Unseen Abilities

I wrote a guest post last month over at IndieGoGo, a great fund raising and awareness tool for filmmakers, on the topic of using search marketing to attract an audience for your film.

Here’s a quote from the post:

Making a film is a big enough challenge in itself, but if you are like most low-budget independent filmmakers, you’ll quickly discover that finding an audience for your film can be even more challenging.

Outside of widely known marketing methods like submitting to festivals, inviting people to special screenings, and attempting to make friends on social networks, most filmmakers fail in allowing their audience find them on their own.

If you are a filmmaker looking to build an audience, I suggest you read the rest of the article: Build Your Film’s Audience Using Search Engines

Inspired by funny GraphJam charts, I created this graph based off trailers I’ve seen in the theaters and the resulting box office success and fan ratings.

Do you agree? Love to see your comments.

Most, if not all, film festivals have Myspace accounts, some are on Facebook, but I was most surprised to discover festivals using twitter. It came to my attention when @slamdance recently opened an account. I also see @cannes and @afifestnews. Despite the great popularity of the festivals, the three are only averaging about 20 followers a piece thus far.

The greatest value of a festival twitter account for festivals will be during the festival for last minute updates, connecting live wither others at the festival, and getting instant feedback on the movies and events.

Like most new filmmakers, my primary goal with my film was to submit it to Sundance and get accepted into the film festival. As you join the industry, you start to learn about many other film festivals that matter as well, but there something about the recognizability of Sundance. In the public eye, if you say you’ll be submitting it to film festivals, the first thing that will come out of most people’s mouths is: “You mean like Sundance?”

Last Thursday I mailed out Unseen Abilities in time for the regular Sundance deadline and you should have seen the look on the girl’s face who prepared my package - she was absolutely amazed that someone from around here was mailing something to Sundance (complete with a Hollywood, CA address). Even though I just gave her my address, she was star-struck and said “Are you from around here?”

I must admit that it felt good to mail out to Sundance, but it will feel much better to get in. Only time will tell…

Tropic Thunder, a comedy film that premiered at a red carpet event August 11th starring Ben Stiller, Jack Black and Robert Downey Jr has was protested heavily for using & abusing the term “retard.” It’s all over the news and Special Olympics chairman Timothy Shriver wrote a long article for the Huffington post calling for a ban on the “r” word.

This topic is relevant to Unseen Abilities as our title refers to one of the two main characters in the film, who is physically handicapped after a car accident. Unlike Tropic Thunder, I don’t see Unseen Abilities upsetting anyone as the beginning of the film quickly shows how likable & capable the physically challenged can be.

I do think Timothy and others have raised very good points, but I’m afraid their efforts are only giving the film lots more press, driving up box office revenues. I was happy to hear Dreamworks and the actors took the protests seriously. Hopefully Tropic Thunder doesn’t cast a dark shadow on other films that handle the topic more gracefully.

Where the actual writing takes place for any given film probably varies greatly. I imagine coffee shops, home offices, and the livingroom are not uncommon. I’m curious where most screenwriters and filmmakers write. Perhaps if I share my writing locations & times for the Unseen Abilities film, others will share their experience.

After summing up the various places where writing occurred (whether it be in my head, on paper, or directly on the laptop), here’s the breakdown:

Before I further explain the breakdown, it might be helpful to know that I held both a full-time job and a part-time job while I was writing the screenplay. My time was also taken up by my wife and then 2-year old son, so it probably makes sense that my chart mostly reflects my only available free time.

My Breakdown explained:

10% Can’t Sleep - my roommate in college couldn’t stand me because he’d try to sleep around 9 or 10pm, then I’d show up around midnight and fall asleep before him, within minutes. Despite training myself to not think about anything when I go to bed so I can sleep immediately, there were certain times I couldn’t help but think about the movie. When I caught myself doing so, especially if I had an idea I had to write down, I would jump out of bed and work on the movie until I grew tired.

10% Discussions - I often found myself bouncing ideas off people (mostly off one of my lead actors, my wife, my sister and co-workers). I also received new ideas (mostly from the same lead actor). The filtering of ideas and actually writing, however, always took place in a vacuum.

15% Passive Activites -  By passive activities, I mean taking a shower, driving the car, painting the deck, waiting in line or other fairly thoughtless activities that allowed my brain to work through the complex rubiks cube of piecing together situations, scenes, catalysts, conflicts, back stories, motives, subtext, locations, characters, twists, timing and all the other things that make writing a quality screenplay so difficult.

65% Commuting - This is one that is probably unique to me. The bulk of my writing took place on train rides from Everett to Seattle and back. I’d spend 1-2 hours each day reading screenwriting books, scripts of movies I was familiar with, or writing Unseen Abilities on my laptop. I did this for about a year. It was my first screenplay and the learning curve was steep (even for the formatting alone).

It seems only fitting that I ended up writing the very train I rode on each day into the movie. It was a surreal experience being on the outside of the train filming it go by, knowing that what I had written on that train was now being captured as an moving image that would later become the movie Unseen Abilities.

 If you’re a filmmaker or screenwriter, I’d love to hear where you did your writing. Add your comments!

They say sound is 50% of your movie experience and that filmmakers often overlook the importance of spending extra time sound editing. I couldn’t agree more - sound or lack of it is one of those things that can quickly make your film feel boring or cheesy. Another often overlooked task is color correction.

Unseen Abilities was shot in HD and most of the footage looks pretty decent without color correction, but after I started applying it, I quickly discovered its power. Take a look at the following shot, before and after using the FCP color program:

Notice how much the image improved? The hand pops out, has depth and the car door now has some color to it. The color corrected version tells much more of a story than the original image captured through the HD camera.

Another way to quickly understand the power of color correction is to watch the behind the scenes footage on a movie. Look for clips that show a movie being filmed and the corresponding scene in the movie to see how vibrant and stylized the movie version is. It’s not just a difference in the camera used, colorists are playing a big role as well.

Of course, small independent filmmakers don’t have money to spend on a colorist, but they still can do amazing things with the Final Cut Pro Color program, which I heard was a $50,000 each-license program before Apple acquired it and added it to the FCP Studio. Don’t be intimidated by it: give color a try or at least the 3 way color corrector in FCP.

Movie editing is one of my favorite things to do, but the self-teaching method can be quite frustrating for an independent filmmaker. I’ve used Final Cut Pro for a few small personal projects, but underestimated the amount of work involved in editing HD footage to make a solid half hour short film.

The problem isn’t knowing what I want to do or how to do it. The problem is how buggy the various software programs are and how one wrong setting can set you into a lengthy investigation process to figure out what is wrong.

In the last week, we’ve probably spent a combined 20 hours troubleshooting various Sound Track Pro problems. Granted, we are both new to the software and are working off over sized files, but there’s no doubt the program has issues. The good news is that our investigation skills are solid, and we’ve been able to overcome each hurdles thus far. Occasionally, I hope to share our findings to help other filmmakers avoid similar issues. God knows we could have used some clear answers online, but find very little support for Sound Track Pro.

As the first official post on the Unseen Abilities site, I want to share my goals with the site and with the movie.

I’d like the site to share my experiences as a 1st time writer, director & producer who hopes to gain attention from investors so I can turn the movie into a full feature after doing well in the film festivals. I hope other filmmakers will find my tips valuable or at least join me in the conversation of what it is like to create a movie.

I’d also like to provide fans of the movie with more information about he people involved in making this film possible.

Yes, I am writing my first post @ 3:40 am after struggling with Final Cut Pro & Sound Track Pro issues. This is another thing I intend to write about as I had to do a lot of troubleshooting due to the lack of solid documentation available online or in the manuals.

More soon,
Dustin Woodard

We’re switching the unseen abilities site to use wordpress so we can more regularly update the site. Thanks for your patience over the next day or so.