Christmas Hellfire

sfoster

Staff Member
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This film starts off with a bang! What a great opening.
I see a lot of missed opportunities in the second half of the film and I feel like I really came up short, even though its a fun movie to watch.

I could have done better... ugh, thats what you're buying with all that time and effort making a short film.
The perspective on your own mediocrity. My #1 change if i could alter the script would be to give the girl dialogue at the beginning and middle of her gun fight.

Anyway it was great working with the kids, my goal was making something fun to watch, and I think/hope i succeeded.

It was a tough film to make though especially designing the costume, teaching myself to sew on youtube
I hated building that stupid fake wall too!!

Couldn't find an actress to play the mom, like at all, barely could even make the movie.
I was fortunate enough to cast friends of mine to play the mom and dad... they did me the favor otherwise this movie wouldn't even exist.

The trials and tribulations of short indie films.
Hope you enjoyed :)
 
Upvote 4
The interesting thing about that clip is the acting is fucking fantastic. No I am not joking. It looks like a clip from a reality show. As in, they are not acting. In fact I thought that's what it was.
 
The interesting thing about that clip is the acting is fucking fantastic. No I am not joking. It looks like a clip from a reality show. As in, they are not acting. In fact I thought that's what it was.
Yeah there is some improv going on there.

I looked around but couldn't find the raw footage from friend zoned, probably got deleted to make space.
otherwise i'd be tempted to see what i can do in editing after all these years
 
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I think you did a great job. Yeah, it's rough around the edges, but that enhances to off the hook mood of it. Most impressive is how fast it moves, while oozing style (camera moves, wipes, etc.), in an early Peter Jackson-esque, hyper violent, tongue in cheek type of way. Not just watchable, but rewatchable.

Keep doing what you're doing. Just work on the audio more. One of my favorite Jackson movies is BAD TASTE. Similar style to yours, but he did a lot of ADR, which really helped.
 
I think you did a great job. Yeah, it's rough around the edges, but that enhances to off the hook mood of it. Most impressive is how fast it moves, while oozing style (camera moves, wipes, etc.), in an early Peter Jackson-esque, hyper violent, tongue in cheek type of way. Not just watchable, but rewatchable.

Keep doing what you're doing. Just work on the audio more. One of my favorite Jackson movies is BAD TASTE. Similar style to yours, but he did a lot of ADR, which really helped.
Thanks! Big fan of jackson so thats quite a compliment. I appreciate the nice words.

I assume you're talking about the general fidelity of the audio and the fact that some of the dialogue is from an on-camera mic.
Yeah.. it's a sad compromise I had to make in order to produce the film.

I wish I had an audio guy, or actors that would answer my emails and show up for ADR. lol.
No excuse for some of it though, I could have done more groans and grunts and yelps and stuff during the gunfights, definitely some lines or curses from the girl while shes getting shot at would have helped a lot.
 
Everyone catches the Die Hard reference... but did you catch The Professional reference that comes immediately after it?


Pretty obscure so i think not lol.

I'll peel back the curtain on something else too, for laughs, we have a saying here in america.. when something is ended (in a bad way) sometimes people will say its toast. Like youre gonna kill someone you might say "when that bitch comes back they're toast!!" so that's the little laugh, her old life is toast, christmas is toast, burnt toast that she has to eat and take in as a part of herself.
 
Christmas Hellfire is on IMDB! First time ever adding anything, it was free and relatively painless.
I also claimed my imdb account from 2006 finally, sean the twelfth.


My star meter is 8,212,958 - LOOK OUT WORLD! HERE I COME
 
Christmas Hellfire is on IMDB! First time ever adding anything, it was free and relatively painless.
I also claimed my imdb account from 2006 finally, sean the twelfth.


My star meter is 8,212,958 - LOOK OUT WORLD! HERE I COME
7 billion people out there, you've already hit the top 1%!

Jokes aside, congratulations on your first big IMDB listing!
 
I set my expectations low, thinking maybe a few hundred views, but it's only at 75 so far.
And to be 100% ignored on facebook, 'friends' won't even lift a finger to click like. yikes.

I retitled my grandma horror script as 'Granmonster' and deeply regret spending $50 to submit it to that shore scripts contest
Of course it got thrown out with all the trash in the first round, what the hell was I thinking, $50 to get more evidence that i'm not good enough

The kid actors were begging me to make it and i didn't have the resources, i thought it couldn't hurt to submit it, right?

But in the context of my life, like I know lives have up and downs, but holy fuck I have been a loser for a long time. way too long, like the entirety of my 30s. This summer I'll be 40 and it will be 10 years since I made my first short film, and yet I struggle to even get actors to work with me or respond to my emails, my stuff is nowhere near theatrical quality, I have built basically no marketable skills or connections in this entire time, and forget placing top 10 in a short script contest, i can't even place top 15.

if i've been at this for so long and I still suck this hard, what am i doing with my life? what makes me think i can do this?
I've been really down ever since I published christmas hellfire and it's weighing heavier than ever today.

I had so much potential in my 20s, regarded myself as smart and talented, never would have guessed I'd grow up to be Gil Gunderson

bart simpson gil gunderson GIF
 
You shouldn't read too much into one script contest, I think even the greatest creativity only appeals to a small percentage of the population. Look at Akira for example, it's considered a masterwork by entire countries, but it's not particularly well respected here. I've heard plenty of people say that The Matrix wasn't anything special, or confuse Star Wars with Star Trek. I'm pointing out that it's quite possible that you'd be getting bad reviews or disinterest from a random sampling of people even if you had an idea or style that was genuinely great.

My point is that right now you haven't been able to make a lot of films, and when you did, you haven't been able to cast a wide net. It takes money to do all that stuff, and banks don't issue SBLs to artists. Nobody is blaming you for that, I think most indie filmmakers are in the same boat, I certainly am.

Look at this from a math perspective for a second, let's say

1. You create a cool short film that 1 in every 1000 people would like enough to subscribe to you on patreon for a while. That would be enough to change your whole life, and reverse your perception of the value of the previous 10 years of filmmaking. lets say 10k a month income from 1000 monthly subscribers at the default 10/month I see on all those sites.

2. So you would need to have 1,000,000 people see your video to get that conversion at that volume. (realistically it's typically worse than this, but this is just for the sake of argument)

3. Compare what's happened to this very basic scenario. So you made a film, and 1000 people or thereabouts saw it. So if the conversion number was indeed 1 in 1000, your expected result would look terrible at that scale. All that work, all those people, and 1 person seemed to really like it, what a let down.

4. But lets scale it up a bit. Still only 1 in a 1000 are fans, but this time you really push the facebook feeds, drop 500 on advertising and use the google first time credit offer to double it, and manage to get 340,000 views. That's about what I got from 1100 in advertising on the last movie I did. So this time you got 340 patreon subscribers, 20-30k likes, and you have some level of income to help make your next short. You make the next one on the cheap, and sell it with a crazy script or enthusiastic line delivery, and you re invest that patreon income into widening your subscriber base.

5. Use the subscription base you built up with ads as leverage in negotiation for sponsorships. EG - look Doritos, I have 10k subscribers, do you want to send me 200 a month and some chips to eat conspicuously in the "Lighting the scenes: Christmas Hellfire"

So in that scenario, a response curve that looked overwhelmingly negative at 1000 viewers, became a success story at 340k viewers.

I think it's possible, and people are doing it daily. Sometimes you say the algorithm has judged you as uninteresting, but I don't think that's how it actually works, and maybe you're interpreting it in an unnecessarily negative light. A guy from google who programmed it did a video about it, and said that views are "Pulled" not "pushed", meaning that it does not actually introduce new videos into the stream actively. You have to have people that are aware of it from other sources, or run ads. It's basically only showing people content from channels they've already watched, and the rest is searches.

Or try reimagining the whole thing, and just approach film in a new way that you've never done before. 40 is not that old for a filmmaker, and 10 years is not that long to learn a field this complex. I don't think you're doing that bad.
 
You shouldn't read too much into one script contest, I think even the greatest creativity only appeals to a small percentage of the population. Look at Akira for example, it's considered a masterwork by entire countries, but it's not particularly well respected here. I've heard plenty of people say that The Matrix wasn't anything special, or confuse Star Wars with Star Trek. I'm pointing out that it's quite possible that you'd be getting bad reviews or disinterest from a random sampling of people even if you had an idea or style that was genuinely great.

My point is that right now you haven't been able to make a lot of films, and when you did, you haven't been able to cast a wide net. It takes money to do all that stuff, and banks don't issue SBLs to artists. Nobody is blaming you for that, I think most indie filmmakers are in the same boat, I certainly am.

Look at this from a math perspective for a second, let's say

1. You create a cool short film that 1 in every 1000 people would like enough to subscribe to you on patreon for a while. That would be enough to change your whole life, and reverse your perception of the value of the previous 10 years of filmmaking. lets say 10k a month income from 1000 monthly subscribers at the default 10/month I see on all those sites.

2. So you would need to have 1,000,000 people see your video to get that conversion at that volume. (realistically it's typically worse than this, but this is just for the sake of argument)

3. Compare what's happened to this very basic scenario. So you made a film, and 1000 people or thereabouts saw it. So if the conversion number was indeed 1 in 1000, your expected result would look terrible at that scale. All that work, all those people, and 1 person seemed to really like it, what a let down.

4. But lets scale it up a bit. Still only 1 in a 1000 are fans, but this time you really push the facebook feeds, drop 500 on advertising and use the google first time credit offer to double it, and manage to get 340,000 views. That's about what I got from 1100 in advertising on the last movie I did. So this time you got 340 patreon subscribers, 20-30k likes, and you have some level of income to help make your next short. You make the next one on the cheap, and sell it with a crazy script or enthusiastic line delivery, and you re invest that patreon income into widening your subscriber base.

5. Use the subscription base you built up with ads as leverage in negotiation for sponsorships. EG - look Doritos, I have 10k subscribers, do you want to send me 200 a month and some chips to eat conspicuously in the "Lighting the scenes: Christmas Hellfire"

So in that scenario, a response curve that looked overwhelmingly negative at 1000 viewers, became a success story at 340k viewers.

I think it's possible, and people are doing it daily. Sometimes you say the algorithm has judged you as uninteresting, but I don't think that's how it actually works, and maybe you're interpreting it in an unnecessarily negative light. A guy from google who programmed it did a video about it, and said that views are "Pulled" not "pushed", meaning that it does not actually introduce new videos into the stream actively. You have to have people that are aware of it from other sources, or run ads. It's basically only showing people content from channels they've already watched, and the rest is searches.

Or try reimagining the whole thing, and just approach film in a new way that you've never done before. 40 is not that old for a filmmaker, and 10 years is not that long to learn a field this complex. I don't think you're doing that bad.

I have my own ideas as to why Granmonster was rejected, the leading thought is that... amityville horror came out in 1979 and grandmonster is very derivitave from that 43 year old movie that has already been done and redone, just not original enough for a script contest.

I get what you're saying about subscriber numbers, but if I saw someone on facebook that I know, that worked hard on something, I'd at least click the like button and then keep scrolling. You don't have to watch it, you don't even have to pretend you watched it ya know, just lift a finger to give some encouragement to someone that has devoted a ton of effort to something. i learned how to fucking sew for this damn movie. did all the decoration in my living room, completely EMPTIED the entire room for the return home shot, etc you know the list goes on for doing a whole movie by yourself.

Like damn how big of a loser do you have to be to post your film to your friends and get 0 likes 0 comments, i would hardly even believe that if i saw it in a movie. it seems too dramatic to be real.

Anyway I don't think hellfire is a masterpiece, there's lots of stuff i fucked up, and I was only expecting a couple hundred views
I wish the girl said "is it carolers?" and before she shoots everyone at the end i wish she said something badass like "merry christmas"
 
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Facebook's algorithms suck.
I'm "friends" with you there but never saw the post. Part of that I'm sure is because I have a lot of connections but still....

Once suggestion and I'm not quite sure what causes this:

When I click on your Christmas Hellfire post on FB, it doesn't show up with any image - just a white box.
People respond to images & FB pushes them more.

Just my 2 cents worth...
 
When I click on your Christmas Hellfire post on FB, it doesn't show up with any image - just a white box.
People respond to images & FB pushes them more.

Just my 2 cents worth...

Whhaaat? A white box? fb screwing me and not showing a youtube thumbnail?
This is a screenshot of what i see on facebook


And here is a link to the public post, anyone can see it
 
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Goddamnit!!! This is a revolution!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The true voice of a Rebellion, in his own unique style

...and I'm still crying, overwhelmed.
 
I think Jesus is dead for most of us...This is an honest wake-up call to Raise The Dead.

But the magic is in its irony..... That Jesus was not a good man.... yes he was a wonderful case..... but not a good man

I think we should bow down to his qualities, rather than being obsessed about who he really was.
 
I think Jesus is dead for most of us...This is an honest wake-up call to Raise The Dead.

But the magic is in its irony..... That Jesus was not a good man.... yes he was a wonderful case..... but not a good man

I think we should bow down to his qualities, rather than being obsessed about who he really was.
Ah the real irony is that I'm an athiest, and I grew up in california and the northeast USA... but here I am making a southern american film about jesus and guns lol.

The reason I included all the jesus stuff is that it's a cultural association, christmas is the only time of year a lot of families in america even go to church. Plus ya know, my characters that I write aren't ME, it's okay for my characters to have different beliefs than I do, its okay for them to believe in jesus even if i don't
 
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