***UPDATE***
Sorry, We’re Dead will be screening at The Comedy Film Festival on Sun, April 7th at 1:30pm at the Galaxy Highland Theater in Austin, Texas.
I managed to make a feature length film, so it seemed like it was time to write a blog post? I’m not even sure what exactly I’ll end up writing about, but it felt like I should mark the occasion with one of these.
I guess that, first, I should announce the big premiere of the film, Sorry, We’re Dead. It’ll be premiering at the ETHOS Film Awards International Film Festival on Sun, Nov 12, at 8pm. That’s in 2023, in case this post is being read years from now for some reason. It’s an 86 minute indie dramedy, and it’s pretty quirky and strange, but it’s the movie I was trying to make.
And in case you’ve somehow stumbled on this post without actually knowing more about the movie, check out www.sorryweredead.com for a trailer and synopsis and all that.
I’ve generally been saying that “making a feature film” has been a life goal of mine, and that’s kinda true, but it’s so much more complicated than that. It’s not like I sat down at 10 and told myself that I was going to make a feature length film or die trying. I recall telling myself that I would make a movie though, but then I would just go make “a movie” right away, and “a movie” just meant making something longer than the last time I tried to make “a movie”. So maybe, 8 minutes instead of 3 this time. I think inside I knew that I wasn’t quite managing to “make a movie” like I intended, but I was too young to really notice.
So many other life goals of similar natures have swirled around in my head, concurrently with the movie goals, and also ever-changing over time. I recall wanting to write a book in 4th grade, and then I wrote what I thought was a book, but looking back at it, I think it’s only like 50-ish pages. So it hardly counted as a “real book”, though once again, I didn’t notice.
The goal I can remember most clearly was “Let’s make an animated series”, because that’s one that I was old enough to understand more of the nuance of. I couldn’t just make a series of 1 minute animations, they were supposed to each be 22-ish minute length, like on TV. They were supposed to look indistinguishable from real TV shows. And I could tell that I wasn’t quite hitting that bar when I would try! So that goal stuck around through and after college. But making a REAL animated TV series, with 22 minute episodes and reasonably high animation quality, was just out of reach. I wasn’t a good enough or fast enough animator to actually make even a single pilot episode on any kind of reasonable timeline. And a single pilot episode wasn’t what I wanted, I wanted a full TV show.
While I was in college I toyed more realistically with the idea of trying to make a feature film, but the idea would quickly overwhelm me as I tried to plan everything logistically and narratively. I didn’t feel like I had ideas that could support 90-ish minutes of runtime, but even more than that, the logistics of getting a cast and crew together for enough days to film a feature was the true elephant in the room. So I just set the idea aside for the time being.
Then after a few years of working in the film industry as a freelancer, I had worked on a few indie films, and suddenly ended up on one that was just the most fun I’d ever had on set. It was a 10 day feature, shot all in one ranch location, and the cast and crew were all lovely people and it was just such a joy to come to work every day. AND, the film was cutting a lot of corners, but in what I thought were smart ways that were still keeping production values fairly high. We didn’t have that many crew members, and we weren’t being paid that well, so suddenly, it occurred to me… maybe I could replicate this myself? It didn’t look THAT expensive to pull off.
I got a copy of their budget, and it was still a lot of money to pull out of thin air, but I could almost see how to get that amount of money together. I knew a few grants that could get me most of the way there if I got them, so as long as I could work with a similarly sized crew and only 10 shoot days, maybe I could pull it off?
It ended up being a little harder than that, in just about every way, but particularly because the money didn’t just “magically come from some grants” as I thought it might. It took me a while, but I eventually realized that if I could save a small amount of every paycheck, I could, given several years, manage to make the film even without any grant money or outside investment. I ultimately got a little bit of investor money, but still, a lot of it was me squirreling away small bits of paychecks.
Anyway, upon seeing that budget, the idea officially crystallized that “I can actually make a feature length film!” It’s something I had thought about for a long time, and had always aimed to do when I was young, but it never really seemed possible. It was always out of reach. Yet, I suddenly saw a path forward to actually making a legitimate feature length film with a real crew, not just being a kid running around with some handheld camera.
Years later, and hundreds of paychecks saved up, it’s finally complete. There are some things I’d do differently in hindsight… but not many of them, honestly. Probably the biggest thing I would wish for would be two more shoot days! But that’s a budget thing, and I would have had to delay for a few more years if I made that decision. And that honestly wouldn’t be worth it. I still made the film I wanted to make. Maybe there was an extra 3% of nuance in some scenes I could have gotten with more time to focus on a few moments, or a chance to keep experimenting with a performance further, but would that be worth the thousands of extra dollars and years of extra time spent waiting? Not for me. It’s a real steep curve on the cost to benefit ratio at a certain point, and that extra 3% would not be worth waiting two more years for to me. I’d rather just make the movie at 90% of what I wanted, and then move on to the next one. I’d rather be able to finish three films in my lifetime that are each about 90% of the way there, rather than only making a single film at 97%. (I say 97 because I feel like 100 is not actually possible, it’s a platonic ideal of what a movie can be. There’s an asymptotic curve, infinitely getting closer to 100 but never actually reaching it.)
So given another chance, I’d basically make the same exact movie.
I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface of things I could talk about, but it’s a bit of a problem for me that I can just talk forever. I think I’ll leave it here. The point is that it’s complicated, but making a feature length film has been a lifelong goal, even if it wasn’t always exactly obvious to me or being buried underneath a different life goal. But it became apparent that this was a life goal I could actually achieve, so it quickly rose to the surface above all the other ones!
I have plenty more ideas for films I want to make. I’m right back to square one in a way, because now it’s all about the finances again. I’ve got to try and raise the funds to make a feature all over again? How exhausting…
But I really want to make another one. And I’ll be working on bringing that next movie to life in any way that I can, even if it’s the extremely slow, paycheck squirreling method again.
If you meet any indie film investors, please let me know!