A Year Without Rent

Requiem For a Buick Century

2013-03-08T10:11:00.000-05:00

It started off as a gift.

I was car-less, living in a city where you could conceivably get around without one, when my father called to tell me he was getting a new(er) vehicle and did I want his old one?

"How much do you want for it?" I asked.

"No, do you want it?"

"Oh. Yeah, sure. Thanks."

This was back in 2007 and the old car was a white 1999 Buick Century, a solid car, nothing flashy about it. But, more importantly, able to go from point A to point B reliably.

I drove it back to Pennsylvania that summer and half-way there the "Service Engine Soon" light came on.

"Don't worry about it," Dad said. "It does that all the time."

It's been on ever since.

Two months later it sprung a coolant leak, and by the time they found it, it had taken two weeks and $3,000, so you could say I got the car for three grand, which is still a pretty good deal. Other than that, it's been reliable. I had a scary moment in New York when I thought it was going to die in a downpour on a busy highway, but it turned out the spark plugs just needed to be replaced.

I'm a little paranoid about cars. I haven't a clue how to fix them. I can change a tire in a pinch, but I can't change the oil. If something goes wrong, I take it to a mechanic, which is a worry because they always seem to find something else wrong with it and I'm not exactly swimming in the cash needed to fix it. But my Buick Century held up as I drove it around the Northeast. It never stranded me at a rest area. I never had to tow it. It passed every inspection. It was solid.

And then my life fell apart.

The Buick sat for a couple months in a parking garage in Pittsburgh while I went looking for rock bottom. I wrote a script called "Suicide is Painless". I drank a lot of whiskey. When I got back to the Buick, I put everything I owned in it and drove it back across the Northeast.

This was in 2010. This was the start of my nomadic lifestyle.

That summer I made a movie. And then I came up with this crazy idea to travel around the country, working on other people's movies. I got the idea funded on Kickstarter. I changed my address to "1 Buick Century, Anytown, USA", much to the displeasure of AT&T. I put some stuff in storage. And once again I loaded everything I owned into the car and drove. And drove. And drove. And drove.

Somewhere in Minnesota, my brother called and asked how the car was holding up. I told him it was doing fine and he seemed a little surprised. I kept going. I drove across Montana to Seattle, then up into Canada. I went down to LA, then back up to Seattle. I had arguments with the woman on my GPS. I got a little stir-crazy. The pile of empty coffee cups on the floor of the passenger seat got deeper. I hung festival passes from the rear view mirror like trophies. I lived out of the car, working out a rotation of clothes in the back seat. I kept the whiskey in the trunk.

In Seattle, some asshole broke the window looking for something to steal. Luckily they didn't find anything. Victoria Westcott rallied the beautiful people of the internet to raise the money to get it fixed before she had to join me in a jaunt back down to LA. They raised $300 in a day. On the way down the coast, Victoria drove for a couple of hours. It was the first time I'd ever sat in the passenger seat. It felt weird.

I drove to Vegas, to Denver, to Kansas City, then back up to Minnesota. I nearly got lost in the woods in Arkansas. Then I headed to Texas. I went to Marfa, where Brea Grant, Stacey Storey, and I drank Willie Nelson whiskey straight out one of the bottles in the trunk at 2am. I raced east to South Carolina. I drove past my old apartment in Chattanooga and it felt like I was taking a tour of someone else's life. I made it all the way back to New England and the car was still fine.

That was almost a year ago. Half my stuff is still in that car. I'm still a nomad living at 1 Buick Century, Anytown, USA.

The other day, the brake pedal suddenly went all the way to the floor. Thankfully, I was only 3 miles away from where I'm staying and was able to make it back ok. I opened the hood and noticed all the brake fluid was gone. So I took it to a shop. They called back the next day and the mechanic asked me how long I was planning to keep the car.

This is why I get paranoid about mechanics.

The rear suspension is "rotted out". The brake line is leaking in two places. The fuel line is leaking too. He listed a few more issues. My father went and looked at it on the lift.

He summed it up like this: "I have good news and I have good news. First, I got you a beer. Second, you probably don't have to worry about getting your brakes fixed."

The Buick is sitting now. I still have clothes in it. There's an air mattress in the back seat. There's a case of ramen noodles in the trunk. I drank all the whiskey. We're going to put it in the garage and see if we can't salvage it, wring a few more months of use out of it. Fixing it may just cost more than the car is worth. So, essentially this is the death rattle of my 1999 Buick Century. I slept in that car. Hell, I lived in that car. More than an apartment, even, it feels like an extension of myself, my mobile security blanket with a bitchy voice on the GPS and a case of beer in the trunk for when I reach my destination. Only, this might be the Buick's destination--the garage from which I picked it up 6 years ago.

Six years. That's the longest I've lived anywhere since I was a kid. Someone on Facebook pointed out that I could probably still sleep in it, but what's the point if it can't go anywhere?

The Buick doesn't owe me a thing. It's the best car I've ever owned

Looks like it's time to move.

Lucas McNelly is the filmmaker behind A YEAR WITHOUT RENT, UP COUNTRY, BLANC DE BLANC, and GRAVIDA. He consults on Kickstarter campaigns for a living. He hasn’t lived anywhere in a long time.

THEY GROW UP SO FAST: FINDING A HOME FOR OUR FILMS

2012-05-29T13:59:00.001-04:00

by Benjamin Stark

So, here we are. Two great films completed, and nowhere to put them.

That’s probably an overstatement. Let me back up.

I’m part of Wonder Mill Films. We’ve made two “southern” films, utilizing the DIY ethos. Our first film is the sci-fi (-ish) adventure film A GENESIS FOUND, which we shot in 2008. The next year, we shot the noir thriller THE NOCTURNAL THIRD. Both are well-crafted genre pieces with moderately intelligent ambitions, and we’re very proud of them... but, almost like parents hoping to be “empty nesters”, we at Wonder Mill are ready for them to get into the world, able to be stumbled upon and enjoyed by casual movie watchers.

It’s a good time for us - and myself, personally - to look back at the last five or six years. My senior year in college was a flurry of filmmaking activity, as I wrote and directed seven or so short films in a small amount of time. As a group, we produced about twelve. Since then, we’ve managed to produce another few shorts, as well as two feature-length movies. We’ve achieved all of this through putting our nose to the grindstone and staying busy, but now we find ourselves at that scary point where, really, all of our striving doesn’t create an assured result.

I think every modern independent filmmaker realizes I’m talking about distribution. There are hundreds of us: We’ve dredged our hearts, found our stories, inspired our actors, sweat the small stuff, fought the hard fights, and yet we still find our films with marginal audiences, our work having a hard time departing the nest of our circles of influence.

Although every stage of filmmaking is challenging, it seems that distribution is the toughest nut to crack, because there is no formula. We’ve been very aware of the potential audiences for both of our films, but in the end, we’re only a few people, and our films dare to dabble in fairly populist territory. How can our films compete with mainstream entertainment? I might not be exaggerating when I say that for every new digital cinema camera sensor that hits the market to help filmmakers gain an “industry standard” aesthetic, the market for qualifiedly mainstream entertainment gets more crowded. How is my community college valedictorian going to compete with the rich Harvard kid with the 2.0 GPA, anyway?

I digress. There is hope. First of all, as Jean Pierre Geuens reminds us in his brilliant book Film Production Theory, “the joy of thinking, creating, and assembling images and sounds that mean something is your own reward.” No one owes me anything. I don’t have to make films, I get to make films. Not only is there amazing technology out there that helped us craft great-looking movies, but there are also services out there like Kickstarter and Distribber.

On May 25th, we launched our first ever high-stakes crowd-funding campaign. With the help of indie film journeyman and crowd-funding consultant Lucas McNelly, we're using Kickstarter to raise about $6,000 so we can submit our films to Netflix Instant, Hulu Plus, and iTunes via Distribber. We also need some cash to screen the films at colleges in our area, hoping to share what we’ve learned with current film students, as well as learn what they’re learning right now. We’re currently between films, so it’s a great time to look back and revisit my experiences as a filmmaker thus far, while creating some sort of momentum going forward, as well as re-capturing the thrill of student filmmaking.

A social endeavor like a crowd-funding campaign is, to me, as adventurous and treacherous as a summer-long film shoot in a sweltering Alabama forest. If any of you readers have suggestions or tips for building an audience and generating buzz for our films, we’d greatly appreciate it. You can reach us on Twitter at @wondermillfilms or at wondermillfilms[at]yahoo.com!

I’m a natural director. I often feel anxious to move onto another project. But that would discount the hard work that our cast and crew have put into these films, and it would abandon the stories that we fought so hard to tell. If you’re a filmmaker, I’d encourage you to keep your head down and keep working at your story. You might eventually get to the point where someone else has to take it and run with it, but until then, it’s under your roof, and it’s your story. Give it a good home.

FC

2012-05-07T09:16:00.001-04:00

I went on Filmcourage for a wrap-up of AYWR. Check it out.

Filmmaker Lucas McNelly is spending a year on the road, volunteering on indie film projects around the country, documenting the process and the exploring the idea of a mobile creative professional. You can see more from A Year Without Rent at the webpage. His feature-length debut is now available to rent on VOD. Follow him on Twitter: @lmcnelly.

Day 3 of Brea Grant's BEST FRIENDS FOREVER

2012-03-30T13:05:00.001-04:00

We need a different desolate section of highway for Day 3 of BEST FRIENDS FOREVER, one we haven't seen in the first two days, and so we load up the grip truck (minus the picture car) and drive southwest out of town until all you can see is the emptiness of the road for miles and miles in every direction.

It's about a mile and a half away. You could walk there rather easily.

Such is life in Marfa, Texas.

We're shooting a scene where Brea Grant and Vera Miao walk down the middle of a highway, and while we've got permits to shoot on this stretch of road, we don't exactly have the road blocked off from traffic, mostly because there isn't any. Oh sure, a car comes through every half hour or so, but you can see it well in advance, and it doesn't even qualify as being urgent enough to cut a take short. It's a simple walk-and-talk, think Aaron Sorkin in the middle of nowhere, which means that all we've really got to do is bounce some light around.

Enter the 12x frame with some unbleached muslin.

There's no point in putting it on a stand, as we've got to move it as they walk, and we don't want to put more in the road than we have to, so all we really have to do is walk with it and make sure the wind doesn't pick up and turn it into a sail.

It's a two person job. We have four people, which leaves plenty of time to do housekeeping tasks like figuring out how to best organize the grip truck and taking photos of various crew members looking like desperadoes. Because if you were there, you would want a photo of you looking like a desperado.

In-between takes, I jump in and take some publicity stills, as this is a picturesque spot and kind of mimics the poster concept they're working off of.

Then, by lunch we're done and it's back over to the rest area we filmed at yesterday for the second half of today's shoot. Phil and I swing by the house to pick up the picture car, and then we're off.

We have to finish up the scenes with the hipsters, which requires further use of our stunt coordinator, Robbie Corbett.

I'm not sure how much I'm supposed to talk about the specifics of the stunt, but let's just say it involves the car and Robbie wearing clothes that don't fit. But here's the thing, a stunt involving a car is difficult (and dangerous, obviously). You've got to time everything just right or it'll look like shit. And that's hard enough if the car is a normal, functioning car that does things like start and run without stalling. But this car, the WAYNE'S WORLD AMC Pacer, is no normal car. It starts when it feels like it, and stalls more often than not. You would never, ever want this as a stunt car, unless the stunt involved pushing it off a cliff or blowing it up with a rocket launcher.

But that's the stunt car we have. And we need the shot, so we do our best.

It goes about as well as you could hope, all things considered. It doesn't help that the wind is whipping around at ungodly speeds, making it necessary to do things like stand on a c-stand because the sandbags just aren't strong enough. But even with all that wind, the winged insects are out, and they're friendly. Really, really friendly. Weirdly friendly.

Filmmaker Lucas McNelly is spending a year on the road, volunteering on indie film projects around the country, documenting the process and the exploring the idea of a mobile creative professional. You can see more from A Year Without Rent at the webpage. His feature-length debut is now available to rent on VOD. Follow him on Twitter: @lmcnelly.

Correctly Budgeting Your Crowdfunding Campaign

2012-03-15T10:07:00.002-04:00

The other day, I posted the results of a survey I'm working on as an on-going project to get a better sense of how perks are distributed across Kickstarter campaigns. I won't bore you with the details, but basically it's a survey of almost every successful Film & Video Kickstarter campaign since August of last year (it took a loooong time to finish). Then, I spit out the numbers, put them online, and went back to drinking.

Easy, right?

Well, what I forgot to factor in is that not everyone shares my affinity for statistics. You see, I'm kind of a stat nerd. I grew up obsessing over baseball statistics and pretty much taught myself Excel in high school as a means of winning my fantasy baseball league. I was always good at math. I took AP Calculus in high school and even considered minoring in Math for a bit. I minored in Writing instead. And Pre-Law.

Anyway, after posting the data, I kind of assumed that everyone would know what to do with it, but of course not everyone does. So, here we go. This might get a little nerdy. But it's worth it.

The first thing you need to understand is the concept of Expected Value (ooohhh…Probability Theory). I came across EV (that's what we call it) when I used to play poker for a living, where it's a really big deal.

EV in gambling kind of works like this: Let's say I offer you a bet. We'll roll a standard 6-sided dice. When "4" comes up, I'll pay you $6. When any other number comes up, you pay me $1. Do you take the bet? (Yes.) The reason you do is because if we do this 6 times (or 600), chances are that the "4" will come up once and you will make $6. But the other 5 numbers will also probably come up once each, and that'll cost you a total of $5. Ergo, you will net $1, so your Expected Value of that 1 throw of the dice is $0.17. Every single time we make that bet, you can expect to make $0.17, even though you never actually will make exactly that amount on a single bet. But you can't worry about the results of that 1 throw, because you can't control that. You can only control the decision you make with that 1 bet.

This comes up a lot in poker. Poker players play tens of thousands of hands a month, which means that the exact same situations come up a lot, especially stuff like flush and straight draws. Over enough time, the "luck" all evens out and that total EV will converge with your actual winnings. So you train yourself to not be so worried about one individual river card. Of course, if you're on ESPN and you're trying to win the World Series of Poker, the EV calculation changes and maybe you give up a positive EV situation to wait for a better one, since there's the risk of elimination.

You see this more than you think. Nate Silver (who used to post in the same poker forum I used to post in) of FiveThirtyEight uses this a lot (along with a number of other things). After a while, the whole world becomes a series of EV calculations.

So let's see how we're going to apply this to crowdfunding and Perk Distribution. Here's the numbers after 717 campaigns:

After that many campaigns, the average backer amount comes to $95.50, so if you're hoping to raise $15,000, you can expect to have 157.1 backers. Will you have that many? Probably not. You might have more. You might have less. But at the end of the day, this is the best estimate you've got. The rest is kind of easy. 7.15% of 157.1 is 11.2 and so on.

Then, you want to figure out what your perks are going to cost to fulfill. And here I'm just making up some numbers.

Remember, for total EV, your $25 backers are also your $50 backers and your $500 backers and so on. $$ Cost is the cost of fulfilling the perk. $$ EV is just the $$ Cost times the Total EV. Here you should spend roughly $117.64 fulfilling your $5 perk. Again, it might be more, it might be less. But on average it should come in around here.

So you want to raise $15K? Great. First of all, make sure you can actually get the film done for $15K. Then…

Amazon and Kickstarter take, on average, 8%. 8% of $15,000 is $1,200. Now we re-run the numbers for our new goal of $16,200. That takes our perk cost to $492.17. (I'm not going to re-post the image. You're smart enough to figure that out.) Let's call it an even $500. Now you're looking at $16,700. To be safe, let's make our new goal $17,000. That's your actual goal.

Of course, since we're dealing with percentages, everything else moves. Our fees back to Kickstarter and Amazon are now $1360.00 and our perks now cost $516.47, which leaves us $15,123.53 to make the movie. And if you've budgeted the film correctly, that's what you actually need. Had you gone with your original $15K, you would have actually gotten $13,344. I'm guessing your budget is tight enough already without having to cut over $1,600.

Lucas McNelly is a cynical filmmaker who recently spent a year sleeping on couches around the world and has somehow fallen into teaching people how to run crowdfunding campaigns. You can hire him, if you want to. Also, you should follow him on Twitter.

post

2012-03-14T11:51:00.001-04:00

One question I get a lot is what I'm going to do post-AYWR. Well, besides catching up on everything, I've kind of fallen into consulting as a way to make some actual $$, so that I can pay rent.

Read all about it here

Filmmaker Lucas McNelly is spending a year on the road, volunteering on indie film projects around the country, documenting the process and the exploring the idea of a mobile creative professional. You can see more from A Year Without Rent at the webpage. His feature-length debut is now available to rent on VOD. Follow him on Twitter: @lmcnelly.

Trailer for FAT KID RULES THE WORLD

2012-03-09T16:59:00.003-05:00

Filmmaker Lucas McNelly is spending a year on the road, volunteering on indie film projects around the country, documenting the process and the exploring the idea of a mobile creative professional. You can see more from A Year Without Rent at the webpage. His feature-length debut is now available to rent on VOD. Follow him on Twitter: @lmcnelly.

Too Soon?

2012-03-02T23:55:00.000-05:00

This is not nearly enough time before hitting the road again. Fuck. #AYWR
— Lucas McNelly (@lmcnelly) March 3, 2012

It's 11:36 pm. Right now I'm supposed to be on a Greyhound bus en route to New York City for DIY Days, a free conference for creatives that's one of the things I look forward to all year.

Literally at the last minute, I grabbed my bag and walked off the bus, eating a non-refundable ticket.

I just couldn't do it.

@marty_lang I'm at the greyhound station and I still don't know if I'm going.
— Lucas McNelly (@lmcnelly) March 3, 2012

Sure, a 7.5 hour bus trip across Pennsylvania isn't exactly a good time, but it's nothing I haven't done a dozen times before. But as I sat on the bus, it more and more felt like a terrible idea. I guess you could call it a panic attack. Maybe it was. Maybe it wasn't.

I'm *thisclose* to getting off this bus.
— Lucas McNelly (@lmcnelly) March 3, 2012

Maybe it just was too soon to do any traveling.

I'd like to think that if the bus wasn't full, or if Greyhound had provided the outlets they promised, or if the bus hadn't been scheduled to drop me off in Manhattan at 6am, giving me almost 4 hours to kill, then I probably would have been ok, but maybe not.

Maybe it's just a terrible idea to try and do something like that so soon.

@gregorybayne yeah but I'm going to have to travel overnight to do it. Not sure I have it in me right now.
— Lucas McNelly (@lmcnelly) March 2, 2012

All day I kind of knew it was a bad idea, and if my ticket was refundable, I probably wouldn't have even gotten to the bus station. I even tried to get it refunded at the counter before I got on the bus, but the Greyhound agent didn't seem to care. Eventually, I came to the realization that not only had I stopped caring about the ticket refund, but that'd I'd gladly pay money to not have to go. That's when I knew I had to walk off.

So I got the driver to open the door and got off the bus. He warned me that they were about to leave and I told him I didn't care. It was the most sure I'd been of anything all day.

It was absolutely the right move. And while it'll suck to miss DIY Days, it's worth it.

The second I walked off the bus it was like a weight was lifted. Sorry I can't be at @diydays, but hopefully people understand why.
— Lucas McNelly (@lmcnelly) March 3, 2012

I Slept Here #79: Santa Monica, CA

2012-03-02T13:45:00.001-05:00

The final couch.

Filmmaker Lucas McNelly is spending a year on the road, volunteering on indie film projects around the country, documenting the process and the exploring the idea of a mobile creative professional. You can see more from A Year Without Rent at the webpage. His feature-length debut is now available to rent on VOD. Follow him on Twitter: @lmcnelly.

I Slept Here #78: Echo Park, CA

2012-03-02T13:41:00.003-05:00

I Slept Here #77: Pasadena, CA

2012-03-02T13:39:00.001-05:00

I Slept Here #76: Salt Lake City, UT

2012-03-02T11:15:00.003-05:00

I Slept Here #75: Park City, UT

2012-03-02T11:13:00.003-05:00

I Slept Here #74: Purchase, NY

2012-03-02T11:08:00.003-05:00

Perk Distribution

2012-02-25T19:09:00.000-05:00

As of right now, this is over 500 successful film & video Kickstarter campaigns. It should update as more are added. Perks are grouped, when needed, into the correct bin (i.e. $25 perks include anything in the $20-$35 range).

Early thoughts:

+ Documentaries don't draw better than Narrative films. On the contrary, they do worse.

+ Is it easier to attract backers if your film is in the can? Not really.

+ The most popular perk level is clearly $25, right? Wrong. The most popular perk level is the DVD. When the DVD is, say, at $50, the spike in the graph is at $50, almost without fail.

+ The $750 perk is dead. So dead.

+ Campaigns that don't offer a single digit perk actually raise slightly less money than those that do, but they average 24 fewer backers. So by starting at $10, you're pretty much telling 24 people you don't want them around.

+ If you're thinking, "We need $20k, but we want to make sure we don't come up empty, so we'll ask for $10k and try to go way over...", it isn't going to work. You'll almost always end up below $12k.

At some point, I'm going to log more of these, but this should at least give you a better starting point for your next campaign.

If you want, I can break this down for you further. Email me (lmcnelly [at] gmail [dot] com) for more info.

Filmmaker Lucas McNelly is spending a year on the road, volunteering on indie film projects around the country, documenting the process and the exploring the idea of a mobile creative professional. You can see more from A Year Without Rent at the webpage. His feature-length debut is now available to rent on VOD. Follow him on Twitter: @lmcnelly.

I Slept Here #73: Purchase, NY

2012-02-20T20:54:00.003-05:00

2012-02-19T00:01:00.001-05:00

The Final Day

2012-02-18T14:22:00.000-05:00

This is the blog post where I'm supposed to get all teary-eyed and profound. Or, where I wow you with "One More Thing...". But I don't have any of that right now. There's no big, epic, raging party at the finish line, no balloons falling from the ceiling, no confetti, nothing grand at all. At least, not that I know of.

And that's totally fine.

I'm not even on a set today. I'm going to go down to Santa Monica and hang out with Dustin Pearlman and his couch will be the final AYWR couch. Simple as that.

But I think what gets lost a lot in talking about AYWR is how important the community has been in quite literally keeping this thing afloat. Ultimately, this is your project and a document of how you collectively operate. I'm just the guy going from place to place to see it first-hand.

So on this, the final day, I think it'd be better to hear from you. AYWR kind of lives on Twitter, so I'd love if you could tweet your reaction to the end of AYWR--good, bad, whatever. I'll collect as many as I can and add them to the bottom of this post.

Without you, AYWR doesn't work. Without you, it's nothing.

Thank you, from the bottom of my heart. It's been a hell of a year.

Tweet #AYWRfeb18

@lmcnelly's year has been an amazing achievement and a wonderful exhibition of independent filmmaking spirit at its best. #AYWRfeb18
— TheClapperBored (@TheClapperBored) February 18, 2012

I think AYWR has created connective tissue between all us #indiefilm makers around the world. We have a common thread now. #AYWRfeb18
— Marty Lang (@marty_lang) February 18, 2012

I also think AYWR has showed that it's not as hard as people think to help others make their films - and for them to help you. #AYWRfeb18
— Marty Lang (@marty_lang) February 18, 2012

But mostly, AYWR has conditioned me to accept random texts/phone calls from Lucas - and to keep my spare bedroom open. :) #AYWRfeb18
— Marty Lang (@marty_lang) February 18, 2012

AYWR is indeed a strange beast. Happy to have been part of it, happier I'm not @lmcnelly - he *must* be wrecked! Well done mate! #AYWRfeb18
— zahra (@fnafilms) February 18, 2012

There was something beautifully polarizing about #AYWRfeb18 seeing what floated what sank and why was better than film skool Thnx @lmcnelly
— Stefan Wrenshall (@IndieJoneser) February 18, 2012

I just clicked #AYWRfeb18 to see what'd happen. Now I'm embarrassed. Um YAY @lmcnelly - well done, good job. Santa Monica is my fave place.
— zahra (@fnafilms) February 18, 2012

@lmcnelly Thank you for connecting filmmakers throughout the world and sharing your experiences #AYWRfeb18
— Wolfgang Gumpelmaier (@gumpelmaier) February 18, 2012

If I am ever forced to trade or sell my futon for food, I will use the fact that "Lucas McNelly slept here" to try to get more $. #AYWRFeb18
— CaptainAwkwardDotCom (@CAwkward) February 18, 2012

I can't wait to see Lucas' IMDB page and all the credits therein! #AYWRfeb18
— Paul Osborne (@PaulMakesMovies) February 18, 2012

Well done! What a great place to end it. Santa Monica, where I met @fnafilms No regrets. #AYWRfeb18
— James DeMarco (@jazadal) February 18, 2012

Congrats to Lucas McNelly for wrapping #AYWRfeb18. Happy that FM was part of it. Was cool to watch the way it bobbed and weaved.
— Scott Macaulay (@FilmmakerMag) February 18, 2012

Sorta don't believe Lucas McNelly is already done with #AYWRfeb18. Where did my own year go?
— David Lowery (@davidlowery) February 18, 2012

I cannot believe @lmcnelly completed #AYWRfeb18today. I have at least two more films for him to work on for free.
— Wonder Russell (@bellawonder) February 18, 2012

We've had an incredibly honest look at the realities behind independent film, which will reveal more as information is collated. #AYWRfeb18
— Leilani Holmes (@momentsoffilm) February 18, 2012

Learned alot watching from the sidelines & frontlines @FlywayFilmFest & @filmcourage. Your journey's just begun. #whataride #AYWRfeb18
— Elizabeth Karr (@elizabethkarr) February 18, 2012

. @lmcnelly's social media film experiment was the best glimpse into the changing landscape of DIY film we've had. #AYWRfeb18
— Wonder Russell (@bellawonder) February 18, 2012

I am now two degrees away from an international community of filmmakers simply because I bought @lmcnelly a burger. #AYWRfeb18
— Curt Hendley (@chendle) February 18, 2012

also, I have a T-shirt with a Sasquatch on it that I wear at least once a week no matter what the weather's like. #AYWRfeb18
— Curt Hendley (@chendle) February 18, 2012

Give myself and @lmcnelly about two years, and perhaps we'll both have correlating sequels. #AYWRfeb18
— mattson tomlin (@mattsontomlin) February 19, 2012

@lmcnelly killed it, connecting filmmakers far and wide.What a trip it was to follow it online, then have him show up at my door #AYWRfeb18
— Michael Babiarz (@mikebabz) February 19, 2012

Congrats to @lmcnelly for surviving a year of being a professional indie film hobo! May your bindle always be well tied. #AYWRfeb18
— Noah J Nelson (@areyouthatguy) February 19, 2012

@lmcnelly met and got to work with @breagrant.Do I really have to say anything else? :-) #AYWRfeb18Seriously tho, what an achievement!
— Tzuriel Kastel (@audiowizard25) February 19, 2012

With @lmcnelly travelling, the global world of #indie #filmmaking has become as flat as never before #AYWRfeb18
— spoxx (@spoxx) February 19, 2012

Doing #AYWR and not just talking about it encapsulates the spirit of true indie film.Excited to see what @lmcnelly does next #AYWRfeb18
— Richard C Jones (@richardo) February 19, 2012

Cant believe #AYWRfeb18 is over... Congrats @lmcnelly for surviving, hope you can adapt back to normal life now lol
— Tina Frank (@Art_Dept_Tina) February 19, 2012

A Very Short Crowdfunding Survey

2012-02-17T14:47:00.000-05:00

Let's get some numbers. The results are updating below as the data does. The more surveys we get, the more accurate the numbers, so add yours.

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Updated (with a chart!)

Filmmaker Lucas McNelly is spending a year on the road, volunteering on indie film projects around the country, documenting the process and the exploring the idea of a mobile creative professional. You can see more from A Year Without Rent at the webpage. His feature-length debut is now available to rent on VOD. Follow him on Twitter: @lmcnelly.

Day 2 of Brea Grant's BEST FRIENDS FOREVER

2012-02-10T14:11:00.000-05:00

It takes about 30 seconds out on the plains of West Texas at sunrise to understand why Willie Nelson wrote so many songs about them. To call the colors "stunning" would be an understatement. It reminds me a little of when I drove through Montana earlier in the year, only it's more vibrant somehow. Maybe it's the scope you get from the big windshield of the grip truck. Or maybe it's something different about the humidity in the Texas air, but it's hard to fathom the sunrise until you see it first-hand. As we drive to set, it's just twenty minutes of Phil Matarrese and I with our jaws on the dashboard.

Today we're shooting at a different picnic area, one that's up against a hill overlooking miles and miles of nothing.

There aren't very many characters in BEST FRIENDS FOREVER other than our two leads, but today we're filming a scene where they encounter three hipster (played by Kit Williamson, Alex Fernie, and Alex Berg). Their characters are kind of assholes, to put it lightly.

We set the 12x12 back up with the unbleached muslin and then Phil puts Billy MacCartney and I on a project involving some more muslin. We're going to be bouncing light around a lot with some 4x4 foam boards, but Phil isn't happy with the light he's getting from them. So he has Billy and I create a dirty muslin for him. Basically, we cover it in reddish dirt. This sounds really easy--dump some dirt on a cloth and you're done. But, the ground is completely dry. It'll make the muslin dirty, but not dirty enough to make a difference. You really have to grind it in. So what you end up with is Billy and I standing on a 4x4 cut of muslin, scraping our sneakers on it over and over again like we're trying not to track mud through the house, making sure the dirt is really in there. Then, we gaff tape the muslin to one side of the foam board and just like that we've got another option for bouncing a dirtier light.

The 12x12 has to go inside a rock formation where the main action of this scene is taking place. It fits, more or less, but it's really windy out and there's a worry that if the wind whips in through the rocks just right, it'll turn into a sail and potentially hurt someone. There's no room to drive in a stake, so Phil and Ellie Ann Fenton come up with the idea to tie it to a picnic table on the other side of a boulder, effectively using the boulder and the table (which has been cemented into the ground) to keep everything safe.

Then, it's time to do a stunt.

Robbie Corbett, our stunt man, is something of a parkour expert, and in-between showing Vera Miao and one of the Alex'es the steps of their stunt, he'll randomly hop up a rock wall, just because. The run it over and over again--quarter speed, half speed, a little faster each time--while they figure out the best place to put the landing pad mattress among a pile of rocks.

With something like this, normally you'd shoot it over and over again until you got it perfectly. You'd shoot the rehearsals, everything really. Maybe even the half-speed stuff to see how it reads on camera. But BEST FRIENDS FOREVER has to be a little stingy because we're shooting it on real, actual film. Super 16mm, to be exact.

I've never actually worked on anything other than digital before. It's pretty cool.

And this is not a big budget film, by any stretch of the imagination. So conserving film stock is of the utmost importance, even more so when you consider that we're at least 3 hours from any airport in West Texas. If we need more film, it's not going to be easy to acquire.

So we rehearse and rehearse and rehearse. Brea Grant's not in this scene, so she can take more of a normal director approach, and the camera team has a handicap they've rigged up to record from the Super 16 camera as a video assist for Brea to watch playback on. They tweak the blocking until everyone's happy and then it's time to burn one. It goes smoothly, so the process is repeated for all the coverage.

Meanwhile, Billy and Ellie Ann are building some dolly track for a shot later in the sequence, staying ahead whenever possible. For some reason, our dolly doesn't have a normal push bar, so Billy has decided to construct one out of a bunch of gobo heads and arms. It's kind of like the Rat King of gobos.

Speaking of disgusting creatures, this picnic area has the most aggressive flies any of us have ever seen. At lunch they're everywhere, and they don't give a fuck what you do. Swat at them and they don't even move. You can kill dozens of them if you want. Hell, Billy even manages to get one to stay on his finger and shoulder, like a pet bird. It's weird and a little bit creepy.

And then comes the picture car.

The picture car didn't start earlier today. That took awhile to fix while everyone was setting up. And now it won't start when we need to shoot with it. Thing is, we need it to run on camera. We can't just have this car conveniently sitting in the right spot every time it's in the film. It need to move. We need it to be able to drive in and out of shots. Mike Myers got it to run, but it's proving to be a little more finicky for us.

Eventually Shannon gets it to work and we're able to film the scene. A bunch of books get dumped on the pavement. The car works (sort of), and we're done.

We drive back as the sun goes down. It's beautiful, although it doesn't feel as fantastic as the sunrise. Maybe we're just tired.

Filmmaker Lucas McNelly is spending a year on the road, volunteering on indie film projects around the country, documenting the process and the exploring the idea of a mobile creative professional. You can see more from A Year Without Rent at the webpage. His feature-length debut is now available to rent on VOD. Follow him on Twitter: @lmcnelly.

I Slept Here #72: Waldoboro, ME

2012-02-06T11:57:00.002-05:00

Day 1 of Brea Grant's BEST FRIENDS FOREVER

2012-02-05T10:34:00.000-05:00

Most films I work on don't have a picture car, in the usual definition. Sure, there's cars in the film, but it's quite often the director's car, or at least the car of someone working on the production. But a real, actual picture car? Rented from a company that rents such things? Almost never.

Actually, scratch that. Never. It's never happened. I think.

Here we've got one, but not just any car, but the car from WAYNE'S WORLD. The actual car. If you want to see a bunch of jaded crew members getting instantly giddy, tell them they're leaning up against a iconic vehicle that was in a film they grew up watching. It's the filmmaker version of being in Oprah's audience.

Thing is, the car won't start. At all.

Which is how you end up in the freezing cold of dawn's first light in Marfa, Texas with four women attempting to fix a 1976 AMC Pacer while four men watch, completely helpless. Best Boy Grip Billy MacCartney offers to call his Dad, but no one's sure how helpful that'll be.

It's quite the sight--four men (five if you count Lonestar purring at our feet) watching four women try and fix a car. Shannon Deane sets her sound gear down to hold open something under the hood while Key Grip Ellie Ann Fenton revs the engine.

Or, to quote Gaffer Phil Matarrese, "it's kind of hot".

Eventually they get it started and we load the car back on the trailer so that the grip truck can tow it to the location.

Marfa is a small town. And while it can be tricky to film in a small town way out of the plains of West Texas, you can easily drive 20 minutes (or less) in any direction and be in the absolute middle of nowhere with nothing in view for miles. It's beyond desolate, which is perfect for BEST FRIENDS FOREVER, an apocalyptic road movie. The less we can see, the better.

We start off my shooting at a sparse picnic area at the intersection of three highways. We pull in the grip truck and a bunch of cars, but there's nothing to hide them behind for shooting, so Phil talks to DP Michelle Lawler and Brea about which direction everything will be looking to start the day. It's one of those locations where at various points we're going to want to see in every direction, but moving cars and gear is a major hassle, so if we can shoot everything that goes in one direction first, we can re-load the truck and move everything over to the other side of the picnic area.

It's a small thing, but a reassuring one nonetheless. It shows that people are thinking more than an hour ahead.

For BEST FRIENDS FOREVER, I'm the Best Boy Electric. We've got a G&E team of four people: Myself, Phil, Billy, and Ellie Ann. We start unloading the truck. There's a lot of sun so Phil wants to break out the 12x12 bounce as our primary lighting trick. It's versatile, accomplishes a lot, and doesn't require any electricity, which is important, because we don't have any.

We get to work setting it up and I get a crash course in tying knots that I didn't get in the 2 days I was in Boy Scouts. I know what you're thinking: how do I still not know how to tie the correct knots? I don't know. I'm bad at knots. My father has shown me at least 50 times how to change the oil in my car and I couldn't tell you any of the steps beyond figuring out how many miles I've driven since my last oil change. My brain just doesn't work like that, I guess. But I can tell you small details from this Red Sox game I went to in 1996. By the way, if you get the right seats at a game, you can really see a knuckleball dance.

It's pretty windy, so we drive a stake into the ground and tie the bounce to that. Or, we tie it to whatever is nearby that isn't moving, whatever is the combination of easiest and safest. Mostly we just move that around, as needed. There's not a ton we can do with sun in wide-open spaces other than bounce light and flag as needed.

After a bit, Stacey Storey shows up with a RV she acquired somehow to serve as our mobile green room (and bathroom facilities). The story behind it is suspicious, in a Jerry Springer sort of way, and if I'd written down more details, I'd recount it here.

As the day moves along, we have to move the grip truck and the RV to the other side of the picnic area. Most of the things we've got out are on wheels and the rest get temporarily ratcheted down so nothing breaks.

There's a bit of a stunt involving falling on a mattress (the mattress I slept on last night), and the normal battle against the fading light. We wrap and pack up the truck as the sun sets, cracking open some cans of Lonestar in celebration. And when we get back to the house, Lonestar the cat is there to greet us.

Filmmaker Lucas McNelly is spending a year on the road, volunteering on indie film projects around the country, documenting the process and the exploring the idea of a mobile creative professional. You can see more from A Year Without Rent at the webpage. His feature-length debut is now available to rent on VOD. Follow him on Twitter: @lmcnelly.

I Slept Here #71: Hartford, CT

2012-02-02T12:44:00.001-05:00

Day 5 of Nicolas Citton's DECORATION

2012-02-01T14:43:00.000-05:00

You know how some people think that the day changes when the clock strikes midnight? You're walking around with them and at 11:59pm they say Tuesday and at 12:01am they say Wednesday, and even though they're technically right, it's really confusing? When I used to work a graveyard shift, there was a guy who did that every day and it drove everyone nuts.

Well Day 5 of DECORATION started at 12:30am. At least, the story of it did.

I'm on the couch in the living room, winding down to sleep. The lights are off. Nicolas comes into the living room and tells me that they won't need me for tomorrow's shoot. And then he leaves.

Um…ok.

I try to sleep, but that kind of gets your mind racing.

I often say that there's a better version of A Year Without Rent that involves a camera crew following me around because I can only capture a fraction of what happens, but they wouldn't have been able to capture that unless they had set up a camera rig to record absolutely everything. And I don't know that they would have been set up at 6 something in the morning when Nicolas comes back in, this time more combative, to really give me a piece of his mind.

Of course, I'm barely awake. In retrospect I should have discretely turned on the audio recorder on my iPhone, but I don't remember to do a lot of things before I've had any coffee. But here's the basics.

+ Nicolas, who doesn't have a Twitter account, is mad about some tweets I sent from set. He doesn't know what they are, exactly, but he's heard about them from someone else. You've seen some of them if you've read the rest of the DECORATION posts.

+ He "doesn't care what I write", but his concern is that what I'm Tweeting is affecting the morale of the crew. That's a fair concern. In this case, it might be unfounded, since the tweet he seems to be talking about was pretty obviously a joke about how I couldn't believe someone in the crew hadn't seen a certain classic film. Or he had never had a bloody mary. I forget which.

And there was one sent to someone that said the film I was on wasn't going well. That should have been a DM.

+ Not only does he not care what I write, but has, by his own admission, no idea what A Year Without Rent is, and he doesn't care. You'll remember from Day 1 that this isn't a film I approached. They approached me. For the writer, director, and producer of a film of this size to not have any idea who the press person they've asked to come on set is (or what he's doing there), is stunning. This is not a large production, by any stretch of the imagination. And this is not the first production in AYWR. What I do is pretty well-established by this point, both the blog writing (like this) and the tweets from set. Like, for example, Paul Osborne's FAVOR, which Cheryl Nichols worked on.

If you seek me out, ask me to come to the middle of Arkansas (on AYWR's dime), and don't know what I'm going to do on your set, that's 100% your fault. It's not like I happened to be in Arkansas and stopped by on a whim. And it's not like I'm doing anything I didn't do on FAVOR.

+ He's upset that I haven't even bothered to read the script, which is something he requires everyone to do, because everyone needs to be on the same page and have the same passion for the project.

From what I can tell, the script has changed nearly every day.

No one has given me a script. When I point that out, his demeanor changes considerably.

+ It's a long conversation. Really long. Cheryl comes in and expresses her concerns, but it boils down to one thing: I shouldn't be helping this film. The director doesn't want me there, and AYWR functions best when the filmmakers are willing participants, which is something that I assumed would be the case from the initiative they showed in asking me to drive 833 miles to get there.

Thing is, I'm not leaving. They're on the schedule and I'm in the middle of fucking Arkansas. If this was LA or Seattle or New York, that's one thing, but I don't know anyone in Arkansas. So I offer to read the script, and that placates him. Sort of.

And they have some valid points about the nature of AYWR and what value it actually provides, because it varies from film to film. But the process doesn't, and when you approach someone, you need to know what you're getting. Is AYWR a good fit for every film? No. But it's your project. You know what AYWR is and your should know what your project needs and requires. That's your responsibility. Otherwise, you're just wasting everyone's time.

Once the day does actually start (late), we head to a cemetery to shoot the titular Decoration Festival.

I've searched Google a couple of times looking for information about the Decoration Festival, and have found nothing, so I'll have to rely on the film's IndieGoGo page: "the town's sons and daughters return to celebrate the lives of ancestors buried in the cemetery."

Apparently it's a big deal.

We get to the cemetery and it looks like, well, a cemetery. Ten or so locals show up to serve as extras, and a skeleton crew walks around the cemetery with them while the rest of us kill time by attempting to play baseball with an orange wrapped in tape and making a swing out of some rope and a gobo arm. There's not a whole lot else to do.

So they didn't really need me after all, but I don't think that's the point.

Eventually, they come back.

What's they've found out from this excursion with the locals is that the festival isn't something they're prepared to fake. It's elaborate, with lots of flowers and, well, decorations all over the cemetery. The whole town comes out. To do it like this would look terrible. So the new plan is to push that scene to the actual festival--in the spring.

Keep in mind, the movie is named after this festival. They know what this festival entails.

It's not the first thing they've pushed. I've seen them reschedule a couple of Arkansas interior scenes to shoot in LA, but this is a pretty big shift. It's a hard thing to shoot around, it being kind of important. Not to mention the fact that they're going to have to match fall exteriors with spring exteriors, and the leaves have definitely changed already. They either have to use what little they got today and make it work in post, or they have to come back in the spring, which brings up a whole host of potential problems with continuity.

I can't imagine they'll ask me to join them in the spring.

Filmmaker Lucas McNelly is spending a year on the road, volunteering on indie film projects around the country, documenting the process and the exploring the idea of a mobile creative professional. You can see more from A Year Without Rent at the webpage. His feature-length debut is now available to rent on VOD. Follow him on Twitter: @lmcnelly.

Johnathan McFarlane on the Festivus Film Festival

2012-01-30T11:03:00.000-05:00

by Johnathan McFarlane

ED NOTE: After Kris and Lindy Boustedt's wrap-up of the Festivus Film Festival, festival director (and long-time friend) Johnathan McFarlane emailed me with a clarification. I invited him to write up the festival from his perspective. Enjoy.

It's hard to believe it's year 5 already. I was able to sleep in until about 8am, which is an incredible contrast to the first few years where panic would set in around 4am and I'd have to get up and get moving. That's usually how the first day of the festival goes for a fest director. Panic and utter terror. Nervousness. Anticipation. But as you rack up the years under your belt, it gets better and easier. You learn to harness the chaos that is directing a film festival. You build a staff that you trust, so that you can delegate responsibilities. That alone allows you to do a better job at the things that you can't delegate to anybody else. It still shocks me when I think back to that first year. Tim DeMasters (the other founder) and I had absolutely no idea what we were doing. All we knew was that we were overwhelmingly disappointed by our own experiences on the festival circuit, and decided we wanted to fix that. Or at least fix it in our own town, Denver, which at the time had only one major festival, the not-so-indie juggernaut that is the Starz Denver International Film Festival. Running a film festival is a learning process, a process of trial and error, failure and success, adaptation to your audience, creating a brand. With so many festivals out there today, and new ones popping up every single year, we knew we needed to create something unique. How many film festivals can you think of that have a film reel in their logo? Way too many. Or how about festivals that advertise a "red carpet gala?" Yawn. Even many minor festivals that have no presence and no reputation will do their best to raise the hype on some F-list celebrity that they've convinced to show up. Boring. It's been done. So that's how the Skull and film strip Crossbones came about. With that logo we wanted to say, "we're different, we're awesome, and we're edgy." Maybe none of that was true the first year, but fake it 'till you make it! Since year 1 we added a 4th day to the festival, have been slowly able to attract bigger and better sponsors, have re-built our website numerous times, added a filmmaker lounge open for the duration of the fest, turned our LLC into a 501(c)(3) non profit, expanded and refined our selection process, grew our all-volunteer staff from about 10-25, and created a board of directors, just to name a few of the changes. Yet when something is your passion, your baby, you're still never happy. That's how Festivus Film Fest is. We are always trying to come up with the next step in the evolution of the festival. Which brings us back to year 5; Our most recent measurement of success.

Day 1, (Thursday) started off well. Trever Alters (our hospitality director), and Chris McFarlane (my brother and Trever's right hand man) got to work bright and early shuttling filmmakers from the airport to the Curtis Hotel in our two 15-passenger vans. Assisting them were our squadron of filmmaker liaisons. Every filmmaker is assigned to one, and that person is their "go-to" person for the entirety of their stay here in Denver. Miss the shuttle and need a ride to the venue? Trying to find a good spot to eat near the hotel? Where is the best after-hours club to go when we aren't ready to call it a night? Your liaison is there to help you with all that and more. About noon we had another 10 of us meet at the Bug Theatre and across the street at the Next Art Gallery to start setup for our opening night. We rotate venues for both screenings and the lounge, but on Day 1 and Day 4 they are at the Bug Theatre and the Next Art Gallery, respectively. The Red Bull crew showed up about the same time to help set up the lounge (Red Bull is our biggest sponsor). They provide cool high-top tables, a bar, refrigerator, and a ton of Red Bull product. Then we set up the 10' x 8' photo backdrop, Festivus logo gobo light and sandwich boards. That and all the other minor things to be done take a few hours, but by around 3pm the lounge is pretty much set. After hanging our signage and checking discs at the Bug, we're pretty much ready to go there too. Que local artist Eric Matelski to come in and start his chalk art in front of the venue. He does a great job painting a really stylized version of the Festivus logo, and people get a kick checking it out as they start to show up. The first screening is at 6:45pm, and by 5:00 we already have our first big problem. The theatre doesn't have a working HDMI cable to connect their blu ray player to the projector. It was supposed to show up earlier in the day, but apparently UPS was running late. 3 of us get on the phone and start scrambling, trying to track down a cable. Not easy when you're trying to find one that's 75' long. Luck is on our side though! A Bug employee shows up with the cable at about 5:45. Great, we should be all set. Except we're not. The blu ray player won't recognize the cable. We plug in the backup blu ray player that I brought from home for emergencies. Still no good, which tells us it's not the blu ray player or cable, but actually the projector. It's about 6:20 now, and we have to move to the very unfavorable backup plan: using the RCA outs. Essentially we won't be able to project in hi def. We break the news to filmmaker J.T. Gurzi who is behind our opening film, HEAVEN STREWN. He's obviously unhappy. So are we. Filmmakers expect us to provide a certain level of quality, and in this case we've let him down. The film didn't look horrible, but the picture just wasn't as sharp as it should have been. Nevertheless, the audience was very engaged and the Q&A was healthy, and nobody other than us film geeks complained about the projection. Despite J.T.'s protests we comped one of his room night's at the Curtis. It was the least we could do. The rest of the night went smoothly. The short block which followed J.T.'s film was extremely strong, and got a very positive response. Maybe because shorts are perfect for our short attention span, nobody noticed that the projection was not as crisp as it should have been. For the most part it looked good. The lounge was busy throughout the night, and passholders were slamming back plenty of Red Bull/vodkas, Buffalo Trace Whiskey, and beer (all free in the lounge, of course.) After the second (and final) screening of the night was over and folks were heading to the afterparty, I had a chat with Alex, the owner/operator of the Bug Theatre. He told me the projector was 7 years old, and I was stunned. It might as well be 100 years old. He promised to have a brand new one for Saturday, when we had 3 more screenings at the Bug. The afterparty at Forest Room 5 was a lot of fun. The filmmakers all mixed well together, and our DJ did a great job keeping the party going. Dan Meinerz and Christine Swerdozki (our Red Bull reps) were both there, and they were having a blast. Let's be honest- this is a business, and keeping your funding sources happy is an important part of it.

1 day down, 3 to go. Up next is Friday, where we are at the Oriental Theater, our much bigger venue, seating 250. Our lounge manager Dan Ito has a few volunteers with him and he's hard at work getting the lounge set up at Sellar's Space, another art gallery next to the Oriental. The Oriental has a huge screen, even bigger than most standard sized movie theaters. But their projector is not very good, and we need an HDCam deck there as well. Ceavco is the company that takes care of our video console and projection at the Oriental. We get a beautiful, bright picture off a great Sharp projector they brought in, and the content coming off the HDcam tapes looks incredible. The blu ray masters look great too. The signage gets hung, and for our first row of seating we have giant bean bag chairs. Who else does that? The place looks great. All we need now are people. Historically, our second block on Friday (8:45) is one of our busiest, with the first usually having healthy attendance as well. This year was no different. We had about 125 for the first film, a feature called CELLMATES starring Tom Sizemore, and over 200 for our second block, Laugh Track Comedy Shorts. We took things a different direction for our comedy shorts block this year. They were all comedy, no doubt, but very dark comedy. It was an experiment, to see how our audience would react. The feedback was mixed. Some people absolutely loved it, and others didn't quite get it. But that's what programming a fest is about- anticipating your audiences' tastes and interests, and then playing with them, throwing them curveballs, switching it up, challenging them. One of our board members, Nathaniel Eyde, had convinced Donald Zuckerman to come to the Laugh Track block with him. Donald Zuckerman is the head of the state film commission. He doesn't really have the ability to give us money directly, but he can connect us to the people that can. Having him there was a big deal, and I was honestly a little worried how he would take our dark humor programming. After the block was finished Nathaniel pulled me aside. "He gets it," he told me. Zuckerman liked the block. He liked the setup (especially the bean bag chairs), and was impressed by the attendance. I don't really know what that means for the festival, if anything, but it gave me a boost. After the block was over our band Wire Faces hopped on stage to rock out the afterparty, which was actually there at the Oriental that night. In the past we'd had a lot of trouble booking bands. At first we would pay them a flat rate, but then they don't have any motivation to promote the show. Then we tried paying 50% of their standard rate, plus giving them 50% of the door. Still no help from the band's side. Turns out musicians can be really lazy when they know they have a guaranteed paycheck. So this time around Wire Faces agreed to play for 100% of the door. No guaranteed deposit or anything. They played a great show, fast and furious, and the crowd loved it. Things were winding down around 12:30, and so I was able to get home and get to bed that night about 1:30am. I think that's the earliest I've ever gone to bed during Festivus. Is that a sign? Should I be doing something else? Am I forgetting something? I hoped not, and was able to get some solid sleep leading into Saturday, which is by far our longest and most difficult day.

On Saturdays we run screenings at both the Bug and the Oriental. The first screening at the bug is at 2:00, so I get there around noon to help get things organized. The signage from Thursday is still up so there isn't a whole lot of setup. I was overjoyed to see that Alex had kept to his word, and purchased a new projector. We fired it up and tested out the discs for the Experimental block, and it looked beautiful. Very crisp and bright. On Saturdays, Tim and I divide and conquer. He leads the crew over at the Bug, while I lead things over at the Oriental. He's the only other person in the world I'd trust to do the job, at least at this point in the festival. I helped some of the crew get the door set up for the day, and then it was over to the Oriental, to prep for our 3:45 world premiere of Lilith. For me, this was a big one. Not only was it a world premiere, but we had actress Julia Voth attending. She made waves as the basis for Jill Carpenter in the Resident Evil video games, and more recently starred in BITCH SLAP. It makes me a little nervous that she's there, as I am very well aware that 3:45pm is not a good slot for a horror film. When we were putting together the final program the decision was either to not play it at all, or play it in that spot, and we made the decision to go for it. Unfortunately there was a big X-factor on Saturday that we had no control over. Surprisingly enough, the Broncos had actually beaten the Steelers the weekend before and made it to the second round of the playoffs. This meant that essentially we were competing with the Broncos for our audience. Not easy to do, especially in football-obsessed Denver. But, like I said, nothing we could do. When we kicked off the film I was a bit dis-heartened by attendance. For such a big movie that we had pushed so hard (lots of press coverage, special promotions, etc), we only had 55 people in the audience. Basically, we got Tebowed. Luckily the people that attended were very interested and engaged, and the Q&A with Julia after the film went great. People had good questions. We didn't get the quantity I wanted for that block, but we got the quality. I checked that one off in the schedule and moved on. Next block was our Twisted Tales shorts, and it was a strong, weird block. Exactly what people were looking for. Attendance was very good, about 175, and the Q&A was fantastic. On stage we had a filmmaker all the way from Germany, one from Holland, and a talented young student filmmaker. All three would go on to win awards later that night. Checking in with Tim throughout the day it sounded like things were going well over at the Bug. Good attendance and happy filmmakers. There was a film in the experimental block called WIGGAH that was extremely controversial, but hey, we're pushing the envelope. Final block on Saturday night at the Oriental was a feature film called SEARCHING FOR SONNY. This spot, 8pm on Saturday night, is the premiere slot in the entire fest. It's where we put our best feature. SEARCHING FOR SONNY was no different. Starring Minka Kelly, Jason Dohring, Masi Oka, it was a fantastic cast, and it was incredible to see them in what truly was an indie film (which we discovered during the Q&A with producer Red Sanders. Great production stories!) Now we had our second "issue" of the fest start to bother me around 8pm. The Broncos game was still going, and the space we had booked for our awards party was still packed to the brim with Broncos fans. Okay no problem. The game will be over by 9pm, and they'll boot everybody out right away. But that was not so. When our crew got there at 9 to start setting up for our 10:30 party start time, the place was still packed and Broncos fans were line dancing on our dance floor. I got a call from the venue assuring me they would get everybody out and it would be fine, but it wasn't. I tried to stretch as long as possible on the Q&A to give the party-starters as much time as possible to get set up. When I got there around 11:00pm, the transition from Broncos to Festivus was just about complete. It was an awkward transition, but for the most part I don't think the Festivus fans noticed. I had it out with the sound guy who in my opinion was completely incompetent, and had to argue with the manager to have the lights turned down to an appropriate party-level, but eventually everything worked out. The party was a blast, the awards ceremony was a blast, and the flock of people in front of the step-and-repeat was testimony to the party. Our favorite local faux-German supergroup Total Ghost performed, and the crowd loved them. Now when they turned on the lights and it was time to shuffle everyone out, most festivals would call it a night. It was 1:45am, after all. Not us though. All the filmmakers hopped in the shuttle to be carted off to the after-afterparty. I was too exhausted, and headed home. I heard a lot of stories though, and the shuttle didn't leave the after-afterparty until 5:30am. When I got home at 2:30am, my wife told me it was "the most fun night of Festivus ever!" I trust my wife, so I'll believe her.

3 down, only 1 left. We get the lounge gear back over to Next Art Gallery to get set for our final day. The Bug is pretty much ready since we used it the day before. All the staffers are tired, but we're excited as well. Everybody has been happy so far, and despite a few minor setbacks, the fest has been smooth. Sunday is always a bit of a rally though. Good thing Red Bull is a sponsor because at that point that's how most of us are still running. We only have three blocks today, 3:00, 5:00, and 7:00. The first is a mixed short block we titled Rehab Shorts. It's actually a really strong block, with everything from comedy to zombie. Attendance was mid-range. Maybe 50 people or so. That's not bad for early afternoon on a Sunday. 5:00 was the world premiere of an Australian black comedy called BLOCKHOUSE BLUES. Attendance was light, about 30 people. It's a shame, because it was a fantastic movie, and very well received by the people that were there. I would have expected better. My Dad showed up for that one, and he loved it. Finally, it's the last block of the festival. The Locals Only block. We put it last because we want to finish with a sold-out block, and this one is sold out every time. 10 films, all local, and the filmmakers basically promote the block for us. Of course, we also want the filmmakers to see that we do support local films, as much as possible. The Q&A was a little crowded. With 10 films thats 10 filmmakers on stage, and even a few that decide it's necessary for them to have an actor or producer with them as well. But what can we do- it's their moment to get the recognition they deserve, so we let them have it. After the Q&A I hop up on stage for the last time of the season. Say thank yous, goodbyes, please come back next year. I keep it short. There is a very low-key afterparty at the Corner Office (inside the Curtis Hotel) and I know everybody wants to get there. I finish up my speech and people mingle and chat for a while as they slowly shuffle out of the theater. It's over, the last screening of our 5th season. As I sit by myself on the front of the stage I try to just soak it in. The inevitable post-fest depression will hit soon. I know it's coming. It's a very, very real thing, that everybody in the core group of staffers experiences. You almost don't know what to do with yourself. Imagine that something is the focus, the epicenter of your life for about 8 months. When it's finally over, you feel lost. I've heard of staffer's even crying the day after the fest.

We pack up all our gear and signage and head over to the Corner Office. I'm by myself in my car, which is stuffed full of Festivus "equipment." This last hoorah is very relaxed. Nothing to set up, nothing to break down. We just show up, relax, chat, exchange info with all the new friends we've made, and call it a wrap. When I walk in I look around the room, and out of nowhere everybody turns to face me. They applaud. They "get it." And despite the stress, the mistakes, the obstacles we had to overcome, I know that we have been a part of something truly great.

Some stats:
From year 1 to year 5 our budget has tripled
This year we had filmmakers from Australia, England, Germany, Canada, Switzerland, Netherlands, and of course all over the U.S.
Our crop of attending filmmakers was more than ever, 45+, with nearly 60% of the films represented by a filmmaker
Attendance has gone up every year, with year 5 being no different
We had 13 world premieres this year, including 2 that were features
Advertising included 4 billboards, 2 half page print ads, 5000 flyers, 200+ posters, Facebook ads, and "e-blasts"

Johnathan McFarlane is the director of the Festivus Film Festival. He also directed the feature documentary PROJECT CANADA. He and his wife Erika are newlyweds.