Category Archives: The Mediascape

How to make a low, low budget sci-fi feature

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Aleem Hossain blogs on No Film School How (and Why) I Made an Indie Sci-Fi Feature Film for $30K.

It’s a fascinating read. His belief is that:

“We should rethink why we are making independent films in the first place, especially indie sci-fi and speculative films. I don’t think we should even be trying to compete with Hollywood. We should be striving to make films that are strikingly different from big-budget films.”

Aleem faced five challenges making After We Leave and solved them creatively. Although he answers them from a sci-fi point of view, they can be extrapolated to indie filmmaking in general.

#1. The Brainstorming Phase: What Are Sci-Fi and Indie Film’s Core Strengths?

“Hollywood is very good at making its kind of movies. Why should we try to compete with them with a lot less money? In my mind, the only reason to make an independent feature film is to create a movie that only you would make. A kind of film that wouldn’t exist if you didn’t exist. I think what independent films can offer are new directions in style, tone, theme, topic, representation, and viewing experiences. They can challenge the mainstream artistically, politically, and narratively.”

#2. World building does not have to be expensive.

Rather than with a VFX-laden long shot, sometimes a world can be built with a carefully composed close up:

“The future version of Los Angeles that I imagine in my film is undergoing severe water shortages. This glass is the only clean water we see in the entire film. Every other time characters drink, they drink dirty water or something other than water. I don’t have a shot of a huge empty reservoir. I don’t have a shot of drones “mining” water from clouds. I have one clear glass of water, provided by the most powerful and richest character in the film… and my main character chugs it down. It cost me nothing. But it’s definitely world building.”

#3. The standard model of film production discourages artistic risk-taking.

Aleem laments, “The system is always telling us to play it safe.”

To counter the “stay on schedule” mantra, he bought their camera gear:

“We could choose to just try one crazy complicated shot, exactly at sunrise, and then we’d all go off to our day jobs. If it didn’t work we could try again the next morning.  There was no downside other than our time… and because we were fitting it in around our existing work and lives. This way of working was, in fact, the thing that convinced collaborators (some long time friends, some new) to work on the film. They all had day jobs that paid way better than I could. The reason they gave up their nights and lunch hours and weekends to work on After We Leave was that I was offering them a chance to try things they normally didn’t get to try. To reach for things in a way they normally didn’t get to.”

This also freed up his actors to ask for extra takes and for his DOP to extend magic hour by shooting at the same time over a number of days.

As to locations:

“I ‘scouted’ for hours on Google Street view looking for rundown and beautifully gritty locations… and then I placed small scenes in each of them. We shot all over Los Angeles. We didn’t get a single permit. We didn’t need to because we didn’t care if we got kicked out of somewhere… it wouldn’t throw off our schedule or make us cut the scene or waste a ton of money. We’d just film it next weekend at a different location. And the truth is, most days we were a crew of three people with a DSLR, a Zoom recorder and a mic, plus one or two actors. We shot in 25 different exterior Los Angeles locations and were approached only once by the police and twice by private security. And in two of three of those times, they weren’t telling us to stop filming… they were making sure we were safe in what they perceived to be a dangerous location.”

#4. VFX don’t have to cost a lot of money, they (just) cost time.

Rotoscoping and motion tracking in Adobe After Effects have improved so much in the last ten years that green screens and locked off cameras are no longer necessary.

See their VFX reel.

#5. There is actually a huge advantage to being micro-budget when you reach the distribution phase.

Aleem realized his advantage was, “I needed to make back less money than other films.”

After being rejected by top film festivals, he found success at niche ones:

“After being rejected by 22 festivals in a row, I got an email from Sci-Fi London raving about my movie. I gave them the world premiere and After We Leave won Best Feature Film there and everything started to change. We went on to Berlin Sci-Fi, Other Worlds, Boston Sci-Fi and won a number of awards and got great reviews.”

Aleem concludes:

“The big lesson I learned is to only do what I felt we could do well and to pick a story that makes use of that. And that’s the irony… by avoiding mimicking the films that try to appeal to huge audiences, I actually created a film that resonated with audiences.”

My take: Lots to take away here. Embrace your limitations. Less money can mean more time. Raise enough to get it in the can. Then raise more to finish it. Use the right festivals to connect with your true audience. Never compromise your vision.

Inside the film festival selection process

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Caleb Hammond, writing in MovieMaker, reveals How to Get Your Film Into Festivals.

Illustration by Angela Huang

The article summarizes responses from “a range of festival directors (many with 10-plus years of experience), programmers, and of course, screeners” to a detailed survey.

Having been a screener and member of programming committees for a number of film festivals, I’ll also chip in.

Do screeners watch every minute?

“44 percent of screeners made clear that they watch every submission to completion. Thirty-seven percent said they occasionally fail to finish viewing a submission and only 19 percent said they frequently stop a film submission early.”

I watch every minute, unless a submission is so terrible or clearly outside a festival’s field of interest.

Should my film be long or short?

The consensus is that shorter is better. Remember, the shorter the films, the more that can be programmed.

I agree. I watch hundreds of films so I’d rather watch two shorter films than one longer one. Put another way, a longer film has to be significantly better than two shorter ones to make it.

Will a film festival bend its rules for me?

Do your research and “really know the profile of every festival you consider submitting to.” This way you can save time and money by avoiding submissions to unsuitable festivals.

Make sure you check off every requirement of the festivals you submit to — no exceptions. Bonus: help me make sure your film qualifies if there’s any question about any of the requirements by explaining everything to me in your personalized cover letter.

Will festivals let my bad sound pass?

No. Bad sound is a tip off, like bad acting and bad visuals, of a bad film. Anything sub-standard makes it much tougher to accept a film. Paradoxically, casting a known actor in your film may actually raise the bar for all the other aspects of your film.

I agree. Bad sound is hard to ignore. I would almost suggest doing one or two takes of every scene close-mic’ed without camera to give yourself plenty of sound options in edit (before resorting to ADR.)

Can diversity help my film?

Yes. If two films are tied, the one with more diversity wins.

I look for diversity in both the cast and the crew.

I missed the deadline. Can I submit after the late deadline?

Maybe, but it’s not recommended. Submit as early as possible for a couple of reasons. Earlier submission costs are cheaper than later ones. Plus the later you wait, the greater the chance that a festival has already started to make decisions. Even if they haven’t, your late film is subconsciously judged agains all that have been seen before it.

I advise that you do not send a work in progress because you are asking the festival to make a couple of gambles on you and your film: will you or won’t you finish the film in time and will it or won’t it be better than other finished films that could have been chosen? Better to not rush it and submit next year when the film is completed.

I love these closing words, quoting an anonymous programmer:

“There’s a festival for every film and a film for every festival. Submit to the ones whose vision you agree with and want to support, whether you’re accepted or not.”

My take: Make the best film you can. Know your ideal audience. Research appropriate festivals on FilmFreeway. Offer your film to those festivals for their programs. If your film is selected, congratulations! If it isn’t, feel good in supporting those festivals. Continue to believe in your film and realize it wasn’t a good fit with their programs. Make better films, and repeat this cycle. Nevertheless, if you go through this loop too many times, consider starting your own film festival!

The Truth about Indy Film Distribution in 2020

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Naomi McDougall Jones shares on the excellent Seed&Spark What the Joyful Vampire Tour of America Taught Us About Independent Film Today.

Naomi is the writer and one of the producers of Bite Me, a $500,000 subversive romantic comedy about a real-life vampire and the IRS agent who audits her.

They wanted to do distribution differently:

“Our distribution plan was based on two core hypotheses. The first was that, although Hollywood is constantly complaining that people don’t want to see movies in theaters anymore — thanks to Netflix, streaming, having to put on pants to do so, etc — those complaints didn’t jive with our observations about the people around us. In an age where technology is isolating us all ever-more-aggressively, drawing us further into our phones and farther away from each other, we felt that people are actually desperate for excuses to get out of their homes and into community. It isn’t that people don’t want to leave their homes, we figured. It’s simply that you need to give them a better proposition than “pay upwards of $50 for two people to go to a movie theater, interact with no one you didn’t come with, and have no added positive experience above what you would have gotten for the cost of your monthly Netflix subscription at home without having to put on pants.” Our second hypothesis was that, if we did some crazy marketing stunt like, say, travel around the country with the film in an RV for three months, and also put substantial marketing dollars into social media and YouTube ads, that all of that buzz, news, fun and marketing would translate into a larger number of people renting and/or buying the film online.”

The filmmakers are brutally honest with the number of tickets and merchandise they sold in the real world and the digital revenue online.

They thought they’d rake it in online and their real world tour would not amount to much more than a cute publicity stunt.

Good surprise! They grossed $38,000 in ticket sales across 51 screenings, meaning an average of $745 per screen. They also made an additional $9,000 in merchandise sales, for a total of approximately $47,000.

Now, if their online revenue was ten times as much, they’d recoup their film cost.

Bad surprise! Less than 600 people rented or purchased the film online, generating these numbers: $1,821.45 from iTunes, Amazon, and GooglePlay/YouTube combined and an additional $5,522 from Seed&Spark, for a grand total of $7,343.45 in digital revenue.

That’s actually less than their merch.

Along the way, they heard that TVOD is dead: “TVOD sales for everyone have declined 50% year-over-year for the last two years.” Yikes!

Wait, there’s more!

They also made a fascinating 12-part documentary series that follows them across the States as they promote their film and show it to paying audiences. See Prologue, Part1:

My take: Kudos to the Bite Me Team for this unparalleled access. The glimpse into their truth is humbling. Finding your audience is harder than ever; there’s just so much competition for eyeballs. I would actually like to see the documentary series cut into a feature, something that chronicles the wide-eyed optimism of the filmmakers, their journey around the country and the realizations they stumble on. Of course, then they have to take that on a second tour across the continent.

Hollywood tentatively adopts AI prediction tools

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Tom Taulli asks in Forbes if Artificial Intelligence (AI) Can Help Make Hollywood Blockbusters?

Artificial Intelligence & AI & Machine Learning

He reports that:

“Warner Bros. recently struck a deal with Cinelytic, which has built an AI-infused project management system. It is focused on the green-lighting process, such as by helping to predict the potential profits on new films.”

Cinelytic says users can:

“Gain critical insights into how key talent will increase the chances of success of your project, and by how much. Our proprietary economic scoring system, Cinelytic’s TalentScores™, ranks talent by their economic impact across the film industry, including by media type, genre, and key territories.”

See also:

My take: I’m not sure AI tools will help make better Hollywood films. AI tools analyze past successes and compare new projects against old ones. With this in mind, how can we expect anything but retreads of yesteryear’s blockbusters? More comic book films coming soon.

Online content moderation may lead to PTSD

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Casey Newton reports on The Verge that Youtube Moderators Are Being Forced To Sign A Statement Acknowledging The Job Can Give Them PTSD.

“Content moderators for YouTube are being ordered to sign a document acknowledging that performing the job can cause post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). ‘I understand the content I will be reviewing may be disturbing,’ reads the document, which is titled ‘Acknowledgement’ and was distributed to employees using DocuSign. ‘It is possible that reviewing such content may impact my mental health, and it could even lead to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).'”

This story follows one by Casey in which he chronicles the working conditions of approximately 10,000 online content moderators.

These moderators work as contractors to companies working for Google or Facebook, for instance, and are charged with keeping Youtube or Facebook, for instance, free from copyright infringement and explicit imagery, be that extremist violence, abuse, porn, hate or harassment.

“We are now two years into a great expansion of the content moderation industry. As governments around the world make more demands of tech companies to police their services, tens of thousands of people have signed up for the job. At the same time, we still lack a basic understanding of how the most difficult aspects of this work — removing graphic and disturbing content — affect the people doing it. We know that a subset of people who work in YouTube’s violent extremism queue and similar roles around the world will develop PTSD and related conditions on the job. We don’t know what a safe level of exposure might be.”

The tech companies know some content moderation can be mentally challenging and are investigating tech solutions. This paper describes displaying the images in grey scale or blurring them.

Unfortunately, the only real solution is for people to stop uploading harmful material. Until then, online content moderators run the risk of being hurt.

My take: these contractors police the Internet to keep us safe from harm. In that sense, they are really no different from the fire, police and military services. They should be paid equivalently and have the same health benefits, especially when their work leads to PTSD.

Streaming debate: nostalgia or new?

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Philippe Jean Poirier reports for CMF Trends on Streaming Wars: Using Nostalgia as a Weapon.

Nostalgia

He starts by linking to a Wall Street Journal story that reveals Netflix’s top shows from 2018. Surprise: they’re not their new shows:

“The Office” and “Friends” are more popular than “Orange is the New Black” or “Ozark“. (Interestingly, neither of these Netflix shows made their 2019 top ten.)

He then lists competing streamers who stole those shows and what Netflix did:

He then quotes vMedia co-founder George Burger:

“You always think you want to watch your favourite shows from 20 years ago, and yet you end up not devoting all that much time to them. When video stores started opening everywhere, I remember thinking: wow, I can catch up with all my favourite old movies. But that feeling doesn’t last. And that’s not a sustainable business model. Eventually, 80 percent of what you found in video stores was less than a month old. Netflix’s move from distribution to a production and distribution model is based on the fact that, once they had demonstrated that there was a business in streaming, they realized they were at the mercy of the studios for content. They anticipated the current trend, where studios want to be their own distributors.”

He concludes, “With the arrival on the market of several new OTT platforms, Netflix’s catalogue has somewhat been depleted. And these new players certainly don’t intend to stick to recycled content. Peacock, HBO Max and Disney+ are all investing massively in the production of original shows.”

My take: The mediascape expands each year, both in terms of content and in terms of outlets for that content. On the other hand are two things that are for the most part finite: individual viewing time and entertainment budgets. This means more content and more outlets will simply be ignored by viewers; the audience must fracture into niches if the smaller outlets are to gain any traction. Nostalgic content may attract an audience to a streaming service but new shows and content will keep them there. So much to see, and so little time! More curation is required.

How to test screen your indie feature

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Ben Yennie posts on Guerrilla Rep Media How and Why to Test Screen Your Independent Film and lists five main things that work:

  1. “Invite people who aren’t filmmakers.
  2. Give out printed comment cards/sheets at the close of the event.
  3. Ask the viewers to rate the film on IMDb & give them the ability to at the screening.
  4. Capture emails to let the beta viewers know when the film comes out.
  5. Consider inviting local press.”

Your film should be close to picture lock and the test screening invitees should be strangers representative of your target audience.

The survey you hand out to every single viewer must be printed on paper and ask for their demographics (but not their name) as well as answers to specific feedback questions.

Ben suggests you ask the test screening audience to rate your film on IMDb after completing the paper questionnaire and before the Q&A.

He also suggests you collect their email addresses so you can contact them with news about your film in the future.

Finally, he suggests you invite local press to your test screening to start creating a buzz for your project.

John August has suggestions for your questionnaire.

Don’t want to organize all this? These folks will hold your test screening online — all for $10,000 and up.

My take: this is all good advice. The test screening vlog by Darious above is great too. I must admit I have never heard of asking your test screening audience to rate your film on IMDb before it has been released. The main takeaway from all this is that you don’t want your premiere to be a de facto test screening because it will then be too late to incorporate anything you learn into the finished film. Well, you can, but it will just be much more expensive to make any changes at that point.

Auteurs: if you believe in your film, produce it

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Randee Dawn, reports in the LA Times: For auteurs, the question sometimes becomes: How much do you believe in your film?

Her thesis is that to guarantee getting your film made, more often now, you have to produce it yourself:

“Being inspired by film actors, directors and writers is easy. It’s all there on the big screen, in the finished project. But fewer aspirational filmmakers first think, “What I really wanna do is produce.” That particular job, which can cover an enormous range of organizational, financial and generally unsexy duties, is frequently invisible and thankless. But without producers, films wouldn’t get made. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons we’re seeing so many writer-directors also putting on producer hats this season. Films including “Marriage Story,” “The Report,” “Knives Out” and “Parasite” have all been made by filmmakers wearing three hats, while “Jojo Rabbit” and “Motherless Brooklyn” feature writer-director-actors who took on a producing role.”

She interviews Edward Norton, Rian Johnson, Scott Z. Burns, Bong Joon Ho, Taika Waititi and Noah Baumbach for their perspectives.

On producing, Norton evokes the legend of Sisyphus:

“Writing is lonely; directing and acting, if you’re overlapping them, is challenging but fun. But producing is just pushing a rock up a hill. And sometimes it rolls over you on the way back down.”

He goes on to explain why he produced his own indie:

“It’s the film business equivalent of if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself. It’s a necessary grind to get to the fun part. And if you believe in your story, it’s what you have to do to put it all together.”

My take: I love DIY filmmaking! More often than not, no-budget filmmakers like me wear many, many hats, including the producer’s. But finding someone who only wants to produce is a challenge. Everyone wants to direct, or shoot. If you want to produce, let’s talk. I’ve often said, “If you can balance your chequebook AND throw a fantastic party, you can produce.”

Cineplex Board: a present for all Canadians?

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As 2019 turns into 2020, the Cineplex Board of Directors has given Canada a present, one that has the potential to change the mediascape into something never seen before: the option to have control over our country’s movie screens.

Recall that Cineplex accepted an offer from the United Kingdom’s Cineworld to buy it for $2.8-billion on December 16, 2019.

It then entered a 7-week “go shop” period in which it can accept better offers until February 2, 2020.

In a nod to nationalism, the Cineplex Board made the terms more advantageous for a Canadian offer by halving the deal termination fee of $56-million.

My modest proposal: let’s add a movie theatre chain to the pipeline the people of Canada already own!

Why control the movie screens in our country? To enforce screen quotas, of course. The reason Canadians don’t see Canadian movies at the local mutiplex is because those theatres would rather show American movies. Embarrassingly, we had to give up our national policy target of a measly 5% of the box office because we missed the mark so badly year after year.

With almost 1,700 screens in 165 locations and approximately 75% of the audience, we could finally see our own stories on the big screen. It’s about time, eh?

It worked for Canadian music on Canadian radio, and it’s called CanCon.

My take: as much as I would love to see this happen, I’m afraid it won’t, if only because the remaining movie theatre operators in Canada will complain that Cineplex CanCon would have the unfair advantage of unlimited (taxpayer) funding. Fine, I say, we’ll buy you out too! Imagine if the people of Canada owned every movie screen in Canada!

The plots in ‘Love Actually’ rated

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Carrie Wittmer, writing in Elle, has ranked every storyline in the 2003 Christmas classic ‘Love Actually’.

She says:

“I ranked all the storylines while considering many factors, including: if the storyline holds up in 2019, if the story would make a good standalone movie, and if Love Actually would be Love Actually if the story was not in the movie.”

Here they are, from the bottom to the top:

  1. Jamie (Colin Firth) and Aurélia (Sienna Guillory)
  2. Sarah (Laura Linney), Karl (Rodrigo Santoro), and her brother (Michael Fitzgerald)
  3. Colin (Kris Marshall), Tony (Abdul Salis), and America
  4. Julia (Keira Knightley), Peter (Chiwetel Ejiofor), and Mark (Andrew Lincoln)
  5. Harry (Alan Rickman), Karen (Emma Thompson), and Mia (Heike Makatsch)
  6. Karen and Joni Mitchell
  7. Rufus (Rowan Atkinson) and wrapping
  8. John (Martin Freeman) and Judy (Joanna Page)
  9. David (Hugh Grant) and Natalie (Martine McCutcheon)
  10. Daniel (Liam Neeson), Sam (Thomas Sangster), and Joanna (Olivia Olson)
  11. Billy Mack (Bill Nighy) and His Manager (Gregor Fisher)

Her critique is hilarious, actually!

Bonus: Mariah Carey has just released a new video to celebrate the 25th anniversary of her international hit, All I Want for Christmas is You, that Olivia Olson sings in the movie.

My take: I’ve just finished watching Love Actually (my favourite holiday movie) for another year. (Die Hard is my second favourite.) In retrospect, it’s very interesting how much music is in the film. If this script is genuine, Richard Curtis did write it with the music very much in mind. Supposedly, that’s a cardinal sin. (btw, here’s another take on the rankings. And another. OMG, it’s a trope, acutally!)