Jonny von Wallström

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.

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

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…

It’s been really busy since I got back from Cannes. I’ve been finishing Maud & Leo and at the same time financing a project for this summer. Mainly I’ve been doing continous work with The Swedish Institute and their Young Leaders Visitors Program.

Last week we put the finishing touches on Maud & Leo and these days it’s all about distribution and the up-coming projects. At the moment I have two projects that I’m working on. One of them is a feature film, it’s partly sprung out of Maud & Leo but it’s too soon to tell anything about the project.

Beside that I’ve dedicated the spring to a reseach that I’m about to go on next week. I’m going to be travelling Europe to meet swedes that have moved from Sweden. My goal with the project is to portray what it means to be swedish. Sweden is more and more becoming full of everyday rasism. I think it’s mostly because of ignorance, this project will try to create discussion about swedishness. This is just the first phase but hopefully it will result in a exhibition this year or next year.

On the trip I will also be writing on the feature film. I will try to update as often as possible. On Sunday I fly to Berlin and then I’ll travell by train to Paris, Bordeaux, Barcelona, Alicante, Marseille, Annecy, Zell-am See, Budapest, Prague, Krakow and Gdansk.

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…

So some months passed. We had done different projects and was fed up with all the projects we got paid for. So in the spring of 2008 we took a trip to a house in the wilderness of Hälsingland in Sweden.

We went there for the weekend. We arived at 03:00 AM to a house in the middle of nowhere. There was snow outside and in the house there was no heating. We started a fire and went to sleep with our clothes on. We had left Stockholm for the woods, thinking that this trip would get us inspired to start a new amazing project.

When we woke up we felt good. It’s always good to get some new impressions. Our idea with this weekend was to kick start a new script. We thought that for the summer we could create a full length feature film in that house and surrounding. Before we started writing we thought that we would take a long walk, just to get a feeling of the surroundings.

When we came back we started the idea development for our new movie. What we soon realized was that we we’re not getting anywhere. So we asked ourselves why. Our obvious answer was that we had another movie that we had to finish first. So this weekend was a big turning point of the project Maud & Leo. We decided that we were going to complete the movie, with or without financing.

Now we’re back in Stockholm with lots of energy and self-confidence. So we started the pre-production of Maud & Leo. It was in April of 2008, we had set our production dates to be in August. We started to make phone calls, filling out applications. It was insane how much work had to be done in just a couple of months. We had to get full financing, actors, team, locations and the really important Alfa Romeo Spider. Well we had to fix everything. For financing we tried all kinds of ways, everything from funds and sponsors. We made many phone calls, but soon realized that the interest for the project was mainly in the northern parts of Sweden. Specifically the area we’re we wanted to shoot. One thing that helped us in this phase was the fact that we were used to working in the commercial industry, talking to the people investing money in ads and such.

So the applications was out, sponsors were called. Now we needed to have some patience, but the time was short, in Sweden people leave for vacation in June and is then gone until August. All had to be done before that!

What we also realized was that the script needed development. Parallel with our pre-production we focused on developing the script to perfection. This was tough, we all had to fight to get the movie the way we visioned it. We worked on the script frequently between April and June. Working three people together writing a script can be painful, but it also has huge amount of advantages. The way we worked we didn’t OK anything if all three wasn’t satisfied. That took a lot of discussions, but I think it made the movie a lot stronger. Eventually we all felt that we had a great script. Now it was time to get the cast on board.

With this project we have had one goal, to make a fantastic movie that is the way we want it. We have not wanted to change anything to satisfy people, we have wanted to push our storytelling as far as we can. We have challenged ourselves and our audience to think in new ways. That we are really proud of.

To be continued…

Maud & Leo is a project that started a little over 2 years ago. Me and Akram Janzi approached the writer and editor-in-chief Tobias Rydin and discussed doing an adaptation of his book Osynligheten. Soon we all realized that we wanted to make something new. We started writing together, our aim in the beginning was to create a online short series. Episodes that would be 5 minutes each. In that story we found Maud. A strong woman in her 50′s from the northern Sweden.

The story that we was working on didn’t punch us in the stomach, but Maud did. So we started to write her story. It evolved to the Scandinavian film format, a “novellfilm”, which is a 28 minutes short film. This was the first “big” film project that me and Akram did, before that we had been struggling trying to get our company Strange Pictures Sthlm going. Making promos, educational films and commercials. All to get the time and money to make our own films.

We had written a full length feature film and made a couple of pilots. These projects didn’t take off, soon all of them we’re put to sleep. Which today feels like a great “choice”. For Tobias it was his first film project, which for sure was a big challenge for all of us. On the other hand Tobias had realized a lot of great projects like Osynligheten and his magazine YKKY. Since both me and Akram have been educated in film schools it felt great to have a person in the project that hadn’t gotten institutionalized.

We thought that Maud & Leo would be our first “real” film. With that I mean that would get proper funding. So we wrote our script. When we were satisfied with it we started to approach producers, we thought that it would help us in getting our movie financed. Two producers showed real interest in us. We decided to go with one of them, it was a really tough choice, we were choosing between the really established producer and the one that felt good in our stomach.

We went with the well established producer. Thinking that it would be a sure thing. So we’re set! We was going to apply to the Swedish film-funding program “Novellfilmsatsningen”, which is a project that the Swedish Television and the Swedish Film Institute runs together. Every movie gets about 150 000 dollars to make a movie.

The next thing we did was to take our savings, pack our bags and we were off to Norrland. We were in desperate need for inspiration to complete our application! During the trip we also created a pilot, a great way of showing our great visions. Perfect we thought, we have a great script, locations, pilot, huge producer and application. When we got back we thought that we had the greatest movie ever.

Watch the pilot
Maud & Leo Pilot

We were back in Stockholm in September of 2007, home to finalize our application, pilot and script in Oktober of 2007.

Everything was great. At least we’re going to be one of the people selected to an interview, we thought. Every year 10 films are financed through “Novellfilmssatsningen”. It’s aim is to let new filmmakers get a chance to make their first professional film. So our applications was sent, all we had to do was wait.

Boy was we wrong. We was supposed to get the notice in January. During this period we had a really hard time to get hold of the producer, and when we did we didn’t get any updates. So we waited.

Then finally the selected list of films was public. We then of course new that we hadn’t gotten it, but we looked through the list to see who was selected. Did we know anyone?

In the list we found one movie that we knew the producer of. Our producer! So without telling us he had applied to the “contest” with another film. Every producer can apply with two projects, nothing wrong in that, but we most definitely wouldn’t have chosen the producer with two films over one devoted to the project. So that felt like crap. At that time we was left with a movie that we had put all our energy in, and there was no reserves to take energy from.

To be continued