Jane Kelly Kosek's Blog: All About Indie Filmmaking (and Storytelling), page 6

Producers and Directors Need to Remain Committed to Their Films Even After the Premiere Is Over

As a producer, I love working with directors. I get caught up in their passion and joy for bringing stories to life. I marvel at a director's creative vision and have spent most of my career finding the means to bring the visions I believe in to life.

The producer/director relationship is like a marriage. They're passionate, exciting, unique and emotionally charged. When making an independent film, you go into a project as partners and the idea is to remain partners in that film for its life, right?

And in like a marriage, it takes equal effort to ensure the health of a project.

There is a phase when a producer/director marriage is tested. It's usually after the premiere is over and the theater doors have closed.

It's the time when your baby is being let out into the world to find its place. It's such a critical phase in your baby's life. A phase when your baby needs you both there, supporting it, introducing it to new people, and contributing to its success.

It's not the time for either of you to pack your bags and take off to solely focus on creating a new baby and leave your old babies behind.

When this happens, it's like your spouse just left you after years of an amazing marriage. It hurts your partner (director or producer) who believed in you and did everything in his or her power to make the film a success during its creation. And worst of all it hurts your baby - the beautiful thing you created out of love for storytelling.

If you're going to make a film then commit to every phase of its life. Your film needs you. And so does your partner. There may be cases when you explain to your partner that you can't be there for them all of the time and that's okay if you give your partner a heads up and it's a mutually agreed upon arrangement. Every relationship is different. The key is respecting your partner and his or her time and ensuring the health of your baby.

Every time you tell your partner, you don't have time to do something, you are making your partner do it all. It's not like that task goes away. You have just put it on the very shoulders that are crumbling from having to take care of the baby you created together. It's disheartening, sad and exhausting to be the one carrying all of the weight. Don't do that to your partner. Figure out a way to be there or to find help.

You went into this journey together and created something you both so badly wanted to create. Don't abandon the journey. Take it together to the end. Otherwise, your film doesn't deserve to be made.

Happy Mother's Day: 40% Off The Diary of Preston Plummer on IndieReign Outside North America

Watch The Diary of Preston Plummer outside of North America for 40% off on IndieReign through May 30th: 
indiereign.com/v/66047 . 
Code: WELOVEMOMS
Happy Mother's Day!https://www.

Attention Foreign Friends: Our Film The Diary of Preston Plummer Is Now Available Outside the U.S. via IndieReign.com

Poster for The Diary of Preston Plummer
Finding a means for distributing your film to the foreign markets outside of the United States is never easy, especially for small dramatic films.

Trevor Morgan as Preston Plummer
Foreign sales agents want films that have actors who already have worldwide fans. This usually means films with actors who have starred in huge tentpole films like Batman, Spiderman, Transformers, X-Men, Harry Potter, etc etc. I don't make these kind of films so it stands to reason that the films I do make would need a different delivery method - one that allows us to reach our audience direct.

Rumer Willis as Kate
So how do independent filmmakers get their small, dramatic films to a foreign audience? To date, we have had to find foreign sales agents willing to take a chance on our film and then we have watched as our revenue was eaten up by their expenses. This is a practice that doesn't work. We need a better way to get our films to our foreign audience.

Christopher Cousins as Walter & Erin Dilly as Emily
In the end, you may have sold your small indie title worldwide, but did you see substantial income from it or any at all? We as filmmakers have to remind ourselves that we are in a business and it's bad business to not see revenue from your product. End of story. We need to become smart about our business and create a sustainable method of getting our films to our audience.

On set with Rumer and Trevor and director Sean Ackerman
Too often, filmmakers feel like they have no other choice but to sigh and say, well at least it has reached a wider audience as they watch all of the earnings for their hard work go to everyone else but them.

Robert Loggia as John
THIS MUST STOP! We need to take control of our titles and work together to build viable distribution platforms for our titles whereby content creators are earning the lion's share of the revenue.

With this intention in mind, we have decided to work with IndieReign.com in launching our film The Diary of Preston Plummer  into most foreign territories. If you live outside of the United States and Canada and you are not in the Benelux region (as we sold the film in that region to a different distributor), you can watch The Diary of Preston Plummer on IndieReign.

Rumer Willis as Kate & Trevor Morgan as Preston Plummer
I really hope you do watch it. This was a film that was the result of a lot of hard work by independent filmmakers and talent who believed in its creation. We had an awesome creative team and great actors: Trevor Morgan, Rumer Willis and Robert Loggia and a wonderful director Sean Ackerman. This film deserves to be seen and we hope you agree.

Sean Ackerman, director
On set with Rumer Willis, Me (producer), Trevor MorganPlease help us make this film a success and establish a viable means for sharing our small indie films with a foreign audience. Thanks everyone!

Watch The Diary of Preston Plummer on IndieReign here:

Our Other Film Not Since You Is Now on Hulu!

What a week! Both of our films The Diary of Preston Plummer and Not Since You are now on Hulu!

This has been a long time coming. It always takes longer to launch films than you expect. But they're both up now and we're excited that these films will reach an even larger audience. We hope you check them out!

You can watch Not Since You here:

 


And watch The Diary of Preston Plummer here:

 

In Your Eyes, written by Joss Whedon and directed by Brin Hill

We need to watch Brin Hill and Joss Whedon's new film In Your Eyes on the online video Web site Vimeo. This film was produced by Kai Cole and Michael Roiff.

I love the mission behind Joss and Kai's company Bellwether Pictures. Their purpose is to bring micro-budget films directly to an audience, bypassing "the classic studio structure." I've been wanting to do this for years and sometimes I'm able to do it, but not as successfully as I'd like. So the attention Bellwether is bringing to indie film distribution is a huge step in the right direction.

Renting this film on Vimeo will help all indie filmmakers take control of their own distribution. I can't stress how important it is for us to find a viable distribution path to our audiences whereby we actually see the revenue from our hard work. 

Building a direct path to our audience is what we need to do. So let's support the filmmakers behind In Your Eyes because their success if our success. And no, I do not know anyone personally on the filmmaking team behind this film. I would like to know them - I will have to reach out. I am highlighting their work because their efforts to self-distribute will help us all. We need to support them. And hopefully they will support us too. 

The more audiences are familiar with these other platforms for watching movies, the more indie filmmakers will actually have a means for making money on the films they make. It's only five bucks to rent which means lots left over for some popcorn and Whoppers! 

Here's the link to the film: http://inyoureyesmovie.com/

And here is a teaser:


In Your Eyes - Trailer from Bellwether Pictures on Vimeo.

Our Film The Diary of Preston Plummer Is Now on Hulu!

We are super excited to announce that our film The Diary of Preston Plummer is now on Hulu! The film is now on Netflix and Hulu as well as other Internet sites like Amazon and iTunes.

The great thing about Hulu is that it's free for you to watch the film on that platform. We hope you check it out. We had such a great time making this film.

Here's a little bit about the film:

On the day of his college graduation, Preston Plummer cannot think of a single thing he really loves. Adrift, Preston follows a beautiful but troubled young woman to a small island town where he begins to fall for her, but it all threatens to fall apart when he uncovers her family's dark past.

And here are just a few of the awesome comments from our audience:

"The Diary of Preston Plummer - it was beautiful I cried"
"The Diary Of Preston Plummer is hands down one of my new favorite movies"
"Just watched The Diary of Preston Plummer on Netflix. Wow, just wow. So many feels."
"The Diary of Preston Plummer was just so absolutely perfect in every way."

We hope you feel the same. You can watch it here:

The Road to Tribeca 2014: App (a short), directed by Alexander Berman

APP follows Paul, a shy engineer who desperately needs venture capital for his virtual wingwoman app and sets out to prove that his app works. The film was the recipient of the 2013 Alfred P. Sloan Production Grant and is the AFI thesis film from Harvard University graduate, Alexander Berman.



What made you decide to become a filmmaker? My father is a novelist and playwright so I grew up surrounded by his stories. When my family moved from Russia, my father wrote to preserve the life and identity he left behind for another country, but I was too young to feel Russian and too foreign to feel American. I started filmmaking at a very young age as a way to make sense of my environment – to insert myself in proxy into a place I didn’t belong.
Tell us about your film (include title of film and category your film will play at Tribeca). What inspired you to make it? My film, “App” (in shorts competition at Tribeca), was inspired by an ugly breakup experience as so many films are! My girlfriend and I had one of those mutual/amiable/bullshit breakups that leave you with a nagging feeling that there is an untold story. Out of jealous curiosity, I used her passwords to search through her email, Facebook, twitter, instagram – the entire contents of her digital mind – to see if she had every cheated on me. When I told her about it later, she laughed and said she had done the same too me. The real data apocalypse isn’t NSA spying or high frequency trading…it’s when we confront our fear of rejection by destroying the uncertainty that is fundamental to love.
What do you love about your film? I love its prescience. While I was developing the film a year ago, Tinder, LuLu, Zoosk, and other location based relationship startups were slides on an investment deck and not the multimillion-dollar companies they are today. The film is a comedy if you think, “This is so ridiculous and impossible!” It’s a horror film when you realize the future is now.
How long did it take you to make your film? My producer, Edouard de Lachomette, and I started developing the idea for the film in January 2012. The American Film Institute has a long development process, so we started shooting in November, wrapped reshoots in January 2013, and delivered in June 2013: a total of 1.5 years.
What was the most challenging part of the filmmaking process and how did you overcome it? My favorite films are the sci-fi movies that feel like they can happen the day after tomorrow. Trouble is…you start developing a film a year before you shoot it so you run the risk that whatever technology you are satirizing feels too stale or too unbelievable by the time you finish. We went through a ton of drafts of augmented reality, computer implants, etc… until we settled on “Sexy Siri”. My animator on the film, Benjamin Berman, is an app developer himself and really helped me conceptualize what the dating apps of 2014 will feel like back in 2012.
Tell us about your experience getting into Tribeca. It’s actually a funny story: I get an email from Sharon (lead shorts programmer) that says, paraphrased, “What is the premiere status of your film? But don’t take this question to mean we are programming you or anything else dot dot dot.” After a nail-biting week of anticipation, I get a call from Ben Thompson confirming that the film was accepted. At the American Film Institute, our entire crew is fellow students so it was an awesome feeling sharing the news with them because we are all starting our careers together.
If you had to make the film all over again, would you do anything different? If I made the film today, it would be completely different because the technology is so different. I’m very interested in augmented reality (like the Oculus Rift and Google Glass) and have a number of projects on the question of what immersive VR does to our emotional experience of the people we love.
What’s next for your film? Do you have distribution? If so, when and how can people see it and if not, what are your hopes for the film? Our film has some other exciting festival announcements to make after Tribeca and some distributors have approached us. At the same time, I want our film to be seen by largest audience possible while it’s still relevant so we’ve also been exploring a general Internet release. I hope the success of the short film enables me to make my feature project. Stay tuned!
Can you provide any advice to other filmmakers who dream of getting their films made? Working in movies a lot of times can feel like a crapshoot. After suffering your first failures, it’s easy to believe the advice that talent and handwork is not enough – that you need to “know” the right people or have a lot of “luck”. That’s bullshit. I truly believe the people who are my role models were the people who had the highest capacity for pain, rejection, and failure. They kept making when others told them it was time to quit. It’s a war for talent out there. But it’s a war won through attrition.
Screening Times: New York, New York - Tribeca Film Festival4.18, 5:30pm @ AMC Loews Village 7, 66 Third Avenue4.22, 5:30pm @ Bow Tie Cinemas Chelsea 9, 260 West 23rd Street4.24, 12:00pm @ AMC Loews Village 7, 66 Third Avenue4.27, 7:00pm @ Tribeca Cinemas, 54 Varick Street
Website: http://www.appthemovie.com/Trailer: https://vimeo.com/66196560

RIP Sarah Jones - From Your Film Family

When I heard about Sarah Jones - a young woman who died working on a film set as an AC (Assistant Camera) - I felt like I had been kicked in the gut. I put my head in my hands and thought how sad it was to lose someone so young who was probably living her dream of making movies. I was reminded of the joy I felt walking into a production office for the first time - knowing I'd come home. A home we all believe will care for us - look out for us - protect us.

I didn't know Sarah personally but I knew her, just as I know every member of the entertainment industry. We are one big family who come together all over the world to create stories. Each new project builds a sub-family. We bop around the planet and instantly bond with our sub-family of the moment to create a story we hope will help inspire, provoke thought, make us laugh or cry. This bond never goes away.

A film set is a very emotional, life-changing, awe-inspiring place where creativity and dreams are realized. It's a home for so many of us. Let's strive to protect our home and our family members.

As producers, we need safety to come first always. We are the parents of the family on set. Our crew needs to be able trust their parents.

My heart goes out to Sarah's friends and family. We feel your pain and send our love to you. We come together all over the world to mourn the loss of Sarah - a member of our film family. We will strive to be a better family.

RIP Sarah Jones. You will always be remembered. Love, Your Film Family



For Sarah's Family, From Ours from Sustainable Dave on Vimeo.

Season 2 of Average Joe Web Series - Ridiculous & Roll Your Eyes Fun

Now for some afternoon fun, you can watch Average Joe . Each video opens with Intended for Immature Mature Audiences. The 13 episodes of this wacky series live up to the intro. If you're looking for a laugh from some ridiculous and raunchy dating sitches and an Average Joe, this Web series is for you.

Here's the trailer:

And to watch all of the episodes, you can go here: Good times! Thanks to my publicist Susan Szotyori for sharing this gem with me - haha!

A New Novella and Book Trailer for Valentine's Day: Valentine Schmalentine

My writing partner Brandon Trenz and I wrote a really funny romantic comedy feature-length script called Valentine Schmalentine and decided to adapt it into a novella. I handled the adaptation and even made a book trailer for it, starring Sunny Mabrey. My husband Steve shot the trailer.

It's been so fun creating these novellas and the trailer was a blast.

Here's the link to the book on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ID3K1BY. You should read it if you like rom coms and you like to laugh.

And here is the book trailer - enjoy!!: