On making shorter versions of our features, I try not to think about a shorter version while doing the feature. After the feature has been completed, I create the shorter "film festival" version. It's usually pretty easy to do.
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I've never asked Amazon if they take short films. The shortest film that we have on Prime is about 40 minutes.
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Here is something else that we did with several of our films: About ten years ago we began selling DVD copies of our films on Amazon, but as time went on we sold less and less DVDs. We then made them available on Amazon as a VOD, but few people will pay money to watch low budget indie films. We decided to try PRIME, so that viewers could watch our films for free.
BUT FIRST, we took 8 of our feature films, edited each of them down to 40-45 minutes, and changed their titles:
ORIGINAL TITLE.................................NEW TITLE ON PRIME
"Bad Spirits"..........................."Burial Island"
"The Day The World Stopped"...."Day of Darkness In Hillbilly County"
"Dying For Dollars"..................."Conversations With His Dead Grandma"
"The Money Trail"...................."Mosquitos, Alligators, and Bullets"
"Tattletale Corpse"...................(no change)
"Stoned Dead"........................"Zombie Drug Lord"
"Detour To Hell"......................"Robbed, Murdered, and Eaten"
"He's Dead"............................"1 Dead Man, 6 Suspects, $65 Million"
The original titles are all still
available as DVDs, the new titles are Prime only.
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As for the new .06-cents per hour rate...yep, we could now make a penny
a view. It's hardly worth the trouble and expense of having our films captioned.
I wish there was an alternative to Amazon. Hulu and so forth is impossible to get on
without paying an aggregator big bucks, and it's not worth it for us to do so.