Zen Films

The Don and Murph Show

If you haven't seen the Don & Murph show yet then shame on you! :) It's a very cool movie site where the two guiys mix movie reviews with comedy - and they're into horror movies.

I'm delighted to say we just got  exposed on their regular weekly feature What's In Our Box?

Check out this clip and start subscribing!

Number of horror films released in the past 10 years

Number of horror films released in the past 10 years, originally uploaded by ZenFilms.

Looks like 2007 was the peak for horror movie making with films tagged as "horror" on the IMDB accounting for 17% of all movies released last year.
Of course 2008 hasn't finished yet but IMDB shows only 11 films completed but not released so looks like number of horror movies this year has declined.

Free Press?

Going down the self-distribution route has taken me in many directions searching for comparisons with other industries. Check out these ideas on book publishing: http://www.concordfreepress.com/

And this blog pieceby Seth Godin which has some interesting ideas.

Why & How We Chose to Self-Distribute Our Film - Part 1

Where We Are Now 

MindFlesh went on sale to the public last week. We're selling a 2-disc special edition DVD via Amazon & CreateSpace and the movie can also be downloaded via Caachi to personal computers and portable devices.

The film in all formats is DRM-free (except via Caachi's streaming service). Later this year the movie will be available on other download and streaming sites and a couple of video-on-demand (VoD) pay-per-view TV channels in Europe.

 

Anyone discovering the film on Amazon, a download site or VoD will have no idea or reason to care that we're self-distributing the movie. Potential customers can watch our trailer or various clips from the movie and they can read our excellent reviews. On the MindFlesh site I've tried to provide as much information as possible for the viewer to make an informed decision about whether they'll like the film before they buy.

 

This blog post is about how we got to this position. In subsequent posts I'll discuss the various marketing activities we have underway and their relative merits.

 

Should I Self-Publish My Work?

In any other industry except book publishing and movies, cutting out the middleman would be viewed as a good thing! Why give away x% of your revenue if you don't have to? And yet there seems to be some kind of stigma about self-published works - as though those who choose this route do so only to satisfy their vanity or because they weren't good enough to get a "real" distribution/publishing deal.

It was great to see that Lance Hammer took his Sundance film Ballast and decided to self-distribute it because maybe this will encourage a change in perception.

 

My usual response is, talk to people who have distribution deals and ask if they're happy with the money they're making or if they're happy with the marketing the distributor/publisher is doing. Very few will tell you they are. Many authors I know that are with big publishers still find themselves working hard to promote their own work. Why not take that little extra step and cut out the middleman? Cut out the distributor and speak directly to your audience? The problem of course is knowledge & resources to do the promotion and distribution efficiently (e.g. to sell the book or film with the minimum time and money).

 

Market Background - Independent Films

After the success of London Voodoo on DVD (now available in five languages and 21 countries; and we also had a small theatrical release in USA and Singapore) I'd been planning to sell MindFlesh to various distributors around the world for a minimum guarantee and then walk away. Approaching and selling to distributors is very easy - they're looking for product they can sell and they're open to any film that might make them money. It's a simple as that and it should be. So what changed?

 

Well, several things happened or increased in prevalence over the two years if to took to shoot and post-produce MindFlesh:

•  Internet piracy is stealing DVD sales - why buy the DVD if you can download it for free?
•  NetFlix, LoveFilm and other rental companies that offer "all you can eat" subscription-type services have reduced DVD sales - particular for independent titles that have always been seen by the public as a bit of risk
•  user-generated video sharing sites like YouTube are satisfying viewers' needs for original content. Further, because there is so much to trawl through, it's created what some have called a new "Attention Economy" where everyone publishing any kind of content is struggling to get some of the viewer's time.

 

The result of this has been a huge reduction in the number of DVDs purchased.

This in turn has meant that those most likely to sell are the Hollywood titles and those other titles with big marketing budgets that buy attention through print, cinema and TV advertising. 

Hence:

• the big retail outlets now only carry a narrow range of titles. (For more information about what's happening in retail, watch this video or visit the "Save the Indies" MySpace page)
• independent DVD distributors have gone bust because of lost sales through piracy, subscription-based rental and they're squeezed out of retail outlets.

Some people may be able to point to exceptions of course - smaller titles in a Virgin Megastore for example -  but these titles come from the bigger distributors that have long-standing relationships, a bigger library of titles and hence more leverage – "take our turkeys" they might demand "or you won't get the better titles". This bundling of dross with gloss happens everywhere – in TV and in film festivals: take these weaker titles or you don't get the titles you want. It further squeezes out the indie.

The bottom line for us then is that the market for indie films is smaller and more risk-adverse. We knew going in that MindFlesh was never going to be an easy sell because we set out to make something completely original: it doesn't fall into a neat pigeon hole because it's part sci-fi, part horror with a storyline that allows parallel interpretations because it's a film about parallel realities. It's based on an excellent Buddhist horror novel, White Light. 

 

We screened in Cannes and although many distributors loved the film they confided "I don't know how I'm going to sell it".

Of course we'd anticipated some distributors reacting in this way but had hoped to sign with some niche distributors who sell kinda fetish/art-house/genre cross-over titles. But in a smaller market (by which I mean less money being spent) these guys are going bust. For for the bigger distributors still in business it's not about "good films" vs "bad films", it's about "sell same product to known (but dwindling) audience" vs "sell something unusual to a hybrid audience" - they can't be bothered to take the trouble. 

Sure we have a niche audience but the audience for MindFlesh is very easy to identify - it's those people who like films by David Cronenberg, some of those who like David Lynch and some Buddhists. Look at Cronenberg's fans - they're not all horror fans or all sci-fi fans; some would just say that they're fans of great cinema.

 

Thankfully we'd anticipated this outcome from the moment we signed up the book rights which means we'd already started our audience building long before we'd started shooting, never mind selling.

 

Coming Next

In the second part of this blog posting I'll discuss all our social media audience building work including our YouTube blogs, widget building, newsletters, MySpace page, Facebook application and so on.

The Conversation + DIYDAYs and The Future of Independent Film

It’s taken me weeks to find the time to blog about these events but I’ve been determined to put fingertip to keyboard and join the discussion.

First, I would like to thank Scott and Lance and everyone who put these events together because they were informatve, very well run, fun, rewarding and timely. If they hold any further events like these I'd encourage more indie filmmakers to attend.

Second, this blog post is going to seem a little dark after the euphoria of these events. I have more to say on the future of indie films that's more optimistic but I'll save it for another blog post.

Let me start by defining an “indie” film as <$1million and without a named director or a named cast. That means I’m not talking about all those navel-gazing +$4m soap operas made by the studios that are really just low-budget Hollywood pictures with a sad ending.  Calling those films “indie” is like calling Green Day a punk band. Crass was a punk band. And “yes that’s right, punk is dead; it’s just another cheap product for the consumer’s head”.

For all the hope and aspirations we had back then of actually achieving anarchy in the UK, the Establishment, at first dazed, soon recovered and understood how the game could be played. The dream of a new dawn was quickly subverted and we returned to the usual endless days of night.

DIYDays

Attending DIYDAYS was like attending one of those early Crass or Poison Girls gatherings in some disused school in Westbourne Park. It felt real. It was genuine. There was a vibrant grassroots enthusiasm to take the cheap technology that capitalism and US military funding has provided and use it to break free of the norms: new ways to tell stories, new ways to capture those stories, new ways to distribute them and new ways to be compensated (paid). Many of the under 25s there seemed ready to burst with uncontrollable energy, unfettered by the memory and disillusionment of the failed punk movement decades ago.

It was a great event.  And although I’d heard some of the speakers before on Lance’s excellent Workbook Project, I listened with a Zen mind and was rewarded with new insights. The only negative that sticks in my mind was that the woman from Current.tv was a bit of a miserable cow -  I put it down to stress of sponsoring the event.

The Conversation

The Conversation, although equally informative, was rather more Establishment and less indie. I had a good time, I met some wonderful people. But I came away (from the bar), a little drunk I confess, with a simmering disappointment that I couldn’t pinpoint the origin of.

I think now that my melancholia was from the feeling that I’d seen the writing on the wall: Indie films would be squeezed of attention between asinine user-generated videos of people playing the flute from their arse and +$100m Hollywood 3D computer-generated cartoons. Whatever air is left for indie films to breathe would be sucked dry by bland, Brand-sponsored, advertising-led feel-good movies on the one side and dreary taxpayer-funded social-cause documentaries on the other side.  I took a business card from the PR girl representing IndieGoGo  – she worked for Ogilvy. Yeah, that’s very indie.

Right now we’re in the midst of a new gold rush except that nobody knows where the gold is. So there are lots of people buying Internet real estate in case the gold could be on the bit they’re buying. And just like the last gold rush, the ones making money now are the ones selling the spades.

***

I'll promise to be more upbeat on the next post! :)

Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction: A 1-Day Intro, Sat 15th Nov 2008

I don't usually do adverts but this is an exception for my friend Bill who is offering stressed executives and others the chance to learn techniques to help them unwind. If you or your husband or wife comes home from work angry, irritable and stressed, I'd strongly recommend taking one day out the weekend to improve your whole life.

It's a day-long class on Saturday November 15, 2008
9:00 a.m. to 4:30
San Francisco Buddhist Center, 37 Bartlett Street, between 21st and 22nd,
off Mission Street.

Below is Bill's explanation of the class. Note that just because it's in the Buddist centre and Buddhists also mediate, this isn't about persuading anyone to become a Buddhist.

"By persistently aligning ourselves with the present moment, we train our hearts and minds to be more awake and wise for the challenges of our lives. Join us for a day of meditation, gentle movement, and group discussion as we explore what it means to live our lives with embodied presence and awareness. Mindfulness meditation is the practice of deliberately paying attention to what arises moment by moment. Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) is the systematic application of mindfulness training to stress and to health problems related to it. The class consists of lead meditations, gentle movement exercises, reflection, question and answers periods, and group discussions"

To register or if you have any questions, click this link and follow the instructions.

Innovative documentary techniques

I first met Justin Oakey online through his interest in MindFlesh.

He's now working on a short documentary about diesease and how our relationship with diesease might feed into the distress of body horror (think David Cronenberg). The photo below shows our remote interview set up.

The Sony Z1 records my replies while he throws questions via the webcam. There's also an external mic out of picture to get a better sound recording of my replies. The YouTube clips takes you through the setup.

With the interview over, I could have popped the tape into an envelop and posted it along with the external sound recording. Instead I loaded the tape onto my PC, cut into clips and then copies the clips onto DVD for shipping.

Here's a previous short documentary that Justin has just completed,titled Butcher Shop ;)

Butcher Shop from Justin Oakey on Vimeo.

Another great review for MindFlesh!

I woke up this morning intending to find some time to blog about how much I recently enjoyed the event The Conversation ("theconvo") and DIYDAYS San Francisco but found a link to a superb review for MindFlesh. It's here at The Movies Made Me Do It.

I'll get back to those other events later.... hopefully.

Animating with Poser - my Skateboarding dog.

Meet ZenDog my skateboarding dog - created in Poser from Daz3's Millennium Dog and the obvious skateboard prop. Note that I changed the skateboard texture to get the Zen logo underneath.

Check out ZenDog's first skate video...

I created the scene in Poser and then created different files for each shot/angle.
Each shot was rendered as a TIF sequence into its own folder. In fact I rendered foreground and background as different image sequences so that I could better control the focus and touch up the lighting.

The final video was created in After Effects. If you hold down the shift key you can drag each folder into the project window and it'll automatically create a movie/image sequence.

It's fairly basic I know but it's a lot of fun and I hope to use the experience for something bigger later.

Below is a screen shot of the ZenDog page on Jumpcut. I've uploaded each individual shot in case anyone fancies editing their own skate vid :) http://www.jumpcut.com/ZenDog

I'm working on a new video now... hope to have it done soon.

Fire on Angel Island

Oh lordy, I was just about to go to bed when I look out of window and saw a a huge fire over towards Sausalito.

Helen was a bed so I didn't wake her up but I did film it. This was shot at around 10:15pm from Pacific Heights.