JAMES WE NEED CONTENT!

Adrian and I planned to make a feature during the summer of 2011. We felt ready for it, posses the skill and ability to pull it off and have the drive. However things don’t always go as planned. After weeks of meetings and story discussions two things happen. Adrian needed surgery on his wrist to remove some steel plates (he’s apparently not as cool as Luke Skywalker) and I ended up getting cast in a play that took up two months of my life smack dab in the middle of or shooting schedule.

So we kept working away on this medieval project that has just taken forever to do. From this we learned lots and also decided “the next thing we do… no freaking CGI dragons!”. Adrian is a wizard when it comes to CGI and technology but seeing how small our team is (two people) and one of them (me) has no clue how to use any of that stuff, it really can slow production down when we’re both already wearing a million hats.

We had no idea what our next project was going to be, but we knew we wanted it to be high end. We both sifted through all of our ideas from the pre summer meets (over 64 different movie concepts… ya I know right! Were concept machines), we tried mashing up concepts (who doesn’t like the idea of Indiana Jones with laser beams!!) but still nothing was triggering the “JAMES YOU’RE A GENIUS” reflex… or Adrian… but mainly James… hehehe (I’m going to hear about this) 

Then… IT HIT ME! After playing many an hour of Fallout New Vegas and Batman Arkham City an old idea I had from high school flew into my head! I started readjusting and reshaping the idea and I texted Adrian right away about the story I had set in a post apocalyptic North America. After I went through “The Bible” (shows background, character info, where it’s going and so forth) I got the “JAMES YOU’RE A GENIUS” response… which turned out to be more of an “interesting… I like it”

You might be asking yourself “why is it relevant that you were playing those video games James?” Well I will tell you!

The YouTube attention span is roughly five to ten minutes for the average person. I myself to like to watch shows that are upwards of an hour long but generally people go there for a quick fix of something. Dialogue in video games and the over all “acting” seen in each quest or story line is basically the same, the rest of the time people are playing the game. However video games story telling (particularly in those two titles) is fantastic. So I reshaped the feature film idea I had into a webseries format. This keeps the audiences attention for the “golden time frame” as I call it and we also don’t get bogged down with extra story bits. So we trim the fat and get the viewer right into the good stuff.

This hidden back end advantage of this format for all your aspiring film makers is you don’t have the daunting task of working on the entire films edit all at once. This can be the number one project kill factor. You see all the work a head of you and no real feedback for months and you say “its not worth it”. However in this format, although everything will be shot at once (or close to it) we only need to worry about the edit for the episode we are planning on releasing. Once its released we start editing the next episode, all the while people will be viewing the content that is out there. This provides us with people wanting more, wanting to see the next chapter in the story while we are busy working away at editing that next chapter.

The formula will look like this

Shoot season, edit, release, edit, release, edit and so forth until the end of season one! All of a sudden you have a TON of content on your YouTube channel, a fan base and the famous show biz adage “leave’em wanting more!!”