Kyle Gilman's Camera Noise Productions

A Brief History of Two Night Stand

July 9th, 2008

Over the past few days, Two Night Stand has totally exploded on Vuze. It’s over 20,000 downloads in its first week of availability. I know the thumbnail of Jennie has a lot to do with the popularity of the movie, but I’ve also seen a lot of people coming to this site searching for Two Night Stand over the past few days. Today is one of my highest traffic days in a long time. Of course, YouTube is up to 320,000, but that’s taken a long time and I almost never see anyone searching for info about the movie afterward.

It’s funny how things change. Two Night Stand was my first real post-college movie. I had a really hard time finishing the script without any deadlines. In early drafts they wandered around the small town they’d ended up in and got drunk in a local bar. After a lot of revision I ended up with just one location and two characters. I decided not to act in it because I wanted to focus on directing. It turns out it’s a lot easier to make a movie when you don’t have to act at the same time. We shot it in the summer of 2004 right before I moved to NYC. I took my time with the editing and premiered it in February 2005 at The Pioneer Theater along with a bunch of my other short films.

At the time I kind of thought I was done with the film. I had gotten everything I wanted out of it. I made a movie that looked good and didn’t cheat by using the documentary tricks that characterized my earlier films. If the sound recording was bad I couldn’t turn it into a joke like I did in Kalesius and Clotho. After spending nearly $1000 on festival submission fees for Kalesius and Clotho I was totally sick of the so-called “festival circuit.” I half-heartedly submitted it to a few friendly festivals and got into a few of them, although I was disappointed not to get into the Anchorage Film Festival, which is my favorite festival ever.

So Two Night Stand sat on the shelf until YouTube took off. I uploaded it there and hardly anyone watched it. Meanwhile, my Bad Webcam Sex video got 2 million views. Eventually things picked up and now it gets around 1000 views a day. It’s been really great to have all these viewers for a film I never expected to get much exposure. I don’t see any reason for short films to go to film festivals anymore. The Internet is the place for short films. At festivals they’re a sideshow at best.

Anyway, thanks to everyone who’s watched it, and I hope I can make some more films soon.

Entry Filed under: News