Terrortory 2: One Segment Down...Part 2

Alex was nice enough to come out at 5:30pm Saturday to redo her audio. We also recreated the entire scene without dialogue--so I have a foley'd track I can use when I use any wild audio. If you had the time, you should do this for every scene you shoot--not just because it will save you during your actual edit, but it will make doing an M and E(Music and Effects) track for foreign super simple.

Good news was we got Zig back--he's production manager, but also a jack of all trades. Anything I need, he can get done. Takes a lot of weight off of me.

We hightail it to the woods. Some of our creatures are already there making themselves up. Matt, who plays Smiling Jack is also there. I like people who show up early.

I think this pic is far enough it doesn't give much away

Zig and I stack my dolly up with as much stuff as we can fit, and I drag this dolly through the woods. Matt goes with us so we can leave him at the location with the equipment, and go back for more.

The dolly works like shit. Too many roots, uneven ground, then like 100 feet of uphill sand at the end. The cart flips sideways twice, making us reload it. 

By the time I get to the location I am DRENCHED in sweat. Zig and I go back and get another load, do it again. I drag it again, cuz frankly Zig isn't a big guy and this thing is heavy.

At the end of THAT run, I feel like I'm having a heart attack. 

The thing is, I'm a pretty immature guy. I wear a hat all the time--and have since I was like 20--but the thing is, it hides that I'm actually losing my hair now. So it's these things that make people think I'm in my late 30's. I am not. I am going to be 47 this year, and as much as I kid myself that it's not THAT old, it is. Especially when you do ZERO exercise other than when you're shooting a movie.

We hustle back again to get the last of the stuff and see who else has showed up. Most of our monsters have, but they're going to wait until my brother arrives with the Midnight Clown, who's getting painted, and they'll all come as a group.

Me, Josh, and Zig head into the woods with the last of the stuff and it's at this point that I realize I have made a huge mistake--I am wearing my prescription sunglasses, and I have forgotten my regular glasses. It's getting pitch black, especially in the woods. You see, my wife's truck broke down while I was waiting for Zig to get to my house, so I had to run her to a friend's house to get another car, which made me slightly late. I got flustered, forgot my glasses.

And she's not answering my call now--I was hoping she could bring my glass to the location.

In desperation I call my parents--they're out to dinner, but say they'll do it. Will take them over an hour to go to their house, get our spare key, then go to my house and back to the location.

AH! So many unclear pictures! 

It's like I'm trying not to show anything.

We start setting up lights, trying to light a bonfire, while Mark is finishing up the makeup on everybody now that they've all walked the trail to join us.

The fire does not want to blaze. Maybe it's wet from the storm the day before, but spoiler alert--we didn't get a good fire all goddamn night. Gonna be some digital fire improvement I think. Fix it in post, right?

I shoot some little things--the fact that I can't see so well isn't a deal breaker right away, because I can see fine up close without my glasses. So I can get focus on the monitor no problem. Luckily I don't have to do it too long--my dad shows up with the glasses, and my brother walks the trail to get them 

from him. (we're so deep in the woods that there's no way you'd be able to just walk in and find us)

My plan--and my shot list--is to get all of the shots featuring the creatures done first so we can release them earlier than the expected 3am finish time. 

There are complications with lighting--normally you want to shoot all the shots facing each direction at once--that way you only have to move the lights a minimal number of times.

And then there are FX changes that should be happening, but we can't do them yet because I haven't shot the close ups on the person yet. I run around getting what I need on the shots. At least, hopefully. 

We try to get some cools still too--another FREE FILMMAKER TIP--get them. You need them. Stills captured from video don't look as good, so don't think you're just going to use those. Webs and magazines can tell, trust me.

The way I'm shooting--popping in and out of the scene to shoot what's needed--is very disorienting for the actors. It makes it hard for them to build up the emotions they need. Like, if we had time for a wide master then I would have done it. That way the actors play it through once, then when you ask them to jump to a specific spot then they can.

But so much FX happen during the scene that we can really only shoot about 40% of it.

Rob Tongue in the new costume he made

Much of the night is a blur. The good news is that it's relatively cool--much better than we could have hoped for. There are none of the massive insect and spider attacks. Plenty of daddy longlegs, but they're not a big deal.

At some point we let some of the monsters go. My buddy Rob Tongue stayed, along with Matt and Fred(The Midnight Clown). We got some cool stills with them whenever we had to prep FX or break for something else.

Things start running late. The main creature-guy(I'm being vague on purpose) had his mask on for a long time, and he's hot and wants a cigarette(and probably a water because he's sealed in that thing). So I try to get everything with him shot, then tell him to take a break. Shoot more stuff. Move lights. Change batteries. (Sometimes a light has run down, and I have to go find it in the darkness in order to replace the batteries)

I keep checking the time because we're past 3am now. I know we gotta finish, and we have a bunch of FX at the end, plus some gunfire. (I do practical gunfire--no matter how much work you put in on After Effects, muzzle flash and recoil just NEVER looks right).

We finish Alex's stuff and let her go. She was a trooper, We keep shooting.

Looking down at the shooting script and going:

"But it was only like 30 total shots..."

Finally I call it. It's like 4:15am. We have to truck all this shit out of the woods, and I really don't want to make multiple trips. Mike took Mark, Fred and the main creature guy out when they were done, and they haven't returned. We try to compact everything together and figure out how to get it out in one trip.

Josh is like--just keep putting bags on me. He ends up carrying like 6 bags of shit, plus some other stuff. We stack the dolly, and Matt volunteers to drag it out. Zig and I grab the rest, and we awkwardly carry it out. Mike and Fred meet us halfway and take some stuff off us.

By the time Zig and I are on the road it's like 5am. I get home, dump footage and audio, then back it up and plug in batteries--it's after 6am when I'm done.

Then to bed. 

Hard to sleep because I know I have a lot of work to do, because come Thursday the main production starts, and that's 5 days straight. (Well, one night, then 4 days in the heat and humidity)

And still have a lot of little things to do--find/organize the props, go to the woods one final time to double check the sites with how I think I'm going to shoot, try to pre-viz the shoot in my mind so I can see what I may be forgetting.

Gonna be a stressful couple of days...

The Midnight Clown says 

"No, You Can't Have An In-Focus Picture Of Me."

We left this at the site so anybody walking by would think there's been a murder in the woods.

Terrortory 2: One Segment Down...Part 1

So here goes, the super-honest rundown on how the first two days of shooting on Terrortory 2 went...

Night One
I loaded the car with the fuckton of shit we needed for the day's shoot. Up bright and early at 9:30am to do it. Headed to my parents' house to unload all that shit into another car that I needed for the actual shoot.

Already pretty goddamn hot.

Picked up my brother and we headed across the bridge. Turns out, not so much traffic yet, so that was good. Went to Chik Fila for lunch, then over to Josh's(the lead actor) house. I started unloading equipment and a car pulls up behind mine. It's Alex, the actress in the scene, and she's like 90 minutes early.

I'm like, cool. But maybe a little off my game for a minute. I shoot some drone shots, and my fucking drone all of a sudden says it's only got 25% battery and it's gonna return home. I'm not sure where it thinks home is(normally it's where you launch it)--it heads straight up into a goddamn tree, ignoring me on the joysticks.

Fucked up the blades bad. Awesome.

We go inside and I mic the actors. Here's where I fucked up: I gave the actress detailed instructions on where to place the lav inside her bra, but didn't double check it. See, I listened to make sure it was the right levels, but as I found out today when I listened to the audio, the mic was apparently loose. Whenever she moved, there's terrible rustling of cloth.

To make matters worse, Josh adjusts his tie in the beginning of the scene, so I can't even use his mic's sound for her line, because he's rustling HIS mic.

Fuck's sake. It's totally my fault, but with how short I was on crew(literally me and Mike, that's it), I was doing a lot of shit.

The racking of focus on the steadicam is a pipe dream on anything over 35mm, and even on the 35mm you better have it stopped down past 4(it's a 1.4 lens) to have a shot. The monitor I got is fucking NICE. Especially for how cheap it is. It actually shows you the RGB levels separately if you push a button, and the batteries last a LONG time.

So we got done early on the first scene, which was like 4 pages. I was feeling good and I let Alex go, when I should have done a wild line recording of all her stuff just to be safe.

Josh and his daughter wanted to go to Chick Fil A for dinner, so Mike and I said fuck it--we can eat there again.

This was at 7:45pm. Not even close to dark. I did enjoy the cool lens flare the sun threw in the window, so shot a couple of pics.
-----------

Problems start here. See, I had us shooting evening and night scenes between 7-9, but the goddamn sun wouldn't cooperate. Even at 8pm, it was brightly shining through the windows.

We run behind, and Josh's girlfriend gets home and his other daughter, and all of a sudden we're having to pause while they do something between takes. Shots I planned on doing, I simply can't do given the time.

We rush out of there to go meet Mark and some other actors for a scene in the DEEP woods. Like, Naked and Afraid woods.

We have to hump a lot of equipment into the woods--two big light kits, plus my camera and audio gear, plus Mark's FX stuff, plus all the props. There are spider webs EVERYWHERE. And even more scary, you knock them down to put a light up, then turn around to go back to where the other people are, and the spider has built his web again already, in like 3 minutes.

Ticks are all over us. Josh had three on his shirt just crawling on him like, no big deal. All the deet spray we put on, and they didn't give a shit.

Think I'm kidding? Here's a video I shot--I didn't notice the thing on his shirt, but just look at that. There were TONS of them this size or bigger out there.


And humid as fuck. I'm sweating, I'm tired. A lot of my shots, since I'm beginning to abandon my shooting script, aren't feeling great.

We move out of the woods to another section on the edge of a clearing. I head into the woods to place a light, and get the shit scared of out me by a giant deer that bounds off--scared by me I guess, but fuck it gave my heart a jolt.

The stuff in this section is supposed to be done by 1am. It's already 1am and we have the actual FX shots to do still. The bugs are getting into EVERYTHING. A wolf spider in my light kit makes me want to just leave all that shit and go.

We do the FX shot, but I gotta tell ya--I've nearly abandoned sound at this point. Josh has his mic, lav and all, in his shirt pocket. I'm guessing it's not gonna be useable but he doesn't have any dialog. Bad news is clearly I'm gonna have to take him out and foley his breathing and his actions.

----

Still got a shot to do with 3 cars on the road. I have it scheduled for 90 minutes, because I have a cool shot I wanna try.

All that goes to the wayside as the road I was going to use doesn't work. We go to another road.in bumfuck nowhere. Corn stalks on one side, woods on the other. I cannot, at this point, tell you how exhausted I am. We're going on hour 14 and we only had that one half hour break.

I've been bending my body, crouching, standing, jogging, doing all handheld most of the day with my camera on the shoulder mount. It's not light, especially since I've gone to the AA batteries to power it.

We got a couple of cool shots. Finally I call it. It's nearly 4am.

I head home--feels like the longest drive I've ever been on. And I still have to dump and backup all the footage, and plug all the batteries in.

I make it to bed by 6am.

I'm actually hoping the thunderstorm moves in, because shooting Saturday night feels like a lot of work.


Called off Saturday.  The promised thunderstorm rolled in, and I didn't want wet woods. Besides, I was pretty sure people would lighting off fireworks on the 4th of July weekend, and that would fuck with sound.

FILMMAKER TIP

I re-learn this rule on every movie, and keep reminding myself. It's been a rock solid rule since the first movie I ever shot, Hunting Humans.

The tip is this: Don't get too stressed if you think what you're shooting is garbage. 

At some point, especially at the beginning of your shoot, you will start to feel like you're really not getting the shots you wanted, the shots you envisioned. The thing is, when you get to see them at home where you're editing, you'll quickly find it's not as bad as you thought. You start editing it together and some of it actually downright works well.

I best learned this when I was on the set of the first Fear of Clowns. We were shooting in the movie theater, and it was the scene where Jacky and Rick are at the door trying to punch in the code. When we shot that night, I felt like we were tanking it. I wasn't sure I was getting the shots that would convey the tension of the scene in the best manner.

Turns out that once I put the scene together it wasn't bad at all. And the movie theater sequence is really the only part of the movie I actually liked when I was done.

The danger of not recognizing that you're not sucking is that it will bring you down, make you second guess yourself, and then you may start rushing, figuring that if your shit's sucking then you might as well stop trying as hard.

Next Post: We just shot the 2nd part of this segment on Saturday(July 8th for my later self that comes back trying to figure out what day we shot)--and I'll go into that with some pics.

Kinonation - My final thoughts - AVOID

So I've had my flick Bounty on Kinonation for over two years. They claim they will send you a "quarterly" report.

Not sure what quarterly means to them, but I didn't receive ANY report until I contacted them about 16 months after the movie was live. Roger from Kinonation sent me an email claiming surprise that I hadn't received one.

One got sent to me. Said we'd earned like $15. Whoopee, lemme take a vacation.

Also, they're still using this "beta" website three years after they launched. WTF is that?

So in April of this year I still haven't gotten another quarterly report. One report in over 2 years.

I send Roger an email asking them to remove my title from their catalog. After all, their web site and contract claim you can "cancel anytime".

It's now June, and I haven't gotten a reply from Roger. I got a new email saying they've revamped their web site. It's not the beta anymore. I went and looked at the site. It looks a little better, but now you can't even see what outlets they've placed the movie in.

Tonight I sent an email to Roger to let him know he has 30 days to remove Bounty or I'll be contacting my lawyers about it.

My final opinion on Kinonation is DO NOT SUBMIT YOUR MOVIE TO THEM. While I wouldn't say it's a scam, it's clearly not something that is organized very well. It doesn't appear to make much money, and its dashboard and reporting is TERRIBLE, especially when compared against Amazon.

Maybe someday they'll get their shit together, but since they haven't done much in over three years, I wouldn't count on it.

UPDATE: Roger contacted me the day after I posted this to tell me he would remove Bounty from their catalog, and that the probably reason that we didn't receive any other quarterly reports was that there was no additional money.

That may or may not be true, as I told him, because I never received a quarterly report until I complained to them, and then they DID deliver a report...and it had money on it. So the reason I hadn't received a quarterly report in roughly 6 quarters WAS NOT because there wasn't money to report in that instance.

So they ask that you just believe there's no additional money.

When you deal with distributors, it doesn't matter whether there's no money. They are still bound to deliver quarterly reports for at least the first couple of years(the contract you sign typically tells how long they have to deliver them...in the case of my first film, "Hunting Humans", the contract stipulated that they would deliver quarterly reports for the first three years, and then after that quarterly unless there were no new sales to report.)

In this case, from a distributor online that doesn't have any kind of dashboard that gives you any information whatsoever about what's happening with your film, I'd expect to get a quarterly report regardless.

Either way, I repeated that I wanted the movie off, and he says it should take up to 7 days. I'd be lying if I didn't say I'm a little worried about them perhaps still trying to license my movie to some tiny distributor without me knowing.

I'll keep my eyes open for any reports of this, because if it happens then it means a big lawsuit against them.

Terrortory 2

So...what next?

That's the question after finishing Terrortory.  The movie got as high as #6 on Amazon's horror chart, stayed in the top 10 for three weeks, and was an Amazon Star--meaning it's one of the top 100 movies on Amazon, PERIOD for the month of October.


Wanna see the movies we were beating?

It also means we got a monetary bonus from Amazon. All in all, in just one month we earned nearly double our production budget from just Amazon.

Sounds great, right? But when you count the taxes that get taken out, nobody's going home rich. And personally I spent nearly two years on the movie, so if you break it down in years...

We can still pursue a distributor and other options, and we may, but it's a time consuming thing and I'm a creator, and that's my first interest. Sending out 100 screeners and/or engaging an aggregator who will cost us up-front money seems like a lot of wasted time.

Back to my original question...what next?

During the making of Terrortory I had an idea for the wraparound for part two. Not because I necessarily was going to do it. Hell, I've written two sequels for "Hunting Humans", and have started the sequel to "Bounty", but not because I'm planning on doing them. I'm a writer, and I go where the story takes me.

And if the story interests me enough, I will write it because all I lose is time. Besides, the more you write, the better you get, so in the end it's a win/win.

The wraparound would expand the mythology of Terrortory, and reveal a few notions I had in the back of my head as I wrote my segments. The original pitch for Terrortory from Mark was basically a Bermuda Triangle/Twilight Zone type place in Maryland, where weird things happen. It was wide open enough that we could basically do anything there. Like Buffy's hellmouth.

But now I want to hone in on the WHY a little bit. Why does it exist? What's the deal with those creatures? Like, are they all the same creature taking different forms, or are they different creatures? And if different, do they interact at all? What happens if Smiling Jack runs into the Midnight Clown?

I had finished the wrap and was pretty happy about it, so I sent it to my main brain-trust, Zig and Luke. Both seemed to like it. Had a few notes that I integrated, and a couple I ignored.

Thing is, though, I didn't want to work with other filmmakers on this one. I know it sounds dickish, but you have to understand how much work I end up putting in on the finished product, and at a certain point it simply makes more sense that if I'm going to do THAT amount of work, I might as well have directed the whole thing in the first place. It also will end up being a much more cohesive, consistent movie.

The final reason is that if I'm doing everything then there's less time with me waiting on other people to find out if they're going to actually finish their segment and/or turn in something good enough to put in the flick. I usually hit my deadlines when I make them, but a lot of others don't.

But that lead me to think...I KNOW there are other people who want to work in the Terrortory arena, because I've talked to them. I know Mark wants to do another segment. Dan probably does. My brain said...hey, why not do a Terrortory 2 and 3 nearly back to back?

I could do part two, and the other guys could do part three. If they need me to do a wraparound, I could do that...especially because I can explain just WHY Carly has a psychic nightmare about going to the Terrortory in part 1. (and it ties in to the wrap in part two)

I talked to Mark, who talked to Dan, and they seem to dig the idea. Mark will be taking the reins on part three though, which is a huge responsibility, so hopefully he understands how much weight is going to be on him.

That's why it appears that Terrortory 2 is my next gig. I always pursue the story, and that's where the story is taking me. As a filmmaker who invests at least two years of time in every film I do, I HAVE to be excited enough about an idea that I will stick with it for that long, and right now, Terrortory 2 is it.

Not that I don't have other scripts I'm just as excited to do. But when you're working in the micro-budget realm you have to take what you can do, and some of those scripts simply can't be done for peanuts.

Terrortory 2 is going to be much more ambitious than the first movie, I can tell you that. It will see the return of Smiling Jack and the Midnight Clown, plus a host of new baddies, some that were on the map, and some that will be added this time.

So if you haven't seen the first Terrortory, go check it out. We'll probably be doing a very limited dvd run soon, or you can rent it cheaply on Amazon still.

Hope you come along for the ride.

----

UPDATE:
I actually wrote this a month ago. I hesitated to post it because I've still been waffling about how hard it is to do. Like, maybe I should just forget it. I have other things I could probably do that would be easier.

Then this past weekend I was out of town for business, and heard that a snow storm was coming.

See, I have a quick scene in Terrortory 2 in the snow. Technically it was set during the day. And I figured I just wouldn't get to do it because there was no snow this year.

So I'm in Florida hearing about this snow coming. Sounds like there will be too much by Tuesday to get anybody but me to go out, so I think...maybe I can do it Monday night.

It's going to be brutal, I know. After a hard, sleep-deprived work weekend, to fly home Monday afternoon and get all the equipment ready, and line up actors(I only needed two)...would be tough.

But  we did it.

We went out at about 9pm. The snow had just started. I needed a nice coating on the ground, so we went into the woods and shot some tests as the snow fell.

Met a friendly guy named Patrick who was nice enough to come out and help us with some creature FX.

It took about 2.5 hours of waiting to get an okay layer of snow/ice on the ground. Wasn't as white as I wanted, but we were all freezing.

Shooting in sleet/ice is not fun. The equipment was getting wet. I couldn't see the viewscreen well, and when you have to focus in the dark...

I think we got it, but won't know until I sit down to edit.

But we're not going to launch into the heavy shooting until it gets warmer.

Not done here, I promise.

I'll have some stuff shortly, but I had to take a break for a while and had some paid editing work that I had to do over the holidays.

News and updates coming in the next two weeks...

Couple interesting notes about independent distribution

Joe Falcon was nice enough to point out this case study about another aggregator I'd never heard of called Quiver. The article is here:
http://nofilmschool.com/2016/11/cents-feature-film-distribution

Also, Jason got back to me again about Distribber. There's a podcast about one of their better-selling low budget zombie movies here that I haven't listened to yet, but am planning on it.
http://filmmakingstuff.podbean.com/e/ep-100-how-self-distributed-film-range-15-leveraged-distribber-to-access-itunes/

He says that Hulu is in a bit of a transition period right now--changing their deals up, so they're actually holding off making new deals there I think.

I really would like to find some other filmmakers with super-low budget movies who have tried Distribber, just to see what we might expect. Haven't found any yet though...

And as a note--you may have noticed me removing numbers in the other posts. The powers-that-be really don't want any metrics shared as far as minutes and whatnot. Getting kind of dickish, but don't wanna bite the hand that feeds, you know?

Especially when it's currently the only hand that's feeding...

As for Terrortory--while it's going down quite a bit in the minutes category, it's falling far slower in the countdown. It's still #16 in Horror, still top 150 overall.

So...What Now?

No, not that. Not yet.

(Though I HAVE finished writing the wrap-around in case I do it)

I'm still talking the first flick. I think we're still on course to do about REDACTED minutes for November. Sure, it's a big down-tick, but it's NOVEMBER. People are getting into the OTHER holiday spirits...

One thing slightly concerning is Amazon's dashboard states it's all "estimates", and they don't appear to be kidding. Bounty in its first month, according to their dashboard, did 1.1 million but on the actual earnings chart they claim it's actual 957,000 minutes...

They also sent me this regarding a DIFFERENT month than that:

This message is to notify you that we made an adjustment to your estimated revenue for the month of September to be more accurate and align with the actual payment you can expect to receive. The royalty revenue displayed on the Dashboard report is an estimated amount. From time to time, you may notice an adjustment has been made to your estimated revenue, like the one in your account for September. 

As you might expect, that adjustment was not in my favor. Not a HUGE difference, but still less.

At a certain point, sure, you start wondering WHO'S auditing these guys to make sure they're honest...

ANYWAY

The question now is, do we pursue a distributor? (I've technically sent one screener out to a company I heard still gives advances, but haven't heard back yet)

Or do we use an aggregator to get the movie out elsewhere? I contacted Jason Brubaker on Distribber. He's always been a pretty upfront, reachable guy. I had talked to him before when he was working on Chill, another distribution service.

I asked him about Netflix, and submitting Terrortory to them now. He said that if it was exploited on Amazon Prime it probably won't get picked up by Netflix.

Now, it's not a big deal to me. I mean, let's say Netflix is going to give us $10K for 6 months or a year...and believe me, it could be less than that. Guess what, we just made that on Amazon in ONE month. So if I'm only going to put Terrortory on one of those, I'd just as soon it be Amazon.

He suggested trying Vudu or Hulu. Vudu costs around $1200 to submit through Distribber and Hulu costs $1000. If the outlets don't accept your movie, Distribber gives you all but $120 back(for processing).

I have NO idea what Vudu pays--doesn't seem to be details on the percentage. I don't like that they set their own prices(you can recommend, but it doesn't necessarily matter).

Hulu pays by the view OR by ads in your movie--if it's per view it's eighteen and a half cents per view...which is actually worse than Amazon unless your movie is under 70 minutes long...

Is it worth it to go through the rigamarole for those two outlets? Let's say I submit to one and they accept...am I ever going to make that $1K-$1200 back?

Questions I'm mulling over now...