Christy Dena Will Help You Be More Successful

I consider myself to be a pretty cutting edge dude. I pay attention to the interwebs and the FaceTubes and such. I know the buzzwords. Everybody is always talking about "transmedia". I read a few blogs about transmedia and I got sick of people telling me I needed to make an iPhone app for my movie. That kind of talk doesn't really hold water for me. I live on my dad's couch. I will be lucky if I can sell enough weed to afford to create our DVDs. There is no room for transmedia strategizing in my meager budget, or my massive to-do list. Or so I thought. After we were lucky enough to participate the in the Slamdance Filmmaker Summit, we got in contact with Christy Dena. Procuring Christy's services was one of the most positive moves we have made with Self Helpless.

I was expecting that Christy would skim through a few minutes of Self Helpless, and hit us with a few emails suggesting that we invest in an app designer and a better Facebook page and that would be the end of it. I was wrong.

Between flights around the world to deal with her major clients who pay her way more than I could afford, Christy found time to screen Self Helpless. In fact, she watched it twice. I find it difficult to verbalize how shocking this is. We have to fight tooth and nail to get people to watch our movie once, and most of those folks have nothing better to do. Not only did Christy give Self Helpless a thorough going through, she got it. She knew all the characters' names, their motivations, and their personalities. She read every blog post, comment, and tweet that we have spewed forth upon the web over the last year. She did her goddamned homework. And then she sent us her consultation: a 14 page PDF with a fully developed report on our film's transmedia possibilities, including a giant "brain map" flow chart diagram thingy outlining all of her different ideas and how they could relate to our release timeline.

Blown away would be an understatement. Christy treated our little indie film as if we were a major corporation. Here's why Christy's transmedia ideas were invaluable to us:

1 - We never would have come up with them. Again, we are pretty far from being stuck in any old school models. I would say we are forward thinking. Christy is better. She is really on some next level shit.

2 - Her ideas felt like they came from us. They were rude, a little shocking, and very funny. They reflected a thorough understanding of our film, our style, and the brand that we are building.

3 - The total cost of implementing Christy's ideas = $0.00. She designed her entire consultation with the understanding that our crew is quite capable with regards to media creation, and fairly destitute in the realm of budget. Her ideas make use of our best strengths, and account for our greatest weaknesses.

My only regret is that we did not get in touch with Christy as soon as we finished the script. Now that I have seen what Christy is capable of, I have realized how much more we could have done with Self Helples if we had gotten her involved sooner. If you are looking into making or releasing a film, company, or any other project that involves connecting with an audience or customer base, do yourself a favor and contact Christy.

You can get in touch with Christy Dena at her site: www.universecreation101.com

Where We At

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The Sensation of Sight and The Power of Local

At our (one and only) festival appearance, we were lucky enough to score some face time with a pretty cool indie distributor. When I mentioned the hometown success we had been having with Self Helpless (sold out theaters, print articles, and a TV appearance) he pretty much laughed in my face. "Success anywhere outside of LA or NY is meaningless, and probably detrimental," was his basic message. While that may be true for films that are shopping to distributors for a theatrical release (old school), it is certainly not the case for those of us who are releasing our own films (true school). I was happy to discover a very concrete example of local success leading to major recognition for a film called The Sensation of Sight.

The Sensation of Sight is a truly independent film that was shot next door to us in New Hampshire. You can check out their excellent website here. The film's executive producer, Buzz McLaughlin, has been writing an illuminating series of blog posts about the film's distribution adventures. His most recent post detailed how his team was able to translate successful theatrical runs in indie theaters in New Hampshire to national recognition and an eventual distribution deal.

I won't recycle the entire blog post, but one piece of information was particularly interesting. After The Sensation of Sight sold out their opening weekend in New Hampshire, the theater reported their sales for that weekend to a number of national media services. Because of this, Variety listed the film at #4 in national per-screening box office gross for that weekend. This put The Sensation of Sight in front of a lot of people's eyes. I was completely unaware of this sales reporting system. Had we understood this aspect of the game, we might have been able to leverage this national reporting system to generate some press when Self Helpless sold out the Brattle theater in Boston, and the Roxy in Burlington, VT.

Check out The Sensation of Sight, and never underestimate the power of local, even if you live in a place where cows outnumber people!

Pioneers, Oh Pioneers

Ted Hope is a very well know film producer (American Splendor, 21 Grams, Adventureland and about 60 other features). He is also a leader in the new media approach to indie filmmaking. This guy shoots 50 setups in a day, then gets home and writes a 1,500 word blog post, and blasts off on Twitter for an hour. His latest blog post really caught my eye as it relates directly to a lot of the inspirations behind Self Helpless. You should take a look at Ted's Blog here. I am re-posting my response below so that Self Helpless fans can have a look at it.

My response:

Wow, I can't believe someone is finally talking about this! This was a huge part of the motivation for creating Self Helpless. We are four guys in our twenties who are equally at home watching "Kisses" or "Lovely By Surprise" and "Caddyshack". And there are TONS of people like us out there. We have often discussed our dissatisfaction with indie films insistence on making heavy, emotional, esoteric films that are so steeped in art that they are rendered inaccessible. Films like that can be great, but there needs to be more diversity out there.

Self Helpless is definitely a low-brow comedy. It is full of guns and drugs and mexicans and farting. But there is also some really original stuff in there. The plot is absurdly twisted as are most of the characters. And, the movie feels completely indie! It has excessively long flashbacks, homegrown animation, and plenty of classically comical motifs.

I am not just trying to plug my movie. I really feel that there is room for people to start making more indie films that will appeal to a young audience. It is clear that internet basted, tech-reliant distribution is the future of indie. Young people are the most interweb-savvy customers out there. They are willing to go through twitter, and itunes, and blogger, and dig… just to follow, find, and support something they think is cool. “Trailer Park Boys, “Always Sunny”, “Flight of the Conchords”, the networks have it figured out, now we need to play catch up.

We have based our entire release model for Self Helpless on our faith in the young indie audience. We are running a seven day bittorrent-only release. We WANT people to download the movie because we know they will support it. This is how you access the young indie audience: young filmmakers make great films directed at their peers, they provide the fans free access to the films, and they create quality merchandise that people will want to buy (instead of begging for donations).

What are you going to do with the movie when it's done?

The traditional model of independent film making is quickly going the way of the dodo bird. It used to be a nice, easy 3 step process: 1 - make movie, 2 - go to film festival, 3 - sell movie to major studio. I am obviously overstating the simplicity here, but there was at least an established pattern.

With the explosion of accessible movie making technology, way more people are making movies. This has lead to a glut of films on the market. This technological boom has also resulted in the creation of a few different movie distribution models such as: VOD (video on demand), self-distribution, and direct to DVD distribution.

What we are pursuing with Self Helpless is a hybrid marketing strategy. Here is a general outline of our different angles on promoting the movie in the hopes of someone buying it:

1) Web Assault - We will be plastering advertisements all across Facebook, Myspace, YouTube, and Twitter. This has become standard practice these days. Our advantage is the large network of friends that the four of us have established. We have approximately 1,200 friends already lined up on Facebook alone. If everyone passes the movie on to 5 of their friends...

2) Promotional Copies - We will be sending promo copies of the movie to anyone and everyone we know that is even tangentially involved in the movie business. You have a friend who cleans the floors at a talent agency in wisconsin, what is his email address?

3) The Premiere - The world premiere hasn't been scheduled yet, and details are top secret. Suffice it to say that it will be off the proverbial meat rack. Picture 100 drunk Self Helpless fans, and 15 bloggers and reporters packed into a theater. Good times will abound.

4) Film Festivals - There are, literally, thousands of film festivals in the US evey year. We will be submitting Self Helpless to a select few festivals that seem to be cool enough to understand the genius behind farting in people's milk.

5) Screenings - We hope to organize premieres in a few different East coast cities to start with. If we decide to try to independently distribute DVDs then we will probably arrange a full tour. Lock your doors and hide your daughters, America!!

These are the major avenues that we are looing at for advertising and promotion. Our main focus is to be adaptabe and work hard. The movie is truly excellent and unique. All we have to do is hustle as hard as we can to get it out to the public.

Why does Self Helpless matter?

Basically, the movie industry is crazy right now. Every fool and his mom is trying to sell an independent film, and at the same time studios are trying to cut their costs to the bone. One might think this spells doom for Self Helpless, but fear not.

Self Helpless is something of a miracle. Big Hollywood pictures can have budgts in the $100 million. "Independent" films (which often have a studio behind them) have budgets as low as $5-10 million. Low budget films tend to have a budget under $1 million. Movies with a budget under $20,000 are considered "no budget" films. Self Helpless was made for around $10,000. The fact that we managed to make a feature length movie that was shot in 2 countries and features an army of extras and a cameo appearance from a major hip hop star is nothing short of astounding.

This positions us uniquely in the film market. We have a finished product that is hilarious and entertaining. Studios don't need to worry about taking a risk on an unproven script, they can simply watch the audience go crazy at a screening. If there were ever a time to push a high quality, low budget film that makes people laugh, this is it. Cross your fingers!

Why isn't the movie done?

Ok, here is the complex answer to this oft-repeated question. Firstly, I acknowledge that we have been saying "in a month" for about four months. The further we get into this movie, the greater potential we discover that it has. This, in turn, leads to more work to reach that potential.

Filming took place from August to December of '08.

Rough editing all the scenes was completed around February of '09.

Final editing, animation, and music composition is finally close to being finished right now.

What remains is the main audio mixdown. Basically this is the process of looking at every single sound clip (dialogue, sound effects, background audio, songs) and seeing what needs to be done to make it sound as good as possible. Some things are too loud, too quiet, too sharp, blown out. Some need special effects to make them sound like phone calls and such. As you can guess, this is an exhausing process. First Adam and I spend between 2 and 5 hours (depending on the scene) setting all the clips in our audio editing program. Then Drick spends another 2 or 3 hours actually doing the mixing. This is a serious time investment, but it is essential to the quality of the viewing experience.

The computer goes to Drick's house in a couple days. He will probably be mixing for 2 weeks or so. Drick has vowed that, in the name of productivity, he will enforce a "no dope smoking until after mixing" policy for himself. A new leaf is being turned over.

During these 2 weeks of mixdown PK, Ski, and I will be working on: titles, a rough trailer, web promo materials, film festival stuff.

I'll hit you guys with an update on the film festival scene soon.