What Projects are you starting in 2022?

Working with creatives for such a long time, I noticed that a lot of people start new projects in the early months of the year.

What are you working on this year? Anyone have a new project they are going to launch in 2022?
 
I was considering perhaps to focus more on production and create 3 short films this year.
Either that or work on my van and go to ca.
 
Do you think you could have one main character appear in all of your shorts? This could be a cool way to do a series on YT and draw people in. S/he would have to have some quirk or attraction of course.
 
Do you think you could have one main character appear in all of your shorts? This could be a cool way to do a series on YT and draw people in. S/he would have to have some quirk or attraction of course.
Hmm i could do the kid actor in all of them. idk about same character.
 
That could be cool she's at the age where she can grow into roles too. Like how Ryan Murphy uses actors that don't play the same characters. Plus she's really good.
 
Drawing people in and cultivating an audience can't be a priority for me - I'd have been so discouraged by now that I'd have quit.

This local comedian wrote a book on amazon and posted it on faceboook and dozens and dozens of comedians posted about how they bought the book. I couldn't get a single one of those people to even watch my 10 min movie for free. and they're out here paying money to read a book from the other guy. feels bad.

I was emailing with the actress/antagonist from my last movie, i finally released the film and then silence. never heard from her again.

LOL.

she didn't even acknowledge the films existence. yikes.
these days she is actively promoting another movie she's in on instagram so she must like that one a lot more.

Damn after all these years I have completely failed at generating any level of interest or respect from those around me

for sure my movie would never be mistaken for a professional production just by watching it. and only a lousy 2k people have watched it.
I thought it was entertaining. but what is it worth?

just another student film. experience for the director and chock full of technical short comings.

I am going to try again though. posting my new script next week. the grandma horror film.
very strong script. maybe with hiring an assistant to move around lights i can hit this one out of the park
 
It's an ongoing battle and I know how you feel - I fight many of the same battles constantly.

2k views is a LOT more than you got on your previous movie, right? So that's progress.
And having seen both, I can say with certainty that you made a huge step forward.

ALSO I just checked out the actress's Instagram page - she has SIX photos from your movie on her page and mentioned that it's now available on YouTube. That's hardly ignoring it.

But beyond that, actors are always looking to the next project and the next one and the next one. That's reality.

And again, I strongly recommend that you put Christmas Fire on IMDb. Actors want and need that public credit in order to book more work. It also will help you to attract talent to your next project.

I look forward to reading your new script.
 
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ALSO I just checked out the actress's Instagram page - she has SIX photos from your movie on her page and mentioned that it's now available on YouTube. That's hardly ignoring it.
Wow I never saw a single post from her like that. I must really suck at using instagram 😅
Well that makes me feel a little better. Yeah I need to do that IMDB thing
 
I looked at her instagram on the internet instead of the app.. i cannot find any of those pictures youre talking about.
My post was about the antagonist of the film yasmin. Maybe youre thinking of the kid Ella?
 
I was indeed! To me, Ella was the star :)
yeah Ella is definitely the star and it was great working with her. felt like she actually appreciated the opportunity.
With the actress/antagonist it's more like she was doing charity favor for a stranger.. i had someone cancel on me last minute and replaced her like the day before with yasmin. very lucky to have had her at all.

Still - as much as i dont care about cultivating an audience, i do care if the few that watch it actually like it or not.
and it feels bad someone that was in it apparently didnt even like it. but I know there were some shortcomings. I'll have to do better next time.
 
i do care if the few that watch it actually like it or not.
I totally get it. But I've had people both love and hate my movies - and I've gotten used to that.

At one film festival screening for Surviving Family, a woman chased after me following the q&a, yelling that I had no right to end the movie the way I did.
But I've also had people tell me that my portrayal of alcoholism & mental illness meant the world to them.
So I've learned to take the bad with the good, and it's good for my sanity. :)
 
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I think that a lot of the response we get in terms of viewership has to do with the youtube algorithm, social media presence, project scale, competition level, and base level human responses. It's definitely not all about the quality of your work. I liked you movie.

Ever wonder how some dumb high school kid makes a 30 second video of their friend falling down the stairs, and then gets 2 million views? Think about some practical math. Let's say that kid attends a high school in a large city, with a class size of 2500. Everybody knows everybody else, and within that closed system news travels fast. The kid that made the video tells all his friends at lunch, and by the end of day 100 people know about it. School is boring, people are exited to share any new news. 5 of the hundred have facebook accounts with 300 friends, mostly from that same high school. Even with say 75% overlap, within 7 days everyone in the school has seen the video an average of 2 times.

Over at the youtube, the algorithm doesn't know about high schools or facebook groups or anything, it simply sees a video that has been watched

1. all the way through (because it's short, and people are waiting for something specific to happen)

2. multiple times (because people are showing it to their friends in person on their phones, or because it's funny)

3. Thousands of times a day starting immediately after publication

Now youtube "recognizes" that the video is of interest to people, and begins showing it to random strangers (advertising that you couldn't buy for 50 grand, provided free.) People watch the video, which is funny, short, and requires no investment of time, intelligence, nor expectation of any follow up.

Soon people see the video come up in their feeds, and about week 5, they see that the video has 2 million views. Maybe they wouldn't have watched it before, but now in addition to the lure of watching some hapless person fall down some stairs, there is a second lure. You can watch this video and find out "why did 2 million other people watch this video?" This automatically builds in a second interest lure onto something that was already working ok.

My point is, don't blame yourself for failure, assuming that what you're doing is inferior in some way. There are a lot of factors, and on top of that the generic vicious cycles of the world doing their normal thing.

I've seen people with legendary grade talent end up with 15k views, and people copy paste a clip from the dukes of hazard and get 9 million views. If you want to engineer success, that takes money, everything else is 98% luck and 2% talent.

There is one thing that might be negatively affecting your views, outside of not having a large social circle, and that is the film title. It's not a bad name at all, it's just that if you do a youtube search, as I just did, you'll find that you can type the exact name of your film in, and scroll for pages and pages without being able to find it. That's a disadvantage for a few reasons, most practically, because even a person who knows the name of your film, and is interested in watching it, will have a very hard time finding it without a direct link. So now your audience is down to just people with direct links. If it had been named "Orphan of the Christmas fire" or "Blood on the Sleigh" then people could have probably found it in a search.

This video was 3rd on the search for "Christmas Fire" and had 50 live viewers when I pasted it. It's 2 weeks after Christmas. Another identical video has 18 million views. This is a tripod shot of a fireplace. Similar videos comprise the first half dozen pages of results. It's obviously not "Better" than your movie, which took a lot of work and skill. It's just that the system has gotten so large that there is no one at the wheel anymore, and everything is running on autopilot.

In addition, it's much harder for an actual filmmaker to grow a following than just a video blogger or similar. Building a following these days is mostly about publishing very regularly, with new videos coming out weekly, sometimes daily. It's hard to do that when you spend 3 months making a film. People playing minecraft can broadcast daily.

I know you're saying you don't care much about cultivating an audience, but you do care about filmmaking, which centers around budget, which centers around ..... cultivating an audience.

 
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I totally get it. But I've had people both love and hate my movies - and I've gotten used to that.

At one film festival screening for Surviving Family, a woman chased after me following the q&a, yelling that I had no right to end the movie the way I did.
But I've also had people tell me that my portrayal of alcoholism & mental illness meant the world to them.
So I've learned to take the bad with the good, and it's good for my sanity. :)

sounds like the ending hit that woman pretty hard.
You make great points. Still gives me a "Sorry, I tried..." bad feeling when one of the main actors completely disregards the finished film.

Not even an empty platitude, clearly she doesn't ever want to work with me again.

I think that a lot of the response we get in terms of viewership has to do with the youtube algorithm, social media presence, project scale, competition level, and base level human responses. It's definitely not all about the quality of your work. I liked you movie.

Ever wonder how some dumb high school kid makes a 30 second video of their friend falling down the stairs, and then gets 2 million views? Think about some practical math. Let's say that kid attends a high school in a large city, with a class size of 2500. Everybody knows everybody else, and within that closed system news travels fast. The kid that made the video tells all his friends at lunch, and by the end of day 100 people know about it. School is boring, people are exited to share any new news. 5 of the hundred have facebook accounts with 300 friends, mostly from that same high school. Even with say 75% overlap, within 7 days everyone in the school has seen the video an average of 2 times.

Over at the youtube, the algorithm doesn't know about high schools or facebook groups or anything, it simply sees a video that has been watched

1. all the way through (because it's short, and people are waiting for something specific to happen)

2. multiple times (because people are showing it to their friends in person on their phones, or because it's funny)

3. Thousands of times a day starting immediately after publication

Now youtube "recognizes" that the video is of interest to people, and begins showing it to random strangers (advertising that you couldn't buy for 50 grand, provided free.) People watch the video, which is funny, short, and requires no investment of time, intelligence, nor expectation of any follow up.

Soon people see the video come up in their feeds, and about week 5, they see that the video has 2 million views. Maybe they wouldn't have watched it before, but now in addition to the lure of watching some hapless person fall down some stairs, there is a second lure. You can watch this video and find out "why did 2 million other people watch this video?" This automatically builds in a second interest lure onto something that was already working ok.

My point is, don't blame yourself for failure, assuming that what you're doing is inferior in some way. There are a lot of factors, and on top of that the generic vicious cycles of the world doing their normal thing.

I've seen people with legendary grade talent end up with 15k views, and people copy paste a clip from the dukes of hazard and get 9 million views. If you want to engineer success, that takes money, everything else is 98% luck and 2% talent.

There is one thing that might be negatively affecting your views, outside of not having a large social circle, and that is the film title. It's not a bad name at all, it's just that if you do a youtube search, as I just did, you'll find that you can type the exact name of your film in, and scroll for pages and pages without being able to find it. That's a disadvantage for a few reasons, most practically, because even a person who knows the name of your film, and is interested in watching it, will have a very hard time finding it without a direct link. So now your audience is down to just people with direct links. If it had been named "Orphan of the Christmas fire" or "Blood on the Sleigh" then people could have probably found it in a search.

This video was 3rd on the search for "Christmas Fire" and had 50 live viewers when I pasted it. It's 2 weeks after Christmas. Another identical video has 18 million views. This is a tripod shot of a fireplace. Similar videos comprise the first half dozen pages of results. It's obviously not "Better" than your movie, which took a lot of work and skill. It's just that the system has gotten so large that there is no one at the wheel anymore, and everything is running on autopilot.

In addition, it's much harder for an actual filmmaker to grow a following than just a video blogger or similar. Building a following these days is mostly about publishing very regularly, with new videos coming out weekly, sometimes daily. It's hard to do that when you spend 3 months making a film. People playing minecraft can broadcast daily.

I know you're saying you don't care much about cultivating an audience, but you do care about filmmaking, which centers around budget, which centers around ..... cultivating an audience.
Literally the only person i know that shared the film on facebook was mlesemann.
if people that know me aren't sharing the film then it isn't worthy of going viral, regardless of the title.

I did arrive at a possible new name though... Hit-Elf: Christmas Vigilante.
Since it was inspired by Hit-Girl it seems apt, and its a unique name for the algorithm.
 
If you think about it, no successful film company relies on viral marketing. Disney still pushes out 70 million dollars worth of ads, for movies that already have an existing fanbase, sometimes twice that. Movies as an artform were never designed for viral distro, I think it works for cat videos, but Goodfellas probably would have failed if you just released it on some corner of youtube and didn't tell anyone.

Here's an example of why judging your work by who shares it isn't accurate. I released this video a few weeks ago, "Dot" and I wanted to test how narration would feel over the footage I made, so I dubbed in Carl Sagan's most famous speech. I think you were the only person that even commented. Maybe it got one like, and no shares. So by the logic that sharing reflects quality, you would think that there was nothing about that video that would be commercially successful. Here's the thing, that speech, the writing that was dubbed into the video, was consolidated from "cosmos". 40 years ago, Cosmos premiered on US television to become the single most watched television program in PBS history.

from google -

The series was first broadcast by the Public Broadcasting Service in 1980, and was the most widely watched series in the history of American public television until The Civil War (1990).

When Seth Mcfarlane brought it back recently, it wasn't quite as big, but it captured the most viewership of any program in the history of Nation Geographic, not exactly a small player. 135 million people tuned in again almost 40 years later, to hear Carl Sagan's thoughts, the basis of both series. The narration I used is the most famous segment of writing from one of the most successful television writers in history.

So if I said, well, no one even bothered to comment, so the writing must not be of interest to anyone, it's a situation where I literally couldn't be more wrong. Hundreds of millions of people were interested in that writing, just no one on one particular page on one particular day.

I like the name. Actually I liked the original name also, but the new one would definitely be easier to find.

Either way, it's a good resume item.
 
If you think about it, no successful film company relies on viral marketing. Disney still pushes out 70 million dollars worth of ads, for movies that already have an existing fanbase, sometimes twice that. Movies as an artform were never designed for viral distro, I think it works for cat videos, but Goodfellas probably would have failed if you just released it on some corner of youtube and didn't tell anyone.

Here's an example of why judging your work by who shares it isn't accurate. I released this video a few weeks ago, "Dot" and I wanted to test how narration would feel over the footage I made, so I dubbed in Carl Sagan's most famous speech. I think you were the only person that even commented. Maybe it got one like, and no shares. So by the logic that sharing reflects quality, you would think that there was nothing about that video that would be commercially successful. Here's the thing, that speech, the writing that was dubbed into the video, was consolidated from "cosmos". 40 years ago, Cosmos premiered on US television to become the single most watched television program in PBS history.

from google -

The series was first broadcast by the Public Broadcasting Service in 1980, and was the most widely watched series in the history of American public television until The Civil War (1990).

When Seth Mcfarlane brought it back recently, it wasn't quite as big, but it captured the most viewership of any program in the history of Nation Geographic, not exactly a small player. 135 million people tuned in again almost 40 years later, to hear Carl Sagan's thoughts, the basis of both series. The narration I used is the most famous segment of writing from one of the most successful television writers in history.

So if I said, well, no one even bothered to comment, so the writing must not be of interest to anyone, it's a situation where I literally couldn't be more wrong. Hundreds of millions of people were interested in that writing, just no one on one particular page on one particular day.

I like the name. Actually I liked the original name also, but the new one would definitely be easier to find.

Either way, it's a good resume item.

Ya know what though maybe the writing really ISN'T good and your conclusion would be correct.

Maybe people really dont care as much about what was said. They care more about who was saying it.
They wanted to hear Carl Sagan's thoughts. When you post it and they think its your thoughts they don't care.

Sounds about right for my experience too lol.
 
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Ya know what though maybe the writing really ISN'T good and your conclusion would be correct.

Maybe people really dont care as much about what was said. They care more about who was saying it.
They wanted to hear Carl Sagan's thoughts. When you post it and they think its your thoughts they don't care.

Sounds about right for my experience too lol.
Not sure that tracks, basically no one knew who Carl Sagan was before Cosmos aired.

I take your meaning though. Doesn't mean people are right, or smart to be that way. Did you see Joshua Bell's experiment? It's on this very topic. He's of course one of the best violinists in the world, and he took a multi million dollar Stradivarius violin down to the metro, dressed as a bum. Then he filmed people's reactions to his playing. I think the message is pretty clear. If you're an artist waiting for the public to tell you what's good, you've got it backwards.

 
Not sure that tracks, basically no one knew who Carl Sagan was before Cosmos aired.

I take your meaning though. Doesn't mean people are right, or smart to be that way. Did you see Joshua Bell's experiment? It's on this very topic. He's of course one of the best violinists in the world, and he took a multi million dollar Stradivarius violin down to the metro, dressed as a bum. Then he filmed people's reactions to his playing. I think the message is pretty clear. If you're an artist waiting for the public to tell you what's good, you've got it backwards.


I wasn't around then lol idk who knew what sorry about that.
and yes i understand what you mean too. one of my favorite parts of the beatles themed movie Yesterday was about how people didn't appreciate the beatles songs bc it was just their friend that had "written" them
 
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