crew Why is it so difficult to find collaborators for a project?

[Nate North]

I have to assume that I'm not the only one on an independent film form that wants to make an independent film. If you've ever tried making one, you know that it's nearly impossible to have any type of success without a larger group involved. My question is, why are people uninterested in joining teams or groups? As a lone individual, your fate is sealed, if 1000 of us worked together, there is no question we'd get something published. I bought a product yesterday. 12 people got together and worked full time on it for 3 years. It was great, I paid full price for it. They now have funding for the next product, and everyone is happy and headed for a profitable carreer in the industry.

Here's the clip I watched about their team and project. It's just a simple top down shooter, innovation level 0. It was great, no issues, everyone is happy.

I live in a small town, and neighborhood garage bands are common. People get together and practice for years, travelling 50 miles to a practice spot, to split up 200 dollars a gig, once they are good enough. They spend thousands each on equipment, and hundreds of hours just getting to that point, and everyone shows up for that.

If people are as passionate about making film as they say they are, why is the willingness to team up and commit so fractional in filmmaking, compared to music, which is arguably hundreds of times easier to succeed at (at least in terms of getting a set written and playing it for an audience)? Do you think it would be strange to watch 6 people collaborate and spend for years to build a lemonade stand, and then go over to a skyscraper construction forum and find everyone trying to do it solo with no money?

 

[Z-Art-Tone]

@Nate North All in all, I realize you're facing some pretty steep obstacles, mainly being location and family obligation. The latter makes you in my opinion a good person, because I know 1 person who would quickly leave his parents in the lurch if he were you. I'm thankful that I can say that I ONLY know ONE like that (quality over quantity applies to friendship, too).

If I were YOU however, I would double down on reaching out to people, with my first priority being to find a strong pitch person. Because in my experience, a successful creative company has the "art" people as well as the "money" people. Art people are terrible money people in my experience, because usually the better they are the less they care about money. Money people on the other hand are s**t as creative people. Even worse when they're in power (ie: creative control). You can see evidence of this by the fact that most successful AAA video games look exactly like each other. Because money people chase the bottom line, graphs, figures, pie charts, key demographics and so on.

Second thing I would do is find others with good skill, reach out to them and make personal visits. Your parents, well I would set it up to where I could take a weekend to travel. Do your parents have friends? Maybe swallow your disgust of being surrounded by your "inferiors" and use them as a weekend lifeline for your parents while you travel on business, perhaps?

P.s.: I've taken some time to check out your project, the art stands out to me. I've yet to take the software on a run but I will get to that.

I'm sure you've done your homework so you probably already know what I'm about to say already, money makes things efficient, but it doesn't guarantee success. For example, let's say I have a couple of billion dollars in the bank. With that money I'm sure I can at the very least get a sit down with the "people representing" the rock, John Cena, Robert Downey Jr and Henry Cavill. But seeing as I'm only MarQii BenJii, the head of a 5 person production company (on it's best day), I could still get a polite no due to my name strength, despite having the theoretical billions

The point of that? Build your name and product up and the connections will chase you

Thank you. The family situation has recently changed. I have often thought about arranging virtual meetings at some point. I understand the differences between art and money types. There is more here I am still digesting and will add questions soon. I may also start a new thread that has to do with audio files. I have looked high and low for online answers and can't seem to find them.

 

[Z-Art-Tone]

MarQuii, I think this response was for me. If not I may be putting my foot in my mouth. Thank you. The family situation has recently changed. I have often thought about arranging virtual meetings at some point. I understand the differences between art and money types. There is more here I am still digesting and will add questions soon. I may also start a new thread that has to do with audio files. I have looked high and low for online answers and can't seem to find them.

 

[Z-Art-Tone]

Reading Nate North makes me feel exactly like I did in my Honors English classes during high school. Somehow As in grammar and diagramming sentences caused my teachers and school counselor to believe I had any clue how to follow novels. I kept coming up with my own interpretations that had nothing to do with what everyone else was agreeing the author meant.

 

[Nate North]

Reading Nate North makes me feel exactly like I did in my Honors English classes during high school. Somehow As in grammar and diagramming sentences caused my teachers and school counselor to believe I had any clue how to follow novels. I kept coming up with my own interpretations that had nothing to do with what everyone else was agreeing the author meant.

Out of curiosity, can you elaborate on that a bit? I'm always trying to learn to communicate better, and it's helpful to for me to learn about how people interpret what I say. Some people on this thread were exited by what I talked about, some confused, and some angry. It's quite a spectrum of feedback from the same source material.

I've consolidated my explanation a good bit since the days when this thread started. If it helps, I'll try again here.

Save Point is a collective where low to mid range creatives can band together to work together on a single large project. We share resources and education, and help each other out. As project director, I work to combine the creative output of contributors into a story. It is a branching choice based story about a single human lifespan. The format is animation, the style is semi-realistic, and the genre ranges from drama to sci fi depending on which path in the story the user takes.

It's a place where you can learn to work alongside other creatives to achieve a common goal, build connections with other artists of different types, establish references and, once the project is live, credentials on sites such as IMDB.

The animation style has evolved a great deal over the last 9 months, and is about to take a significant step forward in the coming months, due to a large number of improvements that we have just begun to integrate. Here are some recent examples of the evolving visuals, but are only represent a fraction of the generational leap in process we are currently undertaking.

 

[Z-Art-Tone]

Nate, I think what I said meant that, 1) because your knowledge and vocabulary are at a much higher level than are mine, I have trouble understanding your writing, 2) since I am a music creator who prefers to read non-fiction, I never understood why my interpretations of a given fiction novel were incorrect, especially when the author died several decades ago and we therefore cannot ask him what he actually meant, and 3) do fiction writers actually expect every reader or every viewer to interpret their work 100% accurately? Personally, I know that there are always at least two and often several perspectives on any given situation or topic, etc. Even my own songs take on new meanings as times change and events occur. Since I write for myself, I don't care what interpretations people glean from my songs. Each unique interpretation may or may not have anything to do with what I actually meant when I wrote the song. That's fine. People interpret from their own experiences. We can't all have the same brain. The only work I care to interpret perfectly is what God has to say. Humans are humans.

In your case, you seem to be explaining more than your readers/viewers need to or want to know? Again, the more you say, the more confused I am. What if you let your work speak for itself. You seem to be attracting the people who truly want to work with you, so I think you are where you want to be at this time.

 

[Nate North]

I think you're absolutely right about the interpretation stuff. People are and should be free to interpret art as they see fit. When teachers or others tell you that there is a right or wrong way to interpret something, often they are projecting their own viewpoint, rather than respecting yours. What they don't tell you is that they have internal psychological motivations for telling you that. Maybe their motive is to protect their authority, and they can't accomplish that by saying "it means whatever you think it means" A math teacher can proceed with confidence, but a fiction teacher is teaching opinion rather than fact, meaning that sometimes they need to BS you a bit to come off as an authority on their subject, which is important to them in terms of feeling confident in their careers. Was star wars an homage to Freudian theoretical psychology? Maybe, maybe not, but they make themselves sound a lot smarter by confidently saying it is, vs saying that no one knows for sure.

Just because I understand that people like to do this, in my works, I often mischievously sprinkle in random things that appear to be symbolic, knowing that years in the future random people will have long arguments over whether a painting I put in the back of a scene meant that the whole story is an allegory for post modern (random ism that is popular that decade) In reality, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

I do it too. I watch old Pink Floyd videos and try to assign meaning to every slow motion shot of a ferret holding a French flag or whatever. In all likelihood, Dave Gilmour just had his pet ferret with him that day, and decided to give it a cameo. However I will fight anyone to the death that says it isn't a scathing indictment of French new wave cinema's transition into orthodoxy, lol.

 

[Z-Art-Tone]

For the first time, I understood you. I was also laughing. All I did was give you an idea how I think and you spoke my language.