Archive for date: February 23rd, 2007

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Fay Grim Poster

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While we were doing the online edit for Fay Grim, we got word that the sales agent wanted to make a poster for the Toronto Film Festival and it needed to be done like yesterday. Hal and I took half an hour and mocked up something we liked, assuming the people who actually knew how to market films would step in and make a bunch of changes, like adding international superstar Jeff Goldblum’s face to the thing.

Fay Grim Poster
Imagine my surprise when 6 months later I see my poster on IMDb, and on the official website. The logos and whatnot have been added, and there’s a bar in the middle that says “Featuring the continuing adventures of Henry Fool” which I love. Other than that, it’s the same thing we threw together in August.

Girl From Monday PosterA similar thing happened with The Girl From Monday. While I was singlehandedly distributing the film in well over 5 theaters across the U.S., I made a poster that I liked quite a bit. Then we licensed home video rights to Netflix, who sublicensed the DVD distribution to Hart Sharp. I assumed they knew better than I did how to make a movie poster, but they decided to re-create my design, but slightly differently. Hal and I ended up giving them a new title treatment which they reduced in order to make the lovely Tatiana Abracos more prominent, which was something I definitely couldn’t argue with. The final DVD is definitely an improvement, although I don’t like the uneven space between the top and bottom of the billing block, but that might just be the bleed at the top.

The Girl Fom Monday DVD

Truth @ 15 fps Reaches the Tipping Point

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The fictional video blog “Truth @ 15 Frames Per Second” that I made last year (started a few months before that other, more famous, fictional video blog) hit some sort of tipping point recently. The actual site, with monetized Revver videos, still only gets about 50 visitors a day, but YouTube is out of control. It’s getting a few thousand views a day. Pretty soon the combined views on YouTube will pass 200,000. That’s a lot more people than I could ever hope to reach in a short film program at the best film festival. Of course, most of those views are for the webcam sex episode I made specifically for a web audience. And if the YouTube comments are any indication, a large number of those viewers are illiterate, and 15 years old.

But I still think this is great. Among the dozens of useless comments, I’ve been getting some great, insightful emails from people who watch the whole saga from start to finish. I never thought anyone would do that, it’s like sitting down to watch an entire season of a TV show at once. If it’s a British comedy series, you can easily do it in one sitting. I just wish YouTube gave me a taste of the money they’re pulling in. Revver has earned me $14 so far, and that includes revenue from my other shorts.

Artistically, I think it was a good idea to keep 15fps as a limited series. It ended at a logical place, but without explicitly saying whether Penny and Sean broke up. That other, more famous video blog should have ended much earlier. Once the plotty stuff about devil-worshiping cults kicked in I got bored. But the trouble is, it got bad at the peak of its popularity. They couldn’t stop at that point. They would have killed their big ticket to fame and fortune. If I had kept 15 fps going until now I would have run out of ideas because it was a limited concept.

I’m much more interested in limited web series right now. I don’t want to promise too much, but I’m working on something now that I hope will allow me to create several 10-ish episode animated web series, possibly at the pace of one a week. It will be a while before I’ve worked everything out, but if it works it’s really going to rock. Stay tuned.