Everything I Needed To Know About Business I Learned From Dr. Doom (#1)

Lesson #1 – Direct competition is stupid.
(Learned in Secret Wars #1)

I was 8 years old when I first read Secret Wars, and I’ll always remember what a badass Dr. Doom was.

For the uninitiated, Secret Wars was a ridiculous “event” comic where a godlike being from beyond our multiverse, The Beyonder, happened to see the Earth (of the Marvel Universe) and was so enamored by its heroes and villains that he plucked them into outer space and threw them on a planet he cobbled together so they’d fight for his amusement… kind’ve like if God decided to put together his own personal UFC league.

Here’s what he says to the heroes and villains when they wake up on his weirdo planet:

THE BEYONDER: “I am from Beyond. Slay your enemies and all you desire shall be yours. Nothing you dream of me is impossible for me to accomplish.”

Ok so that sales pitch is kind of like Hollywood studios + Silicon Valley venture capitalists + Wall Street tycoons all wrapped into one bag of lottery-ticket-winning awesomeness.

And so all the idiot super heroes and super villains start kicking each other’s asses to try and get a prize. As Molecule Man epic-ly puts it: “I want a nice house and a yard, and lots of friends, and maybe even a girl—! One who LIKES me, and — OWW!”

Why does he interrupt himself with an OWW? Because Doom bitchslaps him, that’s why.

DOOM: “Ignore your petty dreams! To fight is to prove we are but microbes on a slide! We must transcend ourselves!”

And then all those dummies try to knock Doom out so they can go back to fighting each other.

What does Doom do? He’s got the master plan—he ignores the jackasses fighting for the lottery ticket and instead goes after The Beyonder. That’s called being a mothafucka!

What can we learn from this?

At its root, our economic system pits us against our contemporaries by calling them competitors. I don’t consider other filmmakers, other writers, or other labels my competitors. (a) They’re my friends and I don’t need them to fail in order for me to succeed. (b) Just because we’re doing the same thing today, doesn’t mean we’ll be doing the same thing tomorrow… I don’t want to be in the same place tomorrow, I want to be operating on another level tomorrow. Why should we spend our lives fighting each other in this crappy basement when we can both run upstairs and kick somebody else’s ass together?

If you’re constantly fighting with people on your same level, you’ll never transcend to the next level.

Identify where you WANT to be and compete THERE. Find your Beyonder and go kick his ass.

Fuckin Doom, man, that dude knew what’s up.

Disruptive Technology or Corruptive Technology?

There’s a war a-brewin’ on the west coast between Hollywood and Silicon Valley.

[*For the purposes of simplicity and poetic license, I’m using Hollywood here to represent so-called “authored media content” and Silicon Valley to represent the tech business at large, though obviously neither industry/culture is so geographically landlocked.]

In one corner you have the Hollywood Anachronism: content that is execution-dependent, ridiculously expensive and time-consuming to produce and market, qualitatively unpredictable, and when it is successful that success is impossible to reliably replicate. These elements force Hollywood to maintain firm control of when & how the content is viewed as well as the cost (and thus the perceived value) of viewing the content… resulting in a bizantine bureaucracy of distribution.

In the other corner you have the Silicon Valley Thunderlizards: platforms that are content agnostic, ridiculously inexpensive and time-efficient to launch and test among power-user evangelists, qualitatively unpredictable but that’s offset by quantitavely laying as many eggs as possible to see what hatches, and when it works it’s infinitely scalable and simple to iterate. These elements make Silicon Valley nimble and spontaneous with little regard for imposing roadblocks to access.

The feeling has been that this relationship is symbiotic, because in many cases Silicon Valley is building platforms that monetize Hollywood content. But I don’t think it’s developing that way. Some may call it parasitic and maybe it was initially, but contemporarily the better paradigm is Silicon Valley is just scavenging the rotting corpse of Hollywood.

For example, I don’t believe the music industry was crushed by Napster, it was crushed by iTunes/iPod. Napster was a devastating blow, but it was a hassle… we suddenly had all these mp3s on our computers, many of which were glitchy, and we had to burn CD-Rs to listen to them using junky Roxio apps. Plenty of douchebags like me would be happy to jump through those hoops to save 10 bucks, but not the mass-market. And then Steve Jobs introduced the perfect platform of iTunes and the iPod. It was a disruptive technology because it changed the way we manage and consume music. It was a corruptive technology because the underlying theme was: this is how you manage all that stolen music. The iPod was expensive for a Walkman, but its competitive advantage was that the Walkman doesn’t enable you to manage and listen to every song ever composed with simple, free, instant access. Oh and there’s a store too. (I realize the iTunes store is successful, but it’s a new ecosystem. The old one died. Someday there will be a new ecosystem in Fukushima, too, but not today.)

Netflix is the same way, although I’m not here to bemoan Netflix again because I actually am giving Netflix Watch Instantly a thumbs up. The studios are bummed about it, but that’s just because they’re late to realize how much they got boned by Netflix with DVDs and now they’re fighting last year’s war. The Watch Instantly deal is much better, trust me.

But Netflix DVD rental remains an interesting example of corruptive technology. Personally, all our DVDs have been carried by Netflix and all our DVDs have wound up on piracy sites immediately upon street date. Then we started releasing short-form, episodic DVDs for Godkiller that Netflix didn’t carry and I noticed something funny… they didn’t wind up on the piracy sites in any significant fashion. At first I took that to mean there was no interest, but the episodic DVDs were outselling our other releases as well as our competitors’ & friends’ new releases. Then we started selling digital files of the movies on our website: no encryption, no DRM, optimized for every device. These are basically the perfect files to post on a piracy site without any of the hassle of ripping the DVD. But none of them wound up on any of the piracy sites. Then we released the full-length DVD and the *day* it went out by Netflix rental it wound up on EVERY piracy site.

I don’t blame Netflix directly for this, but it’s the system that develops based on perceived value. If you buy a Godkiller DVD or a Godkiller download, apparently you’re less apt to give it to everybody else for free (either because you care about us or because if you paid for it then you think everybody else should too). But once you’re a Netflix subscriber (as I am), rentals are essentially free… so the movie has no perceived value. Most of the high volume movie pirates simply put every new release in their queue, rip the DVD without even watching it, and post it online. There’s no cost to them and it’s worth the hassle to build the biggest library of movies. Corruptive technology.

Are these tech services providing value to the consumer? Undoubtedly. Are they providing value to the producer? Umh. That’s kind of complicated.

(And just to reiterate, I’ve learned to stop worrying and love the Netflix because I think Watch Instantly is a win-win for consumers and producers alike; so I’m not trying to hate on Netflix here.)

The relationship between Silicon Valley and Hollywood *could* be symbiotic but it’s not, and the reason isn’t Silicon Valley’s fault. When you see a dead body rotting on the floor, it’s perfectly fair game to suck the nutrients out of it before they decompose.

The problem is that Insidious is not necessarily a more enjoyable film than The Omen. Hanna is not necessarily a more enjoyable film than The Professional. And the newest Nine Inch Nails album is not necessarily more enjoyable than Downward Spiral.

Essentially, Silicon Valley does not need Hollywood’s new releases to monetize its platforms. iTunes is fine with having Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band even if Brokencyde won’t allow it to carry their new album.

Hollywood is not used to having to compete with its own back catalog, because it’s always had control over that. Lawrence of Arabia doesn’t play on the IMAX screen next to Thor.

This goes for pretty much all non-tech authored content. On my iPad, it’s as simple for me to read X-Men’s Dark Phoenix Saga as it is to read the new issue of X-Men… is every new comic book ready to compete toe-to-toe with vintage Chris Claremont?

The tech world, however, is used to competing with itself. Novelty and nostalgia aside, New Super Mario Brothers on Wii is likely superior to pulling out the old NES and firing up the original Super Mario Brothers. Call of Duty: Black Ops and Gears of War 3 are developed to compete directly against their predecessors. Is Fast Five? No. It may be fine, but it was greenlit to thrive on its predecessors’ half-lives, not to compete directly with them. Hollywood is hoping 3D is the equivalent of a new console for films, but it’s not.

And the funny thing is the money that these Corruptive Technologies extract from Hollywood will affect the next Fast Five *last* and will affect the next The Professional *first*… because first the overhead gets paid and then the original idea gets nurtured. So it’s a vicious cycle of Hollywood losing money by not out-performing its history and then it can’t pull out of the tailspin because it doesn’t have enough money to augment performance.

So the question is whether or not Silicon Valley is doing itself (and us all) a disservice by allowing Corruptive Technology to take the place of Disruptive Technology. We all know Hollywood needed a shake-up, but on some level content-creation is still an art (even in Hollywood) and art needs to be nurtured in a way that doesn’t necessarily gel with the mindset of MBAs and Three Sentence E-mails.

The tech platforms can survive without new release auteured content, but can they thrive without it?

There’s a bridge from the Internet to your TV–Steve Jobs & Bill Gates are the trolls under it

I solved the Last Ten Feet… by walking across the room

I can’t remember ever feeling quite so smart and quite so stupid at exactly the same time.

There’s a concept you hear every so often from media pundits and technology providers: the last ten feet. Basically it refers to the process of digitally delivering movies and TV shows and other video content via the internet. Internet speeds and compression and bandwidth have gotten to the point where high quality video can be sent from anywhere in the world right to your computer… but you probably want to watch it on your TV… and your TV is only another ten feet or so away… but the internet just doesn’t know how to get there.

So there are all sorts of proprietary solutions for how to connect your TV to the internet. If you want to buy an Apple TV, you can port your iTunes videos to your TV through Apple TV… but Apple TV is lame so it’s not being broadly adopted. Microsoft has its cumbersome home network system or its Xbox Live system where you can buy downloads of TV shows & movies or stream Netflix movies if you have an account… but you can’t just download or stream anything you want, only what Microsoft or Netflix has negotiated to sell you—and Netflix has a particularly weak catalog since suppliers are sick of getting nuggied by Netflix’s business model that seems to help Netflix and nobody else. Playstation 3 has a similar operation developing, as does Wii and Roku (formerly a Netflix-only box) which are offering broader catalogs from Hulu and Amazon Unbox. And there’s plenty more… it seems like every day someone is popping up with a new set-top box that will finally connect my TV to the internet.

Basically, everyone wants to be the iPod of movies and TV. Apple figured out how to integrate your stolen mp3s with your walkman in a seamless configuration that was hip, stylish, and integrated into Apple technology… the rest is a CNBC special on the genius of Steve Jobs, rugged capitalist individualist.

But iTunes and the iPod were integrating my access to *everything* into a newfangled walkman. It worked because the internet was already providing me with all the music I could possibly want to hear, Steve Jobs just gave me a simple way to organize and enjoy what I already had. iTunes did not generate false scarcity, it managed abundance.

These set-top boxes, however, are creating a false scarcity of available video content. They’re trying to tell me what I’m allowed to see and how I’m allowed to watch it. I want to watch Battlestar Galactica so I download it on my Xbox, but then I’m not allowed to take it off my Xbox without Xbox-branded plugins. I want to watch Season 1 of True Blood, but HBO only seems to have it available digitally on iTunes… who imposes DRM that prevents me from watching it on my TV unless I buy their stupid set-top box. I can’t even watch it on HBO On Demand through my cable provider, even though I pay a monthly subscription to the bastards and I hardly ever watch any of their goddamned programming. So I wind up calling Blockbuster (since both my local indie videostores have gone out of business thanks to Netflix) asking to see what discs they have in stock like I’m back in 1992 or something. Ridiculous.

Don’t these disservice-providers understand that I want to watch what I want to watch when I want to watch it? I don’t want to wait 2 days for Netflix to deliver it by mail like this is some Benjamin Franklin pony express bullshit… 2 days from now I’ll want to watch something else. And I certainly don’t want to have to choose from Netflix’s paltry Watch Now catalog just because they’re too miserly to offer suppliers enough incentive to sign on their streaming service.

So… I wanted to watch this mumblecore movie and of course it’s not on Xbox Live, it’s not on Netflix Watch Now, it’s not on Amazon Unbox, it’s not on Hulu, and it’s not on my Time Warner Cable On Demand. It’s not available for download on the filmmaker’s website or on the distributor’s website. But it is on Pirate Bay. So fuck you set-top box providers and fuck you filmmaker and distributor, you make it so I can’t see this thing legally and conveniently I’ll just download the torrent.

So I download the torrent and I’m about to watch it on my computer when something occurs to me… why can’t I just walk it over to my TV? I dump the file on one of the USB flash drives I have laying around. These days they’re like $20 for 15 GB and I keep accidentally leaving them in my pants when I do my laundry so I have like a gazillion of them laying around.

I drag the avi file I just downloaded from Pirate Bay onto the USB flash drive and I walk ten feet to my TV. I start looking for USB ports. Voila! Xbox has USB ports. I plug it in. I navigate to Video Library and it shows my USB drive. So I click it and there’s that little whippersnapper of an avi file. I click there, Xbox downloads some driver automatically, and 10 seconds later I’m watching the movie on my bigass flatscreen TV and it looks pretty fuckin sweet.

Am I an idiot? Does everyone else already know you can do this?

I did a little more research and found that on Amazon I can buy an iPod-to-RCA adapter for 53 cents. If you aren’t a techie, RCA outputs are the red/white/yellow plugs that come out of your VHS player or DVD player (if you’re not using one of the newer options like HDMI) and plug easily into just about any TV on the planet.

So then I wanted to see what else I could play on my Xbox besides avi files. On our website Televandalism we sell all our movies as DRM-free m4v files because that’s the file type we found to be most compatible with iPods, and we figured at the time that the most likely reason to download a movie rather than stream it would be for portability via iPod.

So I downloaded an m4v of Pilates For Indie Rockers, dropped it on the USB flash drive, plugged it into the Xbox, and goddamn it played easy and looked awesome. No fuss, no muss… does that mean I can finally get rid of this goddamned bookshelf full of DVDs?

Maybe the rest of you already knew how easy it was to download movies and watch them digitally on your TV, but I didn’t… and I’m the kind of guy who’s supposed to know these things. Why didn’t I know it? Besides the fact that I’m a dumbass? Because it’s not in the interest of the massmarket aggregators, technology providers, and set-top boxes to market how simple it is for audiences to download platform-agnostic video content playable on whatever player they have handy and how filmmakers can sell their movies digitally on their own websites without having to lose 75% of the revenue to all these various pipeline providers.

But aren’t those revenue losses made up for by the fact that digital distribution is cheaper than manufacturing shiny plastic discs? No! Everyone talks about how the cost of distribution will decrease because of digital distribution rather than plastic DVD manufacturing, but in order to get into the iTunes store Apple has required an encode fee that is MORE than the cost of DVD-authoring plus manufacturing an indie-sized run of shiny plastic discs. Adding insult to a kick in the balls, the Apple encode is (a) the same fucking thing as outputting to h.264 quicktime for free in any number of applications, and (b) not transferable to other digital stores which have their own unnecessary encode fees. Basically, they’re all creating fabricated profit-centers that make digital distribution MORE expensive than traditional distribution. The middleman is boning both sides of the transaction.

It’s like if you and I wanted to hang out and there’s a perfectly safe path between our houses, but Steve Jobs and Bill Gates erected bridges and demanded we pay tolls and they spent millions marketing their bridges so we think we have to take them… but their bridges aren’t crossing a raging river, they’re just crossing a path that’s actually EASIER for us to take than their stupid bridges.

Microsoft loses money on Xbox sales, so they actually have to sell software and licenses and subscriptions etc etc–they need to sell content, not just Xboxes, so it’s not in their best interest to market the fact that you can buy video online and watch it through Xbox. Apple is a bit different… since the iTunes store is free and their margins are slim on downloads, they want you to buy iPods–so it’s important to them that whatever you buy in their free store encourages you to buy their proprietary hardware. As a result, no one’s running around raising a ruckus about how simple it is to watch a movie from the internet by using their hardware without using their pipeline. To be honest, I’m astonished they even allow their hardware to support it.

To be fair, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates aren’t the only ones doing this, I just use them as prime examples because they’d make particularly funny looking trolls. Last year Time Warner Cable rented me a DVR with USB inputs and I excitedly asked the cable guy if I could send in video files through the USB ports and he said “probably, but Time Warner Cable disabled all the USB ports before distributing the set-top boxes.” Fuckers.

There’s actually tons of simple ways to move video files from the computer to the TV, but these are discussed mostly in tech blogs not in consumer media. Brian just mentioned to me that LaCie is releasing a hard drive designed specifically for this purpose, but at $349 it’s no cheaper than an Xbox. There are plenty of even cheaper solutions.

The problem is that by muddying all this, they’re actually encouraging piracy. I download and stream plenty of video content legally and pay Microsoft, Apple, Time Warner quite well for it. If that mumblecore movie was available for download legally, I would have bought it–but by creating a false scarcity they made piracy the only way I could get the content in the format I wanted to consume it. I actually felt kind of guilty downloading it and if it was any good I would’ve felt even guiltier. But don’t worry, Justice Department: I was downloading it as research for this very important blog post.

So why has the buying and selling of non-DRM, platform-agnostic movies not become ubiquitous yet? If I can sell you a downloadable movie on my website that you can watch on your computer, on your iPod, on your Xbox, and anyplace else you want to watch it… then why would you choose to download it from Xbox where you can only watch it on Xbox? Or from iTunes where you can only watch it on Apple-approved players? And what’s the incentive for me to distribute through those pipelines if I get more money by selling to you directly? Because I’m hoping that by being on iTunes and Xbox you’ll discover my movie? That’s not very likely. Then maybe because being on those services somehow gives my movie credibility? Puh-lease.

The cost-benefit analysis here favors consumers buying direct from filmmakers’ websites, distributors’ websites, and DRM-free digital stores; and filmmakers, distributors, and e-tailers selling direct from their own websites while also hypersyndicating the content to all those other bridges for the suckers who want to use them. The only thing standing in the way of this model taking hold is the marketing campaigns of the service providers who all want to control the last ten feet between your computer and your TV.

I solved the crisis of the last ten feet. It’s called get off your ass and walk, ya fatass.

[get here by accident? this is a blog post from Hollywood-2.0, read more at www.hollywood-2point0.com]

I’m an Internet Filmmaking Millionaire and SO CAN YOU!

There have always been indie film snake oil salesmen. Back in the heyday of the 90s Indie Film Boom there were gazillions of books telling you how if you just sold your car, sold your blood, or sold out your family’s mortgage you too could sell a film at Sundance and be an overnight multi-millionaire. Some of those books had accurate production information, most did not, but they all shared one thing in common: a fairy tale ending that was either disingenuous (if you want to be nice about it) or a straightup lie (if you want to be me about it). In the last chapter (or paragraph) of these books, after the authors had just spent hundreds of pages detailing every aspect of development, pre-production, and post-production, they would wrap up by saying you take your movie to Sundance, start a bidding war, and cash the fuck out with millions of chump change in your back pocket. Welcome to being a fucking hotshot millionaire, babydoll! Of course, the process of selling or distributing a movie is no less complex than the process of producing one… and “disingenuous” may be the fairer judgment against these authors because they probably didn’t even know the process of selling or distributing a movie. Film Production is technical knowledge… it’s bare-knuckled, blue collar hard work. It can be taught in technical schools by guys and gals who’ve worked in the field for decades. The processes of making a film don’t really change… and when they do it makes things easier, not harder. Sales & Distribution on the other hand is a bit more nuanced and, to be perfectly frank, sordid… it’s the type of dark arts practiced on Wall Street and East New York streetcorners. It’s far more difficult to write a book about how to sell a credit default swap or a hit of crack than it is to write a book about how to fix a 1982 Buick… not because Wall Streeters are smarter than mechanics but because situations on the ground change moment-to-moment in a dynamic sales environment, whereas the insides of a 1982 Buick stay pretty consistent through the years. Most writers of how-to-be-an-indie-film-millionaire never sold or distributed a film, so they can claim ignorance when their readers lose their cars, blood, or homes. And the ones who did sell or distribute a film? Well, they tend to leave out some pertinent information.

Here’s the real deal on those books: they’re basically the same thing as a book that spends 300 pages teaching you how to buy a lottery ticket and then the last sentence says “now all you have to do is win.”

In the past ten years, the trend has moved away from filmmaking (people caught on to their games I guess) and morphed into get rich quick books about real estate (that worked well), day trading (even better), etc etc etc.

But guess what has happened over the past few years? THEY’RE BACK! The snake oil salesmen have returned to the world of filmmaking… but not that hackneyed old FILMmaking of the 90s… no, the problem with all those books from the 90s was that they came from back before Myspace and Facebook and spam and bots and torrents and all these glorious things that make it so much EASIER for you to make BAZILLIONS of dollars as a DiY FILMMAKER! Hooray! Because look how much good these technologies have done for bands! Sure, record sales are down 90%, record labels are zombies in search of brains, and the highest level of artistic success most musicians seek these days is a put in Grey’s Anatomy. BUT (!) there’s a band I heard about that sold 1 billion downloads just by having a clever YouTube video! You can do it too! Just read my blog about how to shoot a video for YouTube and you figure out the rest!

As you can imagine, I’m pretty cynical about this crap… not just because I’m an oldass veteran of the 90s but because I’ve been releasing movies in the trenches of massmarket retail, new media internet, and DiY face-to-face tabletops for the past few years and I can guarantee you the numbers these self-proclaimed pundits throw around is either completely fabricated or, at best, partially fabricated. The festivals and markets have become echo chambers where false prophets lie to wide-eyed aspiring filmmakers and say “I’m an Internet Filmmaking Millionaire and SO CAN YOU!” The funny thing is these snake oil salesmen, like the millions before them, make their money by selling you information on how to become a millionaire… not by selling their own films. The people who actually make money selling their films are (not so suspiciously) tight-lipped.

Well, I’ve got a big mouth and a bad attitude, so I feel like poisoning the well all these snake oil salesmen are drinking from. I’ll be your indie film Robin Hood, stealing from the stupid and giving to the ignorant. I’ve dealt with every level of this ridiculous business from Best Buy to anarchist bookshops, I’ve crashed major festivals with renegade screenings and also been a guest and award-winner (not simultaneously, of course), I’ve screened films in cinemas with packed audiences and in people’s apartments for a couple of devoted fans (not to mention empty cinemas and packed apartments). And now I’ll tell you how you too can be a Filmmaking MegaSuperstarGodlikeGiverAndReceiverOfPain! Yay!

Why am I going to tell you all this shit? Well… basically, it’s in my self-interest to do so. My company not only produces films, shows, webisodes, lifestyle videos, etc but we also acquire and distribute independently produced films when we see something we dig or when we meet artists we want to champion. Well here’s a tidbit for you… we almost always lose money on our acquisitions and have to make up the difference on our productions. Why? Because filmmakers aren’t generally the shrewdest people in the world and they’re getting a lot of bad information. No one is telling them how to effectively make films THAT CAN BE SOLD. There are so many good films that are just totally unsellable. How is that possible? How can something be good and unsellable? Well, that’s what I intend to tell you.

I originally planned to write a book specifically for the filmmakers we work with so they’ll stop fucking up their movies and making them unmarketable, but I’ve been convinced that it’s probably better to put the information out their for anybody who wants it. So I’m gonna give it a try writing the book on this here blog.

Oh and I’m gonna charge membership for the content. Not because I want your money (although I’ll gladly take it, thank you very much) but for two reasons:
a- if you’re serious about Media Sales & Marketing you oughta know that free information on the internet IS NOT FREE… it is free because it serves someone’s ulterior motive to give it to you for free and their motive may not sync up with your motives so you could wind up with some very bad information;
b- I piss a lot of people off… already in this blog post I’ve probably alienated half the readers and a lot of people I work with. Well, if there’s gonna be any accuracy to my information it’s going to piss off a lot more people, so for my own self-preservation I have to restrict access to the information. The biggest problem with the web is information without context, and I’m gonna say some shit I don’t want just anybody to stumble across in an unrelated google search.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. In the next few days, the site will be revamped with free content and premium members-only content and I shall commence dropping the knowledge and shilling my own unique brand of snake oil. Not only will it make you a millionaire, it’ll also cure that nasty rash you picked up at Cinetic’s Sundance party last year. Non Serviam- Pizzolo

Making An Illustrated Film – Godkiller

This week I’m back to work on “Godkiller,” Halo-8′s first Illustrated Film. An Illustrated Film is a highly stylized animated movie that mixes original graphic novel illustrations with motion graphics and dramatic voice performances to create an edgy new style of story telling. Its like Liquid Television meets Ralph Bakshi, allowing us to tackle stories that we wouldn’t be able to do with video.

Halo-8 doesn’t have experience producing animated titles, so I didn’t have a post production work flow in place. I sought advice from a couple of people who work with traditional animation, then tried to adapt that work flow to Illustrated Films. The VO recording was handled by The Engine Room in Hollywood. We recorded the voice actors in separate sessions as “wild lines,” meaning there was no cut picture for them to reference. After the session, I would get the audio files organized by script page, which left me with the chore of compiling all the takes together. Basically, I gather each take of every line of dialogue and stack them on top of each other in the timeline. When all of the takes are compiled, I have what I call the “Take Matrix.” There can be anywhere from 2 to 12 takes of every line. By putting each take on a subsequent audio track, I can solo individual tracks and quickly hear every take of a line. After the Take Matrix is assembled, I go through every take and copy the select take to track one. When I’m done with that process, track one represents a completely compiled performance for that actor using the best read of each line. If I need to make tweaks, I can easily go back into the Take Matrix and audition other reads.

This was especially useful in working with Lance Henriksen’s performance. Lance likes to do long takes and fall into a groove. He’ll do a bunch of these long takes, kind of riffing on the dialogue and making subtle variations along the way. His compiled dialogue performance ended up with a lot of edits because I went deep into mixing and matching his variations, pulling individual phrases of a monologue from several different takes. It makes for a really dynamic voice performance.

"Take Matrix" for Lance Henriksen's performance in Godkiller.

Once you’ve got a Take Matrix for each actor, its very easy to combine all of the actors selected takes into the final dialog track for the film. You just go to track one of the Take Matrix for each actor, copy from the compiled performance on track one, and paste the dialog into the master edit. Its easy to make tweaks as necessary by going back to the Take Matrix and auditioning new lines.

Pop Skull DVD

I spent much of last week authoring the DVD for “POP SKULL,” a new release from Halo-8. Pop Skull is a manic, twisted, drug-infused and award-winning psychological horror film directed & co-written by Adam Wingard (“HOME SICK”), starring & co-written by newcomer Lane Hughes, co-written and co-produced by E.L. Katz (“AUTOPSY“), and produced by Peter Katz (“MORTUARY“). These guys made a great film in Pop Skull, and Director Adam Wingard went the extra mile on special features for the DVD. Special features can quickly turn into a wank, especially the formulaic publicity schlock that ends up on many DVDs from the major studios. But not for Pop Skull. Adam gave us seven short films, nine deleted scenes, on-camera intros for each of the deleted scenes, a short documentary featurette on the origins of Pop Skull, an audio commentary with himself and the film’s star Lane Hughes, DVD menu backgrounds using elements of from the film, and still photos of the lead actors for the DVD cover. Its all well crafted, and in perfect sync with the aesthetic of the film. Pop Skull is definitely a film geek’s DVD, and we are excited to be involved.

The DVD comes out July 28th from Halo-8. Here’s the trailer:

Illustrated Films vs Motion Comics

Back in 2007, it occurred to me that you could scan the images from a comic book, record radio-play style audio of the dialogue and sound effects, and turn it into a pretty badass underground DVD. I brought some of my favorite underground comix to Brian and asked him what he thought… and he said “if that’d work, somebody would’ve done it by now.” We couldn’t think of anybody who’d done it effectively, so we figured there was a reason it didn’t work and moved on to the next thing.

But I’m a comic book geek, so I didn’t give up on Halo-8 doing some sort of comic book type release and a few months later I started writing a few comic books and set up a publishing arm of Halo-8 to make comics and graphic novels. I went online looking for artists and found the incredible Anna Muckcracker (who took on the task of illustrating ‘Godkiller’) and the wonderful Andrea Blanco & Ale Alvarez (who brought ‘How I Lost My Virginity -by Alexandra Jones’ to life).

I immediately noticed that Anna’s illustrations for ‘Godkiller’ were incredibly cinematic… broad, sweeping landscapes; an epic yet subdued pace; and most of the panels were widescreen to begin with. Plus, the surreal flavor she brought to ‘Godkiller’ made me think it was far more broadly appealing than the viciously visceral aesthetic I’d imagined while first writing it. Anna was an odd choice for ‘Godkiller,’ everyone was confused when I said she was my pick… and truth be told I had to do quite a bit of rewriting to slow down the pace of my storytelling to match her visual style. But the whole was definitely greater than the sum of its parts… at least, greater than the parts I contributed–I’m pretty sure anything Anna does is ridiculously awesome all on its own.

So when Anna started delivering illustrations, Brian and I started tinkering with a new filmmaking format we called “illustrated films,” mixing comic book art with voice performances, elaborate sound design, music, and strategically placed motion graphics. Unbeknownst to us, across town the folks at Warner Premiere were developing what they called “motion comics”–and they started with Watchmen.

We had a few extra obstacles than they did… like for example, Anna still had to illustrate the damn thing and I was rewriting it as she went. It took a really long time before we even had enough existing artwork to do our first feasibility tests… and it was pretty slow-going from there. So we were a bit disheartened when we were knee-deep in the Godkiller illustrated film and people started buzzing about the Watchmen motion comic. The nice thing, though, is that Warner Brothers can take a property like Watchmen and use it to convince people that motion comics are a real media format worth watching… we were really nervous that we’d finish our first illustrated film and everybody would say “we’re not watching that thing… that’s… well, that’s not a thing at all!” So we humbly thank Warner Premiere for doing the heavy lifting of convincing people that these are things and should be treated as such.

However, Godkiller is not a motion comic… at least, not as defined by Warner Premiere. We’re filmmakers and we developed our style with a cinematic aesthetic. Watchmen is different. And I find it actually quite fascinating how Halo-8 & Warner Premiere made significantly different creative choices while developing a very similar format simultaneously but in isolation.

Visually, it feels like Warner Premiere went out of their way to make Watchmen *not* cinematic. I don’t know anybody at Warner Premiere so I can’t say authoritatively why this is, but it seems to me that the inspiration was to create a cartoon utilizing existing art–whereas we started with the inspiration to make a film utilizing existing art. I think that’s why our paths stray from one another so immediately.

Watchmen’s visual design takes the original art from the comic, but ignores the visual language of the comic book and treats it like a cartoon. Most of the negative reviews I’ve read of Watchmen seem to focus on the fact that, although the original artwork is used, the liberties taken with animating it aren’t leading to a net-positive in terms of storytelling.

We faced a similar problem of how best to animate elements from existing artwork without compromising the integrity of the visual storytelling. Our assumption was: this is not a cartoon, so it shouldn’t try to be a cartoon. We should use motion sparingly when it serves the story. Other than that, we should let the format rely on the visual storytelling elements already there and only try to augment them rather than replace them. One of my favorite moments in the whole thing is a choice Brian made to have Dr. West’s brow furrow with no other motion in the frame… so subtle, but so effective.

The other thing I found so strange about the Watchmen motion comic is how fiercely it refuses to be a comic book as well. It really doesn’t utilize, even in a self-aware style, the language of comic books in telling the story. Sure it uses word bubbles, but I mean the architecture of the visual storytelling–most notably, the panels. We tried to incorporate the comic book language in our format, often showing the panels on screen and occasionally using multiple-panel reveals onscreen to borrow effective devices from the book. Brian also created some magnificent moments mixing film editing tropes with multiple panel reveals.

But the most confusing part to me about the Watchmen motion comic is Warner Premiere’s decision to use an audio-book style for the dialogue. Having one narrator read all the voiceover, narration, and dialogue is really unsettling. The only reason I can imagine for their decision to do this was to avoid conflict with the casting of the feature… I guess it could be weird to simultaneously cast one actor to play Dr. Manhattan in the movie and another actor to play his voice in the motion comic. But… I dont know, maybe that doesn’t make sense. I mean, Lionsgate put out an Iron Man animated film right before the live-action movie.

Now, let me clarify myself because I think I sound like a dick: I think the Watchmen motion comic is awesome. I was really impressed by what I saw. But they made some creative decisions that I just don’t get. At all. And I think it’s interesting that we made very different creative decisions when developing our “illustrated film” format.

I suppose I can’t really draw a fair comparison until after “Godkiller” is released and all the critics and reviewers and commenters point out all of our misguided choices… then I’ll go back to Watchmen and see how they did all those things right while we totally fucked them up.

This project is exciting in a different way than most, because it’s an entirely new format of storytelling… and each creative decision is a mix of personal inspiration, synthesizing existing methods, and determining the most effective way to serve the story. So two creative teams with different sensibilities, different backgrounds, and different source materials will create wholly different methodologies.

In the meantime, I’m glad Watchmen came out first so we can compare and contrast as we go.