A death in the family in the age of Facebook

I found out on Facebook that I lost my uncle today.

Less than an hour after he had a heart attack in Chennai, India, someone distantly related to me posted the news on our extended family Facebook page.  Since I get an email every time someone posts there, I got the news as an email.

I can't help thinking about the first time I learned a family member had passed away.  I was in grade 2 and came home from school to find the front door of our apartment locked.  It was never locked during the day.  (This was a long time ago when people didn't lock their doors during the day.)  I had to knock on the door.  My mother opened the door and I saw that her face was wet.  I asked her if she'd been washing her face and why was the door locked.  She just pointed to an aerogramme on the coffee table.

I read the aerogramme as best I could since I was only 7 but I realized it was news that someone had died.  I asked my mother who it was.  She said it was her sister, whom I'd never met as my family had left India for Canada when I was a year old.

She'd died in childbirth two weeks earlier which was how long it had taken for the aerogramme to travel from India to Canada then.

So in my life, the time it has taken for the news of a death in the family halfway around the world in written form to be received has gone from two weeks to a couple of minutes.

I was able to call my cousin on his mobile once I saw the Facebook post and he told me that his father had indeed died of a heart attack less than an hour earlier.  And I could try and express myself to him somehow in that moment.  Thanks to mobile phones.

The faster news hasn't made the emotion less.  Also thankfully.

Business plans are harder than screenplays

Not really.  But it sure feels that way.

After taking a course via filmspecific.com I'm trying to write a business plan for my micro-budget film Dany Boy to give investors.  It's a fascinating job in a way, but not one I went to film school to learn.

You can get people to write business plans but this will cost you upwards of $2500 and I'd rather put that money on the screen.  (I'll probably have to spend that on an entertainment lawyer to vet the plan anyway.)

Doing the business plan confronts a film maker with the reasons they are making the film and who they think will actually want to see the film.  I think that is probably the biggest question film makers DON'T ask themselves.

I recently attended a film festival industry panel and posed that question to the panelists:  who was their audience for their film and how did they plan to reach them.  They all shrugged and didn't seem to care.  Somehow they got their films made and the audience would find them.

I just don't think that's a guarantee in the current marketplace which is chock full of content looking for viewers.

So writing this business plan is forcing me to think long and hard about some important questions because if you can't answer them, why would anyone want to invest in your film?

Dany Boy - the film website now live

Finally.

Setting up a website for my independent film, Dany Boy, takes a more time and work than I thought it would.  But it's done.  (Special thanks to Paul Chato of Your Web Department for his help.  See him for all your web site needs!)

In anticipation of a crowdfunding campaign in May to raise money to make the movie shooting in July or September, the site's now live and has the preview trailer, (crowdfunded), as well as our poster, cast photos, crew bios and lots of goodies.

Dany Boy knocked out of Cinecoup

My film, Dany Boy, was knocked out of the Cinecoup film financing competition this weekend by not gaining enough support via social media to remain in the Top 40 projects.

It's not unexpected, (well, getting knocked out at this point was since we were always in the Top 25 until now), but it serves up a hard lesson.  Without a savvy social media team working on a film, it's difficult to get any traction in that space.

And the internet space is where independent films will be financed going forward.  Crowdfunding will be the wave of financing for films, which will no longer be a business, but closer to doing theatre or another of the fine arts, that is, a donation-based activity.  Budgets for films are dropping to the level of what a stage production would cost, or less than a half hour TV episode.  Or those budgets are ballooning beyond the point of contact for an independent film maker.  Star-driven vehicles like the new Ryan Gosling film, The Place Beyond the Pines which is in the $10-20 million range, huge megabudget films like the upcoming Tom Cruise vehicle Oblivion, which is more than the GDP of many countries, or bottom feeding indies, like Beasts of the Southern Wild, in the $200,000 range max, are the 3 levels that seem to have shaken out.

As a bottom feeder, one's only support comes from dedicated fans for your work who will support it without expecting any return other than engaging with the work itself, or the occasional perk via crowdfunding.

It liberates us from being beholden to financiers, government agencies like Telefilm et al, but it means that films will be made for peanuts and film is now on par with dance, drama, concert music and other fine arts.  Nothing wrong with that, but it makes the film maker less of an artist and more of an entrepreneur in terms of seeking out and leveraging their audience in order to make their art.

I have leveraged a fairly engaged fanbase for Dany Boy, just not large enough to keep me in the Cinecoup contest.  That's fine.  Films were made without Cinecoup before and will be after and getting out from the grind of fulfilling the weekly contest requirements will at least enable me to pursue these other lines of financing.  Cinecoup was a useful experience, though not one I'd recommend, to learn what you could learn without paying an entry fee.

Entitlement to premiere at Summerworks 2013

Last summer and fall I wrote my first play, called Entitlement.  It came out of my third not being called back to teach scriptwriting at a local film school.  Getting a temporary teaching job is much like getting a TV series.  Every twelve weeks or so you find out if you're getting renewed.  In this case, I wasn't and having been not renewed two other times over the last seven years, clearly I wasn't cutting it as a script writing teacher for millenials.  (In all cases, the school's didn't bring me back because students complained about me.)

Well, I tried.

So in the spirit of when life gives you lemons, make lemonade, I decided to write a play--my first--about my experiences teaching.  It's about an underemployed screenwriter who takes a job teaching scriptwriting only to have an ambitious student try to get him fired.  It was amazingly easy to write in retrospect.  I finished a first draft after a couple of months and then after meeting with my agent and a couple of trusted colleagues, did a second draft, (which was really adding new scenes, but not much revising of the original draft) in October.  I then got my friend and colleague, David Ferry, who also happens to be one of the best theatre directors in the country, to read it.  He loved it and organized a reading in January.

The reading was an eye-opener for me.  I finally saw myself how my students must have seen me, when I heard the actor reading the teacher's part.  As "right" as the teacher/me was, he/I was still a bit of a dick.  But the student meets his dickishness step for step and it turned out to be a pretty good piece of theatre.

So I submitted the play with David attached as director to Summerworks, which is a prestigious theatre festival held in Toronto annually.  And a few days ago, Summerworks announced that Entitlement would be part of their 2013 offering, one of 36 different plays.  There was no cast attached when I applied, but since being accepted, David's lined up a terrific group of actors to be in it.

I'm thrilled, (though getting into a festival means you also have to raise the money to produce the play.) But that's a topic for another post.

Another poster

Dany Boy made it into the Cinecoup Top 60 last weekend, (actually 24th).  Though so many teams dropped out from the original 90, that it wasn't as great an achievement as I'd have wished.  (There were 82 that got whittled down to 60.)

And now "fans" get to do it all over again next week for the Top 40.

In the meantime, this week's "Mission" was to offer two different types of posters for the movie for fans to choose.  I'm actually glad to have done this mission as I think the second poster I came up with is a strong one that can be used throughout the financing campaign.  (The first one is in the previous post.)  Please post any comments on the new one:

Cinecoup week 2

I'm even less sure about how game changing Cinecoup could be to Canadian cinema than I was last week.

Over the weekend, Cinecoup's "critic's picks" were a cheezy sci-fi effort and one about a cop who was really a werewolf.  I'm not arguing about the merit of those two picks, other than they were both aimed at a male teen market.  Granted, this is the largest demographic that goes to movies now.

But by aiming at that market, how is Cinecoup a gamechanger?  It appears to be encouraging the game be played exactly as it's being played now.

So let's call Cinecoup what it is, which is an excellent marketing machine derived from what's worked in the videogame industry, (where the founder of Cinecoup comes from.)  How game changing it will be remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, I've posted two required Mission videos so far.  Missions are assignments entrants must fulfill each week.  The first two have been videos.  Next week's assignment is to design a couple of possible posters for your entry.  You get the idea.

The week a Mission is uploaded, registered Cinecoup fans' views/likes/comments/shares of an entrant's Mission count towards their score in the contest.  So your views/likes/comments/shares of last week's video won't count to our score, but you might find it interesting.  You'll meet Team Dany Boy:  writer, Imthiyaz Hameed, producer, Colin Brunton and me, the director.

This week's Mission shows you 6 ways Team Dany Boy makes a Little go a Long way.  The requirement was "cheap tricks" which makes sense, in that the video is to show how a team will make a movie with a low budget.  Most of the competition will be showing how they made monsters or explosions or CG landscapes as that's what their movies require.  Ours, which is really an art house thriller has some unexpected uses of money-saving devices that were deliberately chosen to enhance the aesthetics of the film.  In the video, Colin Brunton points out that having less money often makes the project more interesting--if you know how to make it look like you had all the money you needed even if you didn't.  I think we do that.

So, check it out and let me know what you think, though please comment on the Cinecoup site so it counts to our score!  Remember that just viewing and liking also counts to our score.

And I added a new possible poster to our portfolio.  What do you think?

Week 1 of Cinecoup

I entered Cinecoup with Dany Boy.

So far it's hard to tell whether Cinecoup will be a game changer for independent film financing in Canada or not.

It's not because the quality of the 90 entries is wildly uneven.  Anyone should expect that.  It's because the quality is irrelevant.  It's the popularity of the entry assessed by how much traction it gets on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Cinecoup's own website that matters.

The director may have never made a film before and may not have ever worked with actors or written a script, but if he or she can put together a trailer that is popular, the rules suggest they could win.  So be it.

So I've entered and opened my work up to some nasty anonymous comments, but a lot of support from the audience that I KNOW is out there for the film.  It's not necessarily the audience for sci-fi or horror movies, (a lot of those being pitched on Cinecoup).  The trouble is, I suspect the audience for my film, an art house thriller about exposing a family secret is not very interested in social media.  So any ideas on how to reach them?

Here's what I need them to do.  Go to cinecoup.com and SIGN UP, (big pink sign up box at the top right of every web page on the site.)

Then go to cinecoup.com/dany-boy.  That's the page for my entry.  Watch the trailer and click on RATINGS.  Give it 10/10, please.  Write a nice comment.

(If you don't like it, that's okay.  I'd rather you not write a nasty comment, but there's nothing stopping you from doing that.)

Not finished yet.  Then you click the MISSIONS tab to see the weekly video missions I've had to do and you get to view/like/comment/share them.  During the first week a Mission video is posted, all of that viewing/liking/commenting/sharing goes towards Dany Boy's score.  Come back the next week and you can do it for that week's mission.

Still want to help?  Like the Dany Boy Facebook page.  Follow @Danyboythefilm on Twitter.  Go to the Cinecoup YouTube channel and view/like the trailer:

It's early days and we're doing all right, but I think we'll need to do a lot better to stay in the game.  I will hold up the film to anybody on the basis of quality and talent in front of and behind the camera, but Cinecoup doesn't work that way.  It's popularity by social media that counts so please spread the word.

Cinecoup trailer goes live TONIGHT

The Cinecoup contest goes live February 28, 9PM EST.

The movie I'm trying to make called Dany Boy is entered.  It doesn't have zombies or vampires in it.  It has a REAL monster.

The shocking trailer can be seen at cinecoup.com starting 9PM tonight.

A couple of reality show pitches

While I've written documentaries, like the NFB's Show Girls and the IMAX documentary Lost Worlds, I haven't done reality shows.

Until now.

Kill Shot stars former Canadian sniper Master Cpl. Jody Mitic who would attempt to replicate famous sniper shots from military and law enforcement history.  Jody is an amazing guy, having had his feet blown off in combat, though you would never know it if you met him.  

The second show I came up with when I was in my home town overseeing the contents sale of our family's 40 year old home.  My sister had hired Richard Moroz to handle the sale and I spent a week overseeing the sale and watching my family's belongings sold to new owners.  I realized that Richard sells lifetimes, and that's the name of the show, Sale of a Lifetime.

I shot and had a great editor Erin Carroll cut a talent demo for the show.

Sale of a Lifetime talent demo reel from Sugith Varughese on Vimeo.

Both are before different networks now.