Zen Films

Transmedia Round-Up

Having been blogging at Culture Hacker for the past few months my site here is looking a little empty :)

As much for my own benefit as anyone's, here's a list of those posts:

• Moving filmmakers to a transmedia business model
• Collaborative Transmedia Storytelling
• Transmedia Notation
• Crowdsourcing for Indies

Merry Christmas everyone!

It's been happening at Culture Hacker

I'm very aware that it's been ages since I posted anything! The truth is that the time I put aside for blogging has been going into posts at Culture Hacker.

For the record, here's a couple of links to recent stuff:

Crowdsourcing for Indies

Collaborative Transmedia Storytelling

Transmedia Notation.

At some point I'll pull this all together and post here... just...need.. to... find... more... time...

The Parasites Online Game

Parasites Online is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game that will start as a (2D) social network RPG (also available on mobile) and extend into a (3D) virtual environment. 

Background 

Parasites Online is a player-driven persistent world set in 2512 (500 years after end of Parasites feature film). Global warming has turned much of the UK into forest (or lake) with only the wealthiest cities able to afford the continual cleaning and deforestation. 

The cities are gleaming wonderlands of skyscrapers that are ruthlessly ruled by a governing dictatorship that lives in the Capital. This governing elite spy on the population with millions of cameras and track the population’s location and life history from cradle to grave on national databases. 

People in cities live like docile animals, taught to conform and beaten into submission. 

The prison population has soared due to psychometric testing of children age 7 to identify possible criminal traits and tendencies. Many tower blocks on the edge of the city have been turned into borstal-blocks or feral “kid cities”. 

Parasites 

Feared, reviled and worshipped by different Sects, the planet is under constant threat from a virulent nanoscopic parasite that eats human flesh and turns it into metal. The parasites aren’t machines as they are in Vexille - they’re organisms that are dumb individually but have a collective consciousness. Think termites or ants building a nest - they rely on collaboration for their survival. The parasites feed off the host (human) physically (the flesh) but they act like chameleons in changing their collective shape to form objects of desire (car parts, consumer electronics). Slowly they replace the body's organs and perform the vital functions for life until the human can't survive without them even though the consumption continues until there is no human left. The parasites die with the host, unable to sustain themselves without flesh. 

Time-travel

The game makes available several Counter-Time Dependency Event Matching Machines (CTDEMM) – or “RevKars” as they are more popularly known. These are time-travel devices that can affect the past and hence rewrite the future. People and things can't travel back in time but these machines use nonparametric regression analysis to identify the smallest possible event to change which will have the desired effect in the present (think chaos theory and the butterfly flapping its wings). 

Players use RevKars to affect the Parasites movie, web series, screenings & access to in-game and out-of-game assets. 

Actions (notably voting) at live events impact the present and hence the effects ripple through into the future (e.g. the game progress). 

Gameplay 

Game participants fall into three categories: 

• Players: those most active in the game 
• Gamers: those recruited to play games-within-games (themed problem solvers and casual games) 
• Observers: those who get pleasure (excitement) from seeing progress unfold but take no active role.

Players start the game with full life energy and slowly grow old and die as the game progresses. As they age they lose mental capacity and physical agility although this can be slowed or reversed through progress in the game. 

When a player dies he is reincarnated. However, his karma at the time of death will affect how he will be reincarnated. The goal is to achieve an enlightened, balanced life at the time of death. Hence it is for the player to decide the optimal time to die. Players are not allowed to commit suicide. 

Mindful positive actions create good karma, thoughtless or negative actions create bad karma. Karma is calculated on a continual basis based on collective action, individual behavior (e.g. compassion, dedication) and success in missions which may include collaborative ambushes, assassinations, gang battles, non-violent resistance and so on. 

Players are expected to recruit gamers and observers as this will affect their karma and their ability to perform well in missions. 

Reincarantion

There are 6 levels of reincarnation with players starting the game as nubes at level 3.  

Players that go through 3 levels of positive reincarnation achieve nirvana and become a special Buddha-type character able to offer special wisdom to other players but can still fall back through the layers. Successive negative reincarnation will ultimately lead to hell and the player will suffer a real online death. 

Note that the levels of reincarnation are not those of regular game levels in that progress need not always be motivated towards nirvana. For example, level 1 – the closest to hell – will be dedicated to PvP combat but skills at this level may have been gained at higher levels. Hence players must manage their karma and the time of their death to achieve their own personal objectives. 

The Sects 

Each participant (player, gamer, observer) must join one of four Sects:

• Kings - a non-elected ruling elite (government) who create the laws (and enforce them) for those living in the cities 
• Dark Dharma - anarcho-Buddhists living outside the cities. Masters of Tai Chi, pacifist and reject modern technology and the law of the Kings 
• PME - "ParaMachinErotica" - those addicted to the hallucinations caused by the parasitic infection. They fetishize & worship technology. Social outcasts that live on the lower floors and on the boarders of urban and rural living 
• Extremist - thrill-seekers/adrenaline junkies hooked on sports like rock climbing, base-jumping etc. These guys live in the tower blocks at various levels 

On reincarnation a player is able to switch Sects and may offer the choice to his gamers and observers.

Live screenings of the movie are affected by Sect members physically present and the collective balance of their karma at time of screening

Publishing content for the Kindle

With the launch of the Kindle DX and a new cut of London Voodoo, I thought I’d re-publish (for the Kindle) the anthology we put together for the movie’s original UK release. And here it is:

SIDE BAR: Kindle for iPhone
Note that if you don't have a Kindle, there is a Kindle iPhone app which works really well and you can sample some of the book for free.
Download the app and sign in. Then, when on Amazon, push the content to the phone. 

Note too that you can listen free to Stepping Offby Mike Davis read by Doug "Hellraiser" Bradley by clicking here for the MP3 or here for the podcast in iTunes.

Continuing....

Ought to be straight-forward right? Well.. kinda but still took a bit of searching for information and trial & error.  FYI I had my original document in Word 2007. So here’s my insight. 

1. Go to Amazon’s Digital Text Platform at  http://dtp.amazon.com

2. Create an account
3. Now you’ll see a screen like the picture below. It’s a three-stage process

4. Stage One: Enter the book details and upload the cover art

5. Stage Two: This is the trial and error part..

In Word 2007, go to Save As.. Other Formats.. and select Web Page. There are other web-formatting options but Web Page is the one I used most successfully.

Open the newly-created webpage – which is your book in HTML format – either in a web-editing program (I used Dreamweaver) or a basic text editor – you’re going to need to edit bits of code.

Each book section was marked with the code 

<div class=SectionX> 

where “X” was the section number E.g. <div class=Section2>. 
Replace these lines with the Amazon custom tag 

<mbp:section> 

The other custom tag you may need is the one that forces a page break 

<mbp:pagebreak />

Upload the HTML file and preview it using Amazon’s preview tool. 

I found that there were too many blank lines. Well after all the anthology had been formatted for a different page size. That means deleting this code: 

<p class=MsoBodyText><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></p> 

Then, the headers had too much space on the paragraph formatting. 

If you go to a header you’ll notice something like this: 

<h1><a name="_Toc151988948"><span lang=EN-GB>Stepping Off</span></a><span
lang=EN-GB> </span></h1>

The <h1> code is the heading format. You’ll need to search the start of the file in the style section to find where this defined. My file had this: 

h1
{mso-style-update:auto;
mso-style-unhide:no;
mso-style-qformat:yes;
mso-style-next:Normal;
margin-top:24.0pt;
margin-right:0cm;
margin-bottom:18.0pt;
margin-left:0cm;
page-break-before:always;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
page-break-after:avoid;
mso-outline-level:1;
font-size:14.0pt;
mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:"Palatino Linotype","serif";
mso-font-kerning:0pt;
mso-ansi-language:EN-GB;
font-weight:bold;
mso-bidi-font-weight:normal;}

I went in and changed the margin-top to 12.0pt.

6. And that's the hard part over. Now you set a price, enter your tax and bank details so they know how to pay you and that's it.

Creating Social Media for Indie Film Marketing

The purpose of this post is to explain how to market your indie movie correctly and avoid some of the mistakes I’ve made. This is a practical piece but it helps to understand the reasoning behind my suggestions. I’ve spent a couple of years now investigating and experimenting with social media on my own movies and not always getting it right! Much of the research and exploration I’ve done has been inspired by Henry Jenkin’s whitepaper on spreadable media, from the Workbook Project and a mountain of social media presentations on SlideShare!

I’m going to assume that as indie filmmakers (a) you don’t have thousands of dollars to spend on advertising campaigns (although more on this in a later post) and hence (b) that you want to use word-of-mouth to make people aware of the movie ahead of it being seen.

So here it is: You have to create marketing materials – social media – that make a contribution to a person’s (online) social life. Audiences don’t build their world around your movie or your marketing materials - they take your movie and media use it for their own (social) purposes. That means (borrowing from Jenkin’s paper) you have to create media that allows your audience to:

• express something about themselves or their community
• express a deeply held perception or view of the world
• determine who’s in and who’s out
• conduct some kind of social function – like sharing, referring, alerting, gossiping, debating (etc.)

The problem with the usual trailer and movie poster is they can only work in this way if you’ve got the kudos built into the project from the beginning – like a named cast or named director, maybe a popular franchise. Then those well-known elements all bring a message or meaning which fans use to express themselves. And, media built on these elements has a social worth as a gift or tribute.

For example, if I decorate my MySpace or Facebook page with a poster from Old Boy or La Haine, it’s communicating something about me – I’m using the poster not to promote the film but to signal the type of person that I am and the people I’m interested to meet. Similarly, if I forward the link to a trailer to a friend, I’m doing it to reinforce the friendship because I think this gesture or “gift” will be appreciated and they’ll think kindly towards me. It’s not really because I want to promote the film (unless I know the filmmakers of course), it's what the trailer is doing for me.

So, if you’ve got an indie film that nobody’s heard of, your trailer isn't punching at the same weight – your trailer and poster are not performing those necessary social functions in the same way or as effectively. Worse still, until there’s a body of opinion that says your film isn’t lame, whoever carries your colors is going out on a limb under the threat of ridicule from the community. Not everyone’s ready to do that.

What to do?
First, recognize that you’ve got a problem. Second, break down all the elements in your film that you do have – start with the cast, the crew, the genre, the premise and the subject matter. Maybe the special effects, stunts, car chases? Look for all the things in your film that can contribute to various people's (social) life and perform one or all of the roles above. Third and finally, think how you’re going to make it easy and convenient to facilitate all those functions – the sharing, the referring, the debating etc.

Don’t think about it as though you’re selling or promoting the movie: you’re trying to add value to someone’s life by giving them a piece of media that they can use for their purposes. If your media doesn’t do that then its spam.

So, for example, if you’ve got a great car chase or a great stunt, upload that clip to YouTube and find people interested in cars. It doesn’t matter that your film is a crime thriller or a horror and not really about cars at all, it’s got that chase and that clip can form the basis for social interaction – it’s a gift from you to the car community. Avoid at all costs spoiling the video with urls and logos – put that information in the description field. If it looks like an advert then it’ll spoil the value of the gift.

The media needn't be a clip or graphic, it could be an opinion piece, a comment on someone's blog, insider information (gossip) - any form of communication that adds value.

A point to note when uploading to YouTube (and other video sharing sites of course) is to give the video a title that reflects what’s in the clip, not the name of the movie. So in this case, it might be called “Car Chase on Wet Road” – it’s much more likely to be found by people looking for car chases. They’re not going to search for the name of your film because as yet nobody’s heard of it. You can actually see this at work with London Voodoo: a fan, without my knowledge or blessing, ripped the DVD and uploaded a collection of clips titled “Woman Possessed”. His video views far exceeded our “London Voodoo Trailer” because he tapped into the popular search term “possession” and into a subculture of people interested in possessed women.

Now, of course you’ll want a trailer and a poster but these are there to provide further information or increased involvement for anyone who wants to take their interest to the next level.

Please stay tuned for more in subsequent posts. I've started here with the assumption that your movie is already finished but I'd like to discuss how you might approach the project differently from the beginning now that you know this. And I'll discuss the media we created and why it worked and when it didn't.

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.

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.

Overlay TV could be great for independent filmmakers

Check out Overlay TV. This could be a great tool for independent filmmakers to grab a few sales from clips and trailers.

And here's another for Sarah Fisher's excellent documentary, Meditate & Destroy

Subtitling in French and London Voodoo re-cut

Oh man, I've been soooo busy these past weeks. Apologies to regular readers for the high self-promotional content - it's almost all I've had time to write.

In the other spare hour or two every day I've been subtitling London Voodoo in French. Now, of course, if the film were only to be show on DVD then I could have used Adobe Encore to add the subtitles automatically... well, kinda. I'd have to create a text script file of course but given I already have a spotting list with the dialog timecoded it would have been fairly straightforward.

But, although I was asked to do the work for a film festival in Canada, my plan is make the French subtitled London Voodoo available for download - hence, the text needs to be added as hundreds of title cards in Premiere :(

Just a final note on the translation. I used BeTranslated- very nice people, quick, accurate and about the cheapest. The most expensive quote I had was 50% more than BeTranslated's price - so quite some range. There's a lot of translation folks online and it's very easy to get a quick quote, it's pretty much just a multiple of x-cents per word.

London Voodoo re-cut and digital "remastering"

So, given I had to go back to the LV source files, I decided to give the film a make-over and cut out about 8 minutes. Anyone that's edited a film before will tell you how tough it can be to just cut out a few seconds, never mind 8 minutes. Still, I did it by removing a lot of voodoo explanations and "exterior interludes" I guess you could call them.

The primary reason for mentioning it here is a small bug I found in Premiere: my source clips are in PAL 25fps. When I export the edited timeline in NTSC mpeg format, not only is there a slight blending of shots between the cut - rather than a neat, clean cut - an additional frame is added from the outgoing shot! What? To overcome the problem I've had to export in PAL - works fine - and then import the exported PAL clip and re-export in NTSC.

I know that NTSC is a different frame rate etc. but the software should recognise the end of the edited shot correctly.

Dirt and scratch removal in Adobe Premiere

I've also been removing the odd blemish and scratch from the image. LV was shot in super 16mm and when the neg was cut before digital scanning (we have a hidef digital intermediate), the guy or girl that glued the cuts wasn't too fussy about where that glue went or how much dirt and crap the neg picked up.

Most of the main blemishes and glue patches were picked up and corrected during grading but I've noticed a few during subtitling so I've fixed them in Premiere.

Ok, so Premiere comes with a dirt and scratch removal effect but it's kinda like a Median effect - it slightly blurs all the image which is ok for small bits of dirt but I have BIG white holes in some places. What I've done is steal a technique from After Effect's rig removal effect.

First, isolate the frame with the blemish in the timeline.Then, in the clip monitor, find the same blemish and step back one frame - to a clean frame. Now take this one clean frame and add it to the timeline on the video track above the blemish. Hopefully, so far so good.

Now drag the Four-Point Garbage Matte effect and drop it on that clean frame in the upper video track. Drag the corners of the matte so that they crop out the whole frame except around the blemish on the video track below. Result - you should have now successfully plugged the blemish with a clean image area from the frame before.

I was concerned that I might have to feather the edges of the matte to hide the fix, but nope - works fine. It also sounds like whole load of effort but it's actually quite quick to do once you get familiar with the steps. Below is an illustrating screen shot. I'd recommend clicking to view image full size in a new window.

ZenTV and Robot Football

I'm sorry I haven't posted much to the blog over the past month. I've been nose-to-the-grindstone hard at it trying to get MindFlesh finished. I'm pleased to say that the moment is due to come this week! Oh yeah!

Quick MindFlesh Update

Cinematographer Patrick Jackson was over here last week to finish the picture grading and now I just have the final soundtrack mix to go though (tomorrow) and we're done... kinda :) What we'll then have is some cool digital files that needs to be transferred to HDCAM and digiBeta for public screenings and to DVD for industry screeners.

Thanks to everyone who emailed their kind comments on the trailer!

Zen Online

As moving-picture entertainment technology strides forward we've been looking into online distribution (download and rental). There are quite a few sites now ranging from Amazon's Unboxed (USA only) & iTunes (only available to the big studios... and only in the US at the moment) to Jaman/CineQuest and my current favorite Brightcove. I like the fact that we can mount the player on our website and also have the content syndicated.

I ought also to mention that we recently signed a deal with start-up DreamTV in the USA for both the English and Spanish language rights to London Voodoo. DreamTV will deliver its channel to living rooms via Verismo, an IP TV provider (IP= Internet protocol TV= television :) Duh!).

Ok, finally, back to Brightcove. Here's a cool clip of Robots playing football for no other reason than I like robots :)