Next Day Stats

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6400 minutes

Well, as you can see, the numbers don't just go down--guess they got adjusted, but I like up much better than down.

We are hovering at the same place in the order list on Amazon. Not good. Really need it to move up. I know a couple of web sites have started mentioning that we're out there now, so hopefully word will continue to spread.

And no, we still haven't paid for the captioning it cost to get us up on Amazon yet. Fingers crossed...soon...

The Amazon Prime Experiment Continues

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4100 minutes

So here's the first couple of days after the movie went up. It's been interesting to watch its movement on the Amazon list, because it's pretty clear that if you can get your movie into the top 30 or so that you will be doing okay.

The highest we've gotten so far is 309. Granted, it jumped from 860 to that, so it's a nice jump but still nowhere near high enough.

As you can see you're allowed to do UK, Japan and Germany also.

They run a pretty good analytics, just don't count the number as rock solid until a few days have passed. For some reason I've seen the number go slightly down a couple of times, so maybe there are adjustments I'm not aware of.

The neat thing for me is this--I actually had another of my movies go live on Amazon Prime but I told nobody about it yet. I wanted to see the difference between a movie I pimped versus one I didn't.

Interesting enough, the movie nobody knows about still was viewed about 10 times. Not sure how they found it, but still...it's data to be considered.

More updates soon.

My internet friend, btw--his movie is now over a MILLION minutes watched. He's been in the top 20 movies for a week now, so it's clear that THAT'S where you wanna be.

Garden of Hedon On Amazon Prime

After going back and forth with Amazon for a while I got the captions file approved, and hit Publish after correcting all the information associated with the flick. Amazon said it would show up in their system within a couple of weeks.

Two days.

It appeared late last night as published, so I went ahead and looked, and yep, there it is.

Now, I don't anticipate a ton of money from Amazon on this. Like I mentioned, we get paid only fifteen cents per hour streamed, so basically about $.29 every time someone watches the whole movie. I'm not sure how fast-forwarding works, but I'm guessing they don't credit you for that.

But, I have an online-friend who put his movie up and has kept us abreast of his totals. Week one he'd made around $50. Not even enough to pay for the captions required to put it up on Amazon Prime.

Then some crazy shit happened. After a couple of weeks he hit half a MILLION minutes viewed. That's around $1200.

Sure, it's not quit-your-job money, but it's pretty good, especially for under a month. And the thing is, the more your movie gets streamed, the higher up the search results you are, which leads to MORE streaming.

The biggest hurdle is people finding your movie, because--at my current count--there are 884 horror movies on Amazon Prime. When my flick went live it was 861 out of 884.

It doesn't seem to be updating much but I'll check tomorrow since we started spreading the news today.

Thing is, though, this could be a game changer. Let's say you can make $7K-$12K a year streaming it through Amazon. You could conceivably bypass a distributor who's only going to give you--if you're lucky--a $10K advance on a back-end you'll never see.

You could actually host your worldwide premiere on Amazon Prime. When you submit the Publish thing you can set a date a few weeks in the future so it's not published right away. Then you pimp the hell out of the premiere date, make an event of it, and get a lot of people streaming it.

I imagine if it's the first place you could see the movie then you might be able to get some heat there.

My immediate worries are that Amazon will decide this is too expensive a venture for them. They're going to be paying out a lot of money that they weren't paying out before, all in the quest to compete with Netflix. They're going to have to worry about fraud--people involved in the movie streaming it over and over again just to make a few extra bucks.

What would be pretty great is if Netflix decided to try it themselves. Man, would distributors be shitting themselves if we filmmakers could do a complete end-around on them.

On the bad end, Amazon needs to fix their goddamn Xbox app. First off, their search engine won't show more than 1000 titles in the search. So when you start scrolling across the roughly 8000 movies they have online, it will stop at 1000 and go no further.

Also if you want to search for a title you click Y for search. Then it says "Click here to search". Bitch, I already clicked Y to search, why am I clicking another button?

Trying to binge watch a series is tougher than Netflix. When an episode's over you have to manually go to the next episode to play it. And if you finish a season, you have to go add the next season to your watchlist since they keep their seasons separate.

They've had enough time to steal the Netflix model, so let's get on that, huh?

I'll update this blog to let you know how it's going.

If you want to add it to your watchlist just go here and click on the button!
http://amzn.to/29Qm76v

Amazon Video Direct Part 2

So they finally got us a dashboard. It shows all of my movies, and some chart but it claims my movies aren't "published".

Not sure what that means. If I go search for my movies on Amazon, they're still there to stream.

I do some digging. I send an email when I can't find any answers.

And Amazon responds:
For migrated videos from CreateSpace, these videos will remain live on Amazon, even if you don't have Closed Caption files.

If you wish to submit changes for already existing content to be updated on Amazon by clicking "Publish," your video's will need to meet our Technical Specification requirements that can be found here:
https://videodirect.amazon.com/home/help?topicId=201973700

So my movies will stay as is unless I want any changes. And by changes, I assume that means if I want to now upload hi-def movies(which they never accepted before from us indie people). The downside is that I'll have to get subtitles created for each movie, which will be like $90-$120 depending on which movie.

And technically before I got that answer I was uploading the Bounty Subtitles--figured I'd publish it and see what happens. So I upload my subtitles and Amazon asks this--what's your movie? 23.976 drop frame, 23.976 non-drop frame, 24fps, 25fps, 29.97 drop frame or 29.97 non-drop frame.

I'm thinking--are you serious? I have no idea. I sent my movies in as dvds years ago(or uploaded an ISO). Why can't AMAZON look at the file and figure it out.

I take a guess and click Publish. Get a bullshit error:
Video assets: An error occurred while processing the captions/timed text file. This file won't successfully complete the encoding workflows. Please submit a new file

 Thanks for all that detail on what the error was. Technically it's an SRT file(which Amazon says is fine) and it was created by one of the companies Amazon recommends(though I got it done long before this).

So I go through and change it to different fps and keep trying to publish. I get the same error above. Pretty frustrating, so I gave up.

But if they accept it I can then get it on Amazon Prime if I feel like it. Won't be crap for money, but a lot of people haven't seen it who I think would want to see it.

Terrortory Coverage

iHorror takes a look with an exclusive pic! Check it out!

http://ihorror.com/fear-clowns-director-explores-new-terrortory/

Amazon Video Direct and Createspace

I was going to do this big post about how Amazon is changing their video system(which will mostly affect indie people like us), but then I came across this post that pretty much says everything I was going to say, and probably better.

http://www.focuspulling.com/amazonvideodirect/

See, the thing is that I've had Createspace for a long time. I like having full control of my movies because when you sign a license agreement with a distributor you lose all your rights(in general) for quite a few years.

Hell, I don't get Fear of Clowns back until 2020. I'm actually pretty surprised they haven't started streaming it places.

The first movie I put up on Amazon was Fear of Clowns 2 way back in the day when I turned down the Lionsgate offer for the flick. I figured it would do pretty well with the awareness of the first movie, and how often "scary clowns" gets punched into search engines.

And I wasn't wrong. It's done fairly well on Amazon, though we're still off from making our money back. It was my highest-budget movie, after all.

Then I put up Garden of Hedon. Then Bounty. All with no trouble.

I got Hunting Humans back, and went through the rigamarole of getting it to Createspace. (their method of delivery was for you to upload an ISO of a dvd of your movie. Yeah. Makes no sense. I gotta upload a snapshot of my dvd that they can rip the .vob file out of, rather than just uploading an .mp4 or otherwise)

I tried to upload it and kept getting failures. I contacted their support, who kept giving me stupid answers that presumed I know nothing about video and formats. After they figured out that was definitely not the case, they got me to tech support.

Who kept trying to say it was on my end. It was the browser. Changed browsers, still no. It's my cache file. Emptied my cache. Failure.

Try a separate computer. Failure. The iso is encrypted. (it wasn't)

Finally I just gave up. That's when it gets weird.

Amazon announces this whole Amazon Video Direct thing. Like a week later, even before AVD launches, Hunting Humans shows up on Amazon. You can stream it right now here:
http://amzn.to/1TWyore

I honestly only know about it because four people DID stream it last month--I just got my reports. How they found it, I don't know. I typed Hunting Humans into Amazon to see where it is. Gotta click on Movies. Then it shows up like six movies down. Probably because I called it HH Remastered to keep it clear of the regular HH.

Anyway, it's weird. Amazon never got back to me to say they figured anything out. I never uploaded anything else. But somehow my "encrypted" iso gets figured out.

So I think they were just in the midst of porting this massive thing over, and didn't want to tell anybody, which led to errors on uploading to their servers.

Anyway, if you're an indie guy who doesn't give a shit about the stroke-session of claiming "My movie got distribution from XYZ company" while also cursing yourself because you got zero money then perhaps you should try AVD.

Not sure about the Prime thing though. Seriously, FIFTEEN CENTS per hour?

If your movie is 90 minutes, and 10,000 people watch it(which, let's face it, is a homerun for us) then you're going to be a rich man! That's $1500, pal. Get ready to make your next epic movie!

A Terrortory Interlude Part 1

I'm gonna share a little of my private notebook on the making of the final segment of Terrortory I'm about to shoot.

What I won't detail is the problems finding actors on this one--without a real casting process, it's pretty tough. Doubling the problem is that there's no money, which sucks, but since I'm stretched thin on this now--having already done three segments when I originally thought I'd only do one.

I'll warn you that there is cursing and honesty, so if you're allergic to any of those then stop reading now.

I'll pick it up on:

APRIL 11, 2016

Went over to Mark's place to get the head cast done of one actress, and get my tripod legs cast. Here's the time lapse I did of the process. Was easier than actually rolling video, and takes up less space on my card.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdTcMUwQRvM

I like the new guy Mark's brought on to help with effects--his name's Rich and he's worked on some big movies like Riddick. Which is weird because he's actually an engineer.

But he seems really knowledgeable about FX which is sweet.

Still two actors short and we're 11 days away from filming.

This is fun.

Okay, that was sarcasm. It's sad because I WAS enjoying working on this flick up til now. I mean, the wrap around was pretty rough but NOTHING like this.

And to make it sadder my brain keeps chugging in the Terrortory. I've already got some really interesting(to me) ideas for Terrortory 2. Like, the return of Smiling Jack. (I have a feeling he's going to be a popular character)

I pretty much have the idea for the sequel's wrap already, which--let's face it--is always the hard part. You pretty much have to come up with interesting ways to get stories told, and most of them involve people sitting down to tell them. That's boring enough if that's all they're doing, but I fixed that by actually telling a STORY in the Terrortory wrap, and figured out a way for the stories to keep being told even as I was ramping up the tension.

Like, let's say two people are telling each other stories but after story two they are threatened by something. They're not gonna keep telling stories, are they?

Well I solved that problem in the first wrap, and I've already solved it in a different(and slightly ingenious if I do say so myself) way.

Anyway, trying not to think about it because I gotta just get done this flick and see what happens. After I'm done this I can write whatever the fuck I want and see what's what.

APRIL 16, 2016

So after a brutal 4 days of scrambling, begging, talking to filmmakers I know, and finally posting on a local message board I got an actor to fill each of the two roles I was missing.

Yes, 6 days before filming. That was tight...as a no-budget filmmaker you have enough things to worry about right before a shoot that casting shouldn't be one...

 APRIL 18, 2016

After all this stress and work to fill out my cast, the forecast seems to be saying not just rain on Friday but THUNDERSTORMS.

A little rain I can probably deal with. We'll be under a canopy(I think--I haven't seen what the woods looks like yet but I think the leaves have come in), so not too bad. The bigger worry would be finding wood that's not wet for the fire.

But thunderstorms? That's bad.

My choices then become: Shoot the day shots in between rain on Friday, and then literally shoot 15 pages in one night. 15 pages with FX.

If there IS no rain let up on Friday then we shoot all 18 pages in one day. A guaranteed 14-16 hour day.

Because I CANNOT get these actors back together again until June, and that's too late.

FML has never been more appropriate.