my ripomatic

Its Been a Busy Week

This week found me, my wife and my cinematographer Brian Macaione in Savannah, GE, shooting interviews for our documentary Blivits!  We were there from Tuesday to Sunday and during that time we collected over 6 hours of material, almost all of which are direct interviews with some of the surviving crew of the USS Randolph, a retired aircraft carrier in the United States Navy.  The sailors were gracious and humble in a way that was refreshing in a time of "look at me" facebook, twitter, and ah-hem-blogging.  I was alittle surprised to have the sailors be so appreciative of the job that we were doing in capturing their stories, but that probably means that we are on the right track to being a fruitful member of our community.

The importance of the work was reinforced to me this week, as the Randolph Association absorbed the 9 surviving almuni of a mine sweeper named the USS Terror.  That ship had for a short while be a part of the aircraft carrier group's auxiliary compliment.  The Terror had a reunion committee of their own, until this year, but with their numbers dwindling, they joined the Randolph Association.  I was lucky enough to speak with some of the crew of the Terror, and I found that their experiences lived up to the ships moniker.  In the same wave of attacks that saw the Randolph take a kamikaze hit in her flight deck, so too did the Terror.  This ship was less than a quarter of the Randolph's size and when the  she took the direct hit, they lost about a quarter of their crew.  The entire aircraft carrier group was under attack.  This story reminded me of my original idea, that every ship in the Navy has a story to tell, and we would do well to listen.

In both cases I have been able to interview about 25% of the ship’s alumni.  I spoke with three of the Terror’s nine sailors and around 23 of the Randolph’s 99 members.  These sailors varied in age from around 90 to around 60, and their jobs were as diverse as their ages.  I talked to a baker, a medic, one of the Randolph's official photographers, a machine shop worker, a boatswain, a couple of pilots, and a couple of electricians.

More selfishly, I got an plethora of information about what magazines they read, and how they find out about the events that they would like to attend or not.  I also will be included in the quarterly newsletter that the Randolph Association circulates to all of their members.  The executive committee of the group explained that they had a bunch of questions about how to track the progress of the movie, and how to stay involved with me and my making the film.  I suggested involving their families to show them how to see our website and how to keep track of our facebook pages.  I also promised them a copy of their whole interview to be delivered to them in the mail by Christmas.  They will have one copy for themselves but they will also be sent a second copy to share with whomever they choose and of course, each DVD has the website information on it.  So all in all, I think I had a pretty successful trip.

Bomb It!

The primary way that I intend to "attack" the job of marketing and distribution is by releasing some of the extra footage that I'm not using directly in the film, online for free.  We are already on facebook, and our website is currently being developed to house all of the free video and blogs that we're planning, in the mean time my vimeo page stores the video content that will eventually be released through our website.

While it isn't time to consider some of the other things that Reiss talks about, we have heard his suggestions and are planning on following his advise to focus on live events and have the film available on as many platforms as is possible.  In tandem with this strategy, we plan on developing merchandise specifically for the different audience profiles we're discovering.

Keywords

1. Navy
2. veteran
3. war story
4. saving private ryan
5. uss randolph
6. uss indianapolis
7. battle in the pacific
8. uss intrepid
9. kamikaze
10. tora! tora! tora!

Out of Position

According to the Hollywood Report, UCF doesn't even rank amongst the top 25 MFAs for film in the country. It would be hard to take exception with the A.F.I. being listed first or U.S.C being listed second or N.Y.U. being listed in the top four.  Those are the schools that people traditionally have gone to for pipeline jobs into the industry.  And that is what their selling points are.  USC tauts a bajillion alumni in the industry, so does UCLA for that matter.  Even schools like F.S.U. promise work on the productions that are being done in Louisiana.  They all have one thing in common the promise of the student being able to find work after getting a post graduate degree from their school.  UCF makes no such claim.  Our focus is on being the first school to really delve into what the new world of digital content is going to look like.  Existentially important sure, but what does it mean for people coming to school?  I think that further than just the hope we are at the forefront of some shift in ideology, UCF teaches us how to be our own boss.  A great many of the classes I've taken are about how to run my own business, not be a cog in someone elses.  And that is reflected in the expectations of my academic life as well.  Only two other programs in the country require their students to create a feature length project upon matriculation and both of those are limited to documentary film making.  Its the boldness of the program that really seems to set us apart in all ways.  We make feature length movies for the same amount of money students at AFI, NYU, and USC spend on their short films, and at the same time we teach students how to work (maybe more appropriately "Think") for themselves.

PMD me.

The PMD that I have already hired for my film is Jessica Southwell.  She promoted a film at the Florida Film Festival that sold out one of it screenings and has in general started to focus her efforts on social networking.  It should also be mentioned that my producer Jason Flynt has a very strong background in this field as well, and has been working with Dr. Mills as the PMD for Wally's Mission on Mars.

My film poses some unique advantages and some pretty heavy disadvantages in terms of promotion and marketing.  These are some of the things that I spoke about with Jessica before hiring her to be my PMD.

Firstly, we know who the core audience of the film will be.  The Randolph Association which is the association of crew alumni that my dad belongs to, are likely to be the film's most important audience.  There are around 400 members of that association.

Second, ultimately Jessica and I will be arranging for screenings around the country at VFW branches and showing the film to small audiences.  If there are available crew members in the area of a screening will go out of our way to get them to show for a question and answer period after the movie.

Third, the budget that we currently have for marketing and distribution is around $2000, however this would get us to our break even point and any money brought in after that would make the movie profitable.

Fourth, our primary focus is going to be finding organizational support for the film as we intend to self-distribute it after completion.  To that end we will likely find as many partnerships as we can with organizations like the VFW and the Randolph Association to get people to our screenings around the country.  We will likely use traditional print advertising for some of this marketing because that is where our audience gets most of its "news".

Five, at some point we might like to add a booking agent, as its something that Jessica feels uncomfortable having completely in her lap.  We will also use an assistant editor to put together content exclusively for the web.

Six, the Randolph Association does have an email list, but as stated previously most of the people on the list do not often check their email.  Many of them get their news through Retired Officer Magazine, or Navy Life.  We will put heavy effort into getting our story into those magazines to keep our audience abreast of the events we will be holding.

Seven, I will be looking for an assistant editor to log footage and create small featurettes for our website.  Some of these clips might be very simple like an interview that we will not use, but some of them might be much more complex.

Eight, our primary focus for release after completion of the film will be television sales.  A theatrical run seems incredibly unlikely, and we will spend most of our effort on television sales agents or VOD possibilities.

Nine, Brian Redban explains that he only recently started making money off of his podcasting empire with Joe Rogan, by selling T-shirts. And I intend to follow suit.  I think that selling tshirts of the Randolph's call signs and the DVDs that we've made might be the best way to get alittle extra money out of our movie.

Ten, though our strategy forgoes most tradition film festivals, we will target several festivals that are not film markets.  We will avoid festivals where the purpose is selling the film, because I do not believe we will have a good chance at being sold, but should it become obvious that this is wrong, we will certainly course correct and attempt to sell the film traditionally.

Eleven, again, we are attempting to make the distribution plan a part of the film's process organically.  That is to say that we will continue to exploit any options we have for distribution as they become available to us, but the only thing that we are counting on is our ability to sell the film ourself.

Twelve, we have currently targeted the beginning of March to come online with much of our web content.  We expect that this wil give us enough time to shoot all the things we need for the film and by that point we will be putting together the feature, meaning we will know what we can use on the web and what we don't need on in the film.