A while back I was asked to submit Maud & Leo to the online film festival We Speak Here. Now it’s finally up on their website, be sure to check it out and help us win the viral price by sharing the movie.
So far well over 20 000 people has downloaded the movie from Clearbits. If you’d like to download the movie you can do so here.
Then something just happens. You suddenly realize that you have enough pieces to put the idea together. You start to see the people and stories that you’ve been looking for. I think we’re moving towards that place at the moment. It’s not exactly the way we set out for it to be, but I think it feels better than the original idea. Mostly I think it feels better because it’s for real, actual people that is living the idea.
At the moment we’re thinking of financing the project one step at a time. I have all the equipment for the production, so all that we’re actually in need of is financing for the costs of shooting the project. Recently I started to break down my projects into these kind of stages.
Stage 1
First research + pre-shooting, in that phase there’s no funding.
Stage 2
The second stage is financing the actual shooting and then shooting it.
Stage 3
Then when that is done, we jump into the editing room and build the whole story, when that’s done we actually will be trying to finance the whole project.
This way we have far more control and ownership of the project, something I think is vital to realize and be true to our visions.
This process is really inspiring to me. It’s like sculpturing, you slowly shape the story piece by piece. Where you often have no idea of where your going. Creative minds work this way, I feel at most creative when I just do things without planning too much. I have a clear idea, but I’m open to things that just happens on the spot.
I find myself really locked in when working in more structured ways. Something I believe create predictable stories. That being said, let’s see where the project ends up. Even though I work in a creative chaos many times I try to keep extremely structured. Recently I read “Making Ideas Happen” by Scott Belsky. It’s a great and inspiring book that makes the obstacles of making ideas happen really clear. A lot is common sense, but it was great to just hear it in an obvious way.
I recently got the fantastic news that I will get funding for the development of a documentary that I’m working on. It’s great news that give me the possibility to focus on finishing the first stage of the project this fall. I’m going to do the last couple of interviews and then edit the movie together. After that I will be applying for more funding to finish off the project. For now that’s all I’m going to say 
.
About 10 years ago The Blair Witch Project was released. A horror film which was pieced together in an documentary styled matter. The movie tells a story of three young student filmmakers who hike into the Black Hills near Burkittsville, Maryland to film a documentary about a local legend known as Blair Witch, and subsequently go missing. The viewer is told that the three were never found, although their video and sound equipment was discovered a year later. This “recovered footage” is presented as the film the viewer is watching.
This is a movie that drastically has changed the way we make movies today. Not the big blockbusters, but the independent movies that wouldn’t get as much chance before the digital age. The movie was an early adaptor of the digital techniques and it was made with an initial budget of $20,000 to $25,000, but when they went with it to Sundance and had to make a print, the budget bumped up to $100,000. Today this is a really common way of making independent movies. You do a shoestring budget, on which you shoot and edit the movie, then you’re off to festivals where you try to get distribution. For Blair Witch the budget landed between $500,000 and $750,000 once Artisan Entertainment finally licensed the rights of the movie.
But Blair Witch most certainly wasn’t the first movie made on a shoestring budget. One of my great inspirations is Rebel Without a Crew: Or How a 23-Year-Old Filmmaker With $7,000 Became a Hollywood Player, written by Robert Rodriquez (Sin City, Desperado). The book tells the story of how Robert made El Mariachi in 1993. A movie which he financed by selling his body to medical experiments for a couple of weeks. The movie was then made for as low as $7000 and it was used to established himself in Hollywood.
Not much as changed in the industry since these two movies was made, but more and more first-time filmmakers are using this way of thinking when they make their movies. They don’t ask permission to make a movie and they work on a minimal budget to get their story out there. But of course they don’t have to think of running a huge motion picture company and to pay out wages every month. This is something that really puts the independent filmmakers in the forefront of developing the future movie industry. They take chances and try out new ways of making movies. Possibly because they have an urge to make it, wether they get paid or not.
Today people are consuming more movies and culture than ever before, they download, share and talk about movies all the time. Unfortunately the industry is not progressing as fast as the audience. The independent filmmakers are the ones with new ideas and they are not only willing to try them out, but they are forced to do so to get their movies out there. The digital revolution that everybody is talking about has already happened. Today we are seeing the effects of people that in the ’90s started to use the Internet to download music and later movies. Even back then there was digital sharing, it was done on CD’s and there was a huge debate on how CD-R was affecting the entertainment industry. Before that there was a debate about VCR’s and so on. Today many have their own home-theatre-system and consume an insane amount of movies and culture. Which should be a huge financial opportunity for the movie industry, but instead it’s in a crises. People want to see everything, but not pay for anything.
This is a huge problem for the big motion picture companies, but it’s also something that has made it possible for independent movies to get out there. Independent filmmakers are more likely to try out new ways of thinking. Often they use social marketing in a different way than the traditional distribution companies. They tend to think of a movie as more of a living thing, instead of a product for sale.
Paranormal Activity was a great success when it was released in 2009. The film has earned over $100 million at the US box office alone, on a reported budget of $15,000. But way back in 2007 they were thinking of doing a remake of the movie instead of releasing it. They had a test-screening that was supposed to determine if they would do the re-make or not. During the screening people began walking out, they thought it was a disaster. Until they learned that the viewers were actually leaving because they were too frightened. It is one of the most profitable movies ever made, based on return on investment. This is a great case of what is possible to do today, but because of being locked into old ways of making and distributing movies the industry often fail to use this opportunity. When the movie was released director Oren Peli invited internet users to “demand” where the film would be screened by voting. This was the first time a major motion picture studio used the service to virally market a film.
People that like a movie talks about it. Movies are something that is social and it addresses stories that are social. You should talk about movies, it has always been that way. We as filmmakers make movies that we hope will affect people in some way, we want people to talk about our movies and what they are about. But the weird thing is that today when movies are being shared, we get angry. A lot of people should stop to think about why people share pirated movies. It’s all about social sharing, people want to share good things. Wether it be movies or experiences. The digital revolution has simply made it much more real, you can actually share a digital copy without doing anything. This is a great tool that can be used globally. It would be amazing to see torrents being shared with commercials instead of trying to build systems that the consumer isn’t interested in using. There has been various global distribution systems during the years that has been for free! Still none of the big motion picture companies has tried to use them. Instead they bump in even more marketing money which in return makes the movie more expensive for the consumer. If the movie industry doesn’t learn that the new society is built on openness and sharing, they will loose even more money and somebody else will get rich.
When I hear a filmmaker complain about people “stealing” their movie I get so tired. One must understand that if the audience doesn’t want to pay for the product, that simply means that something is wrong with the product. Weather it be the product itself or the way it is sold is up to the distributor to decide. But because there has been a revolution where the audience has said, no I won’t pay for your product, the distributor has to find ways to make the audience want to pay. That most certainly isn’t by forcing them to do so, that is what you practice in dictatorships. No they have to find creative ways of making the audience think it’s worth paying for. Maybe that’s by making it cheaper, maybe it’s by financing it in a different way. Who knows.
There’s also the case that filmmakers think that their movies should be seen on a big screen in the cinema, think again. In a couple of years people will mostly watch TV one their portable devices, this of course will later also be true for movies. There will be mobile devices with built in projectors and I think we already can see a lot of people not buying a television. People will want to decide on what they will watch and when, it’s not only television, some won’t want to go to the theatre at 9:00 p.m. But they still want to be the first to see the movie. If we look at todays piracy scene it’s more and more common that people stream the material instead of downloading it. This is evolution, Piratebay was sued and found guilty, but then something new pops up. Now we have a couple of years until pirated streams in HD will be something that everybody uses, but then what happens? People will start to get sued, and then what? There will be something else.
But the industry isn’t stupid, it does understands that it has to be in the forefront of technology to be successful in the future. What they don’t seem to understand is that they really are as slow as the governments, it takes years to decide on things, and even longer to actually change anything. I think that we’re in a period of time, when everything is changing. You can’t charge for movies in the traditional ways today, and you won’t be able to do it in the future either. Understanding that the consumers dictate how they will want to pay for media is crucial. The industry needs to find ways to get paid, but they have to be smarter and work harder than ever on finding new ways of doing that. It’s not the piracy that is the problem, it’s the lazy industry that hasn’t adapted to the new digital age fast enough. A main problem is that movies are insanely expensive to make, because of that it’s much harder to make a profit. But who says there is a market for making that expensive movies? Once again, the audience will dictate what they are willing to pay for the experience or product.
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.
Freedom of expression is something many of us take for granted. But what do you do when someone strips you of your right to free speech and what are the tools you use to circumvent the censors and push for change in your society?
Together with two colleagues I’m making a documentary film about individuals and groups in the Middle East and Persian Gulf who have found creative ways of expressing themselves and generating change, including through art and music, in places where free speech is controlled and censored. A significant part of the film will be dedicated to the role the Internet plays, particularly social media outlets such as Twitter, Facebook and blogs, in getting the free word out in the modern age.
Here’s an image from an interview I did last week with Charles Leadbeater.
We recently opened up our Facebook page for Maud & Leo. It’s the first step towards spreading the movie across the Internet. We’ve licensed the movie as a Creative Common. Which mean that we will be spreading it for free all over the place. Our wish is that everybody who like the movie will be spreading the movie to their dear friends and lovers.
All download links are available on our Facebook page.
Today we open the doors to our Facebook page for Maud & Leo. We have been developing the page for some time now, it’s a great way for us to share a little bit more than just the movie.
On the 28:e of January we’re going to be pre-screening Maud & Leo at Hot Spot, a venue for young filmmakers in Stockholm. It’s a nice opportunity to screen the movie for a young audience which aren’t the obvious audience for the movie.
We’re working at releasing the movie for real in the first quarter of 2010. There’s a couple of really interesting distribution opportunities that we’re going to try out for this film. If all goes well we will probably be using ourselfs of this way of distributing on future projects.
Read more about Hot Spot here: http://bit.ly/77GwaD
This weekend we’re going back to Jokkmokk with Maud & Leo. The movie will be screened at the story days in Jokkmokk. This screening will be a preview of the movie. In a couple of weeks we will be releasing the film for real. It’s been a long wait to release the film but now we have the release planned. Stay tuned.
