Zen Films

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 :)

Bizarre Magazine

We made the July issue of Bizarre Magazine! We're on page 56 between Germany's fattest whore and a bloke with boobs.

Batman Begins

When London Voodoo was released in North America we travelled to several horror conventions to promote the DVD including HorrorFind Weekend in Maryland and Chiller in New Jersey.

Particularly cool about Chiller was that our lead actress Sara Stewart, who plays Batman's mum, Martha Wayne, in Batman Begins was in attendance and ran into some Batfans with a great car!

Grading in Switzerland

With the sound for London Voodoo mixed, and the picture cut, the s16mm master was scanned at HiDef, graded on a Quantel system and then printed back to 35mm film at Swiss Effects in...well, you guessed it, Switzerland. Here's some pics of a grim & grainy Switzerland (well they were taken on my mobile) and some very sunny friends of mine, Lisa and Vincent who now live out there!

Another blast from the past!

Matt our picture editor and sound designer behind the controls as we mix the sound for London Voodoo. Actually this is stage 2 of a three-stage process:

• stage 1, working with ProTools in his own studio Matt completed the sound design and preliminary mix
• stage 2, as shown in the photos below, Matt takes the ProTools project to a non-Dolby approved studio so that he and a sound engineer can improve the mix and prepare 5.1 stems ready for...
• stage 3, where we now spend just a day in a Dolby studio (because it's very expensive) producing the final Dolby-approved surround sound.

 

Back to the future :)

With the forthcoming DVD release I've been digging around some of the archives and found these pics of Daneeta our documentary maker interviewing Helen our Exec Producer.