anyone can switch their vote at anytime — they can take it back, or put it behind another. Also policies could end up switching back and forth… for example, let’s say 49% of the votes are going towards abolishing meat as a food, and then after some grassroots campaigning, it passes the 50% mark, all of a sudden meat production stops and everyone is forced to eat vegetarian. An underground meat market develops. But then it swings back, and more people support meat as food.
Perhaps there’s no central head, political parties, or hierarchy, and the only power held is how many votes a person has behind them.
It’s a world where anyone can be a politician, there’s way more politicians, a lot of people are trying to gather votes, and it’s considered much more democratic.
Then we could take all the follies of this system and play them up. i.e. it’s kind of like government by polls, except real power transfers as soon as a vote is changed; majority has power over the minority; it’s unpredictable – many policies may be in constant flux.
The system was brought on by a collapse in the current political system, but now, because of it, the world is much worse. Everyone’s stuck in it, and because of this new system, it’s impossible to reform it again. Finally, there’s an underground movement trying to over through it.
It’s pretty unlikely that we’ll make any money off of this, but if that happy thing was to happen, wouldn’t it suck if people felt like they didn’t get their fair share? I know that I would feel like shit. This is why I want to make this as transparent and accountable as possible.
As I proposed in this post, and there seemed to be general agreement on, one way to fairly divide our wads of hypothetical money is by logging our hours. So, this being the day of new resolutions, I’d like to encourage people to develop it as a habit that they eventually don’t have to think about. Personally, I’ve been using this dashboard applet for my Linux system and there seem to be various apps to do it with Mac and PC, including this Java crossplatform one (anyone else got a favourite?). But naturally pencil and paper is fine too, whatever works for you. I’ll be asking people for their hours right before we shoot, after we shoot, and after the project’s over.
Many of the people involved have done this to invoice clients, so it shouldn’t be that tough. However, unlike invoicing clients who are reselling your work at a profit, I’d ask people to consider that padding or guesstimating the time you’ve spent is either taking (hypothetical) money away from people that are being accurate, or underestimating the time spent and ripping yourself off.
Anyway: if you have concerns or questions, now is the time to voice them. We’ll work it out. Otherwise, I’ll assume you’re logging your hours!
As people may have noticed, I’ve been coming up with possible story concepts — a couple have just spontaneously occurred to me, and others I’ve sat down and brainstormed up. I’ve got five now, and I’m going to go deeper with them over January — researching the leads people have added in the comments (and hopefully will continue to add), interviewing people with expertise in the subjects, etc. I’ll share what I learn and by the end of the month one will probably feel particularly strong. I’ll then write up a 10 page outline for that one in February, invite people to give feedback, and write the script in March. In Jan, Feb, and March we’ll have monthly events (like the lighting skillshare that went really well yesterday) to meet in person and discuss the movie informally. In April I would like to step it up with weekly meetings that will prepare us for shooting in May and June.
Concerns? Have a particular pre-production thing you’d like to see included? Chime in!