Yesterday we entered Maud & Leo into the “Get It Made”-competition over at Openfilm.com. There will be six finalists, nominated by you the audience, then a jury will pick the lucky winner. Please help us by voting for Maud & Leo. The winner get financing for a feature film.
If you haven’t already watched the movie you can do so below or at Clearbits.net.
Maud & Leo has reached 15 000 downloads! That’s well exceeding our expectations. We’ve done some online marketing for the movie but not as much as we should have. Even without that notion it’s a great number for a independent short film. I have some hope that the movie itself will make the audience themselves want to keep sharing the movie, but that’s not exactly a certainty. We won’t leave it up to them to decide if the movie is spread or not, but I have a great feeling that they will keep seeding the movie and sharing their experience with friends and lovers.
To watch the movie you can do so online at Openfilm.com, and if you prefer to download the movie that can be done at Clearbits.net
Please keep sharing the movie with friends and lovers, and be sure to join us on Facebook for full listing of download locations and news about the movie.
Exciting times! We are working hard on the release of Maud & Leo. I recently registered the film for a Creative Commons license, which mean that we will be distributing the movie freely on the Internet.
Since it’s an independent production that we own the total rights of, it’s really a perfect chance to try new ways of distributing our movies. With that said we won’t forget about the traditional ways of watching movies. It will be distributed through theater, mobile devices, DVD and the Internet for download and streaming.
Today I got the mobile streaming to work for the iPhone, the stream is based on a h.264 codec so a lot of devices should work with it. It looks great! The movie is 26 minutes so it’s not the kind of movie you put on while traveling two stops on the metro, but still I think it will be a great platform for viewing the movie. It will be available both as Podcast and as a Quicktime-stream.
We’re also going to try out some new ways of marketing and financing. Today I got a text messaging feature to work that we will be using for swedish viewers, they will be able to make donations with their mobile phones. Other ways to donate will be Paypal and swedish Bankgiro, these are the ones that we feel is simple enough for viewers to want to use.
As for the cinema we’re working on a few cities to screen the movie in. We’re hoping to be able to screen it in a couple of selected cities in Sweden and some abroad. More news to come in the future…
Today we finished a limited edition of DVD’s for Cannes. They travel today together with Tobias for Cannes. Here’s how it turned out. I will join up with them on Monday in Cannes.
Now the ball was rolling. We had our threads out everywhere, all we had to do was to wait and money would come. So we aimed for our cast.
Of course we wanted the greatest cast and team. We approached some of the best actresses in Sweden for the lead as Maud. All of them really liked the story. Since time was short the only one that could do the movie was Marika Lindström. We met up with her and at our first meeting we felt that she’s the one. She even had a history in the area that the movie is shot in, she grew up in Jokkmokk and was keen on going back there. She was perfect.
There was only one problem. She couldn’t shoot in the days that we had scheduled. The only thing we could do was to move the shooting dates. We set sail for the beginning of September instead of August.
Marika was casted as Maud and we had two actors coming in to audition for the role of Leo. We booked a studio for two days and shot some scenes with both of them. When Adam Lundgren got in the studio for the first time he simply had it. He’s an amazingly talented young actor that we will see a lot of in the future. At the age of 22 he is already starting to establish himself with the biggest Swedish directors. When he auditioned it was a blessing to see him portray Leo, he gave him life that we all had been waiting for so long.
The casting was a great success, we had both actors and they were perfect. But of course there had to be complications. More about that later.
To be continued…
Today we made the last changes to Maud & Leo. Now we’re planning our trip to Cannes. The movie will be screened at the Short Film Corner at the Cannes Film Festival.
Last week we finally sent a copy of Maud & Leo to Cannes. Hopefully it will be picked as official selection. We decided to edit it down to 15 minutes which is demanded to be in the official selection. The original cut i 28 min but I’m liking the short version and maby it’s even better, it’s not totally finished though…
The fist clips from our coming movie Maud & Leo has been released. Be sure to check all of them out in decent quality at www.maudleo.se. Here you can see some youtube clips.
Teaser 1
Teaser 2
Teaser 3
Teaser 4
Today we put up a preview of our coming movie Leo & Maud. The website is www.maudleo.se, it will be launched officially i a couple of days. For now look at the beautiful teaser on www.maudleo.se.
Today the new People magazine will be published. In there you can find an interview with us. By us I mean me, Tobias Rydin and Akram Janzi, the people behind the short film called Maud & Leo (it’s called “Då somnar jag” in the magazine). They will also have a release party at Spybar in Stockholm. You can read the article at www.bronx.se, or download pdf at http://www.bronx.se/0808/people_2008-08.pdf.
The story is about a 60-year old women who travels through the northern parts of Sweden in an Alfa Romeo Spider -73. Its a poetic voyage through the breathtaking landscapes of Norrland.
The lead roles are played by Marika Lindström and Adam Lundgren. The movie is 28 minutes long and will have its premiere in january 2009.
