Here are a few tips to build your marketing campaign as you move through this year’s competition.

BUILD AN OFFICIAL WEBSITE

Once you have a title, set up an official website for your film.  An official website, rather than just a Facebook or Myspace presence, lends credibility to your project – it tells the world (and the media) that your film should be taken seriously. It’s cheaper, and easier, than you might think.

The first step here is to find a web hosting service that’s both cheap and offers cPanel.  cPanel is a backend tool set to automatically install and configure many different types of websites.  Two great examples are HostGator and HostMonster – both offer cPanel and have hosting fees around $8.00/month.  For a complete list of hosting services that offer cPanel, click here.

Why cPanel?  It provides you with one-click installation and configuration of a variety of web management software.  I’ve been designing sites for more than a decade, and I’d recommend you install and run your site using WordPress.  WordPress is an open-source content management system that’s extremely easy to use, customize and modify, and is supported by a huge community.  You can quickly build a professional website to promote your film and easily add new information as your project progresses, and you can do it all from any computer with web access through a browser, without learning any code.  If you need help building it, tap a friend or post your needs in the support forums.

When signing up for your hosting service, choose a domain name relevant to your project.  If the title of your film project is “Save The Rosebuds”, try creating a domain name like www.savetherosebuds.com or www.savetherosebudsthemovie.com.  Use the film title in the domain name – it will help search engines rank your site well.  And stick with the “dot-com” ending instead of “dot-net” or something else – it’s the most common way people will type it if they’re looking for your movie’s website.

Once you have an official website, create a Facebook fan page for your team and link the two.  The goal here is to get your Facebook friends sharing your website content with their friends.

EVERY FILM NEEDS A POSTER

It’s true – when was the last time you saw a movie that didn’t have some sort of poster art?  Posters are easy enough to create – most modern movie posters are simply collage designs created using Adobe Photoshop.  If you don’t have access to Photoshop and can’t afford the $600 to buy a copy, don’t worry.  For free, you can download the open-source software called GIMP, which is just as versatile and professional as Photoshop.  Over the next 90 days, you’ll have plenty of time to work through the various tutorials and learn how to create your own professional movie poster – or tap a friend with skills to help.  Build your poster at 27″ x 40″, the standard size for a full movie poster.

We never printed any full-size posters, but it’s nice to know the file will support it if we ever want to.  Instead, we printed 100 full-color mini-posters at 11″ x 17″.  We used online printing service PrintKeg to create the posters – 100 of them at a cost of $36.99.  Send these posters along with your press materials to give your story an edge, give them away to friends and family, and hang them in prominent places to promote your film when the festival comes.

CREATE PROMOTIONAL MATERIALS

The online printing service VistaPrint routinely offers free printing of various items, including 250 postcards.  When the offer hits, drop your movie poster on it for a great way to easily promote your movie by mail and on tables.  Create an account at Zazzle, and put your movie poster or promotional images on everything from t-shirts to coffee mugs for free, and then incorporate the products into your official website.  Zazzle is a print-on-demand service that pays you a percentage of the retail price for each item you sell.  Encourage friends and family to support your film by buying merchandise, and use the proceeds to bump up your production budget.

Use a professional scriptwriting software – you can download CeltX for free if you don’t already have one.  Typically, standard film scripts average one minute of screen time per page, so your finished script should be in the range of 7-9 pages to make sure your final film comes in under the 10-minute running time restriction.  For last year’s competition, our script for Immoral Desires ran 7 pages, and the finished film with titles came in at 9 minutes and 54 seconds.

We heard about one team who frantically had to cut half of the material from their film to get it down to 10 minutes.  If you use professional software and follow proper scripting formats, you’ll be able to trim your project during the scriptwriting process without having to throw cherished scenes on the cutting room floor later on.

If you’re not sure how to format a film script, click here to download a PDF version of the complete shooting script for Immoral Desires, our 2010 Project Twenty1 film.

Sounds like fun, right?  It definitely can be, but to do it well and finish on time requires a good amount of preparation.  Last year, we created our film, Immoral Desires, for the competition.  Thanks to advanced prep work, we were the third film handed in on deadline day, and we finished with a running time of 9:49 minutes without cutting or needing to add any content.  Most teams register early, but even the late deadline is a month before competition actually begins.  That’s a span of 30-90 days of prep time available to you before you actually start creating your movie.  What are you allowed to do during this time?  Plenty.

Matt Conant, Artistic Director for the competition, told us: “It is totally okay to have some concept of what you want to make [before competition actually begins]. You can even talk out a basic plot synopsis and all that, you’re just not supposed to actually write anything yet.”

He continued: “And yes, you may accumulate props and set pieces as well. Likewise, if you happen to already HAVE costumes that manage to work with the element and the story you’re telling, that’s fine. All garments and props do not have to be fabricated from scratch or anything like that.”  Project Twenty1 actively encourages teams to begin marketing their film as early as possible. Direct from Matt:  “You may ABSOLUTELY do publicity in advance.”

If you’ve already registered, competition doesn’t begin for another few months.  Here are 5 things you can do now to maximize your chances of creating a great film and delivering it on time.

CONCEPTUALIZE YOUR FILM

What sort of movie are you going to make?  You need to decide this immediately after signing up as a team.  Why?  Because you’ll need different team members, sets and software depending on whether you’re creating a live-action drama or a stop-motion animated comedy.  Choose a concept that you can reasonably accomplish within a twenty-one day timeline – if you’ve never made a 3-D film and have no real idea how to do it, you might be better off going with something more familiar to meet the challenge.  I’m no expert on animation, so the rest of these tips will target those making traditional live-action films.

BUILD YOUR TEAM EARLY

As soon as you’ve registered, start building your team.  At a minimum, you’ll need one decent actor.  If you know how to shoot and edit well, great.  If not, find someone who does to help you out.  Audio is half the film experience – if you’re not great at recording and mixing audio, tap someone who is to be part of your team.  Other people you could use include hair/makeup, set design, costumers, lighting and, of course, on-set catering.  Have a friend who’s good with fashion?  There’s your costumer.  Know anyone who went through Cosmetology School?  There’s your hair and makeup person.

SCOUT LOCATIONS

Setting up your locations as early as possible helps you better refine your concept and crew needs.  If you only have access to an apartment, then you’ll only be shooting interiors and you’ll need someone good with lights.  If you only have access to an open field, you’ll be dependent on natural lighting but you’ll definitely want a good audio person to capture decent sound.

ASSETS DICTATE POSSIBILITIES

Last year, we decided shortly after entering the competition in April to create a 1960′s-style sexploitation homage.  Our reasons were simple:  we had access to a single bedroom for filming the entire movie, and we had two female actors and one male.  That relationship naturally suggests a love triangle, and the set reinforces that.  The assets we had available to us  – actors and sets – dictated certain possibilities for a final film.  We knew, given these, it would be really, really hard to do a gritty street crime action film or a sci-fi epic.

SET YOUR SCHEDULE

Plan your twenty-one days carefully.  Last year, the secret element was released on July 31.  We had set aside the next day entirely for scriptwriting, determined to complete a workable script in just one day.

We scheduled all shooting for the following weekend, which gave us a week to familiarize cast and crew with the script and set up our shooting schedule.  Break your script down into shots, and build a shot list.  It will help you stay on schedule and make sure you don’t miss any critical shots.  You can also build shot lists in CeltX.

This tight schedule for the first week left us with two weeks to edit and incorporate music, which allowed us to still hand in a finished film on time despite a rough setback during production.

For those of you too young to remember them, 8-tracks were large cassette tapes that were commercially popular from the mid-sixties through the end of the 1970′s.  They took off when Ford started offering 8-track players pre-installed in several models beginning in 1966 – finally, you could take your favorite music wherever you went, without being dependent on a radio DJ to play it for you.

The smaller audio cassettes – and eventually the popularity of CD’s – killed the market for 8-tracks, and they were a distant memory by the early 1980′s.  It was a tiny window in American history, gone too fast to really leave much of a legacy.  Until now.

Texas self-promotion artist Bucks Burnett has launched the Eight-Track Museum in Dallas.  According to its website, it officially opened Christmas day, but I’ve seen other reports saying it begins normal hours this week.  Whatever the case, if you find you’ve got the itch to explore the roots of automotive music, and if you find yourself in the Dallas area, look up the museum, take a tour and let me know whether it’s worth the effort.  I’d love to hear from anyone who’s actually been there – share your experiences!

The Other Guys pits Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg as loser cops – wannabe detectives trapped in desk jobs, and living in the shadow of the two biggest hero-cops in the city, Danson and Highsmith (played by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Samuel L. Jackson, respectively).  Once those two are out of the picture, it’s up to our luckless losers to try to solve the big case and become the heroes they always wanted to be.

The film starts off strong, and the over-the-top antics of Jackson and Johnson are entertaining, but the heroes are killed off within the first 15 minutes.  And it all goes downhill from there.  There are some funny jokes, but they’re often repeated almost ad nauseum, as though McKay thought we might have missed the humor the first time around.  Or the second.  Or the third.  I can’t remember how many times Michael Keaton’s Captain Gene Mauch refers to his bisexual son for a quick, tasteless laugh.

The Other Guys‘ biggest weakness is its pacing – the damn thing seems to drag on for way too long.  Normally, this is because the writer is developing intricate plot elements or evolving his characters.  In this case, it seems like he was just having fun writing silly things for Ferrell to say, each one followed by the screen direction “Mark Wahlberg wrinkles his nose and looks both confused and disgusted by whatever Ferrell has just said or done.”  And so on for almost two hours.

I picked it up at a Redbox kiosk for a buck, and I feel like I got my money’s worth from it.  I can’t say it’s worth much more than that.  The film might have been much more entertaining if they’d stayed with the Danson and Highsmith characters for 90 minutes and left Ferrell and Wahlberg where they belong – in the background.

If your story is anything like the ones above, CrackerHammer Productions can help by:

• Crafting a targeted marketing campaign to bring your project to as wide an audience as possible.
• Creating a dynamic web presence and fill it with engaging content optimized for search engines and designed to captivate your audience.
• Designing traditional marketing materials to help promote your project (posters, flyers, business cards, headshots, press kits, etc.).
• Reaching out to the press to build public awareness of your project.
• Providing detailed analytics reporting to gauge the success of your campaign.

Let’s look at each one of these in more detail.

1. Craft A Targeted Marketing Campaign

The first step to successfully promoting your project is to set realistic goals and create a strategy for achieving them.  CrackerHammer Productions can help you define your goals, identify potential markets and developed a phased marketing strategy that will yield the best possible results.

2. Create A Great Web Presence And Engaging Content

Having just a Facebook, Twitter or MySpace page isn’t enough.  Using a template provided by your hosting service to build your website won’t cut it either.  To have a great web presence, you need a combination of things working together.  You should have an original, dynamic and professional website with easy navigation.  You need to incorporate a blog into your website that regularly provides engaging content about your project to your audience.  And you need to have an interactive online outreach effort that includes social media profiles and an email campaign.  CrackerHammer Productions can design your website, integrate your social media accounts and email campaign, and write terrific blog articles for you that keep your audience growing and have the right keyword densities to keep search engines ranking your site well.

3. Design Terrific Traditional Marketing Materials

Your project, whether it’s an album, movie, craft or other, needs eye-catching packaging and promotional materials.  Let CrackerHammer Productions design your cover art, promotional posters, business cards and everything else you need to compete in traditional marketing efforts and sell well.

4. Reach Out To The Press To Expand Your Audience

CrackerHammer Productions can craft well-written press releases that adhere to industry standards.  We maintain a sizable database of regional and national media contacts, from niche markets to general audiences.  We’ll work to identify the media most likely to feature your project and target releases accordingly.  We’ll create specific web content to support the releases as necessary.

5. Learn From Detailed Analytics Reporting

The financial investments in your marketing campaign won’t mean much without detailed reporting demonstrating its impact on your target audience.  CrackerHammer Productions will utilize its expertise in analytics and market research to provide regular, detailed reports in simple language showing you the progress of your marketing campaign.

Why Use CrackerHammer Productions?

“Artists Helping Artists Succeed.”  That’s our credo here at CrackerHammer Productions.  While you probably have dedicated your life to perfecting the guitar, writing the perfect novel or creating a timeless movie, CHP founder Michael Mercadante has dedicated his career to multimedia design for the marketing industry.  He has more than 20 years of professional, award-winning experience in audio/video production, website and graphic design, illustration, photography and content writing.  He performs daily research into new marketing techniques and closely monitors emerging trends.  He also maintains working relationships with other skilled and highly-experienced marketing professionals who assist when needed.

Recently, CrackerHammer Productions created and marketed a short film called “Immoral Desires”.  The marketing effort included poster and postcard design, three websites, social media and email outreach and targeted press releases – in short, everything we’ve described above.  Our efforts won the Best Marketing Award when the film made its theatrical premiere at the Project Twenty1 Film Festival, and the film was featured in newspaper, radio and television coverage in the nation’s sixth-largest market, reaching millions of people.  Our websites received visitors from coast to coast and from more than 30 countries worldwide.  Months later, our social media accounts are still picking up followers, and the movie is on the national film festival circuit.

Hire CrackerHammer Productions as the marketing team for your new artistic project today!

If you have a static website that offers nothing more than basic information about your business, and rarely changes, you may not be reaching the potential audience your business needs.  Take a look at the following chart:

This recent research study, performed by the marketing gurus at HubSpot, shows that blogging and social media have high importance to potential customers and clients.  In 2011, why not grow your business by expanding the reach of your website by incorporating blogging and a social media marketing campaign?

CrackerHammer Productions can help you by creating a blog-capable website with a clean, professional design based upon the popular open-source content management system WordPress.  Major companies, including Pepsi and Ford Motor Company, have chosen WordPress to power their corporate blogs.  Let us create social media accounts for you and help you build a marketing plan that utilizes them to help drive business.  Let us help you by creating original, engaging blog content about your business that you can share on social networks and spread the word to new customers.

With more than 10 years of professional experience in website design and management combined with 20 years of professional writing experience for a variety of markets, CrackerHammer Productions is your one-stop shop for growing the online reach of your business in 2011.  Contact us to start a conversation about how we can help you.

I created my illustration using graphite on 14″ x 17″ vellum bristol board.  Here is the finished work:

If you need something similar, contact me to discuss your needs.

As you can see from above, Google maintains its market dominance with minor fluctuation over the past two years.  Yahoo and Bing maintain small niche representation, and the Ask.com search engine barely registers with users as it captures less than 1% of the total market share.

What does this mean for our SEO (search engine optimization) recommendations here at CrackerHammer Productions?

For the moment, it means no change in our current recommendations, which are as follows.

THINGS TO CONSIDER

• Despite minor fluctuations, Google remains the powerhouse leader in search engines, and so paying attention to their rules and regulations will best help your website reach the most web users.
• In May 2009, Yahoo signed a 10-year agreement to power their search engine with Bing, which means Bing rules should now apply to both search engines.
• Together, the smaller search engines continue to capture more than 15% of the total market share.  According to current internet usage stats, that’s about 300 million people worldwide who DON’T use Google.  If your advertising budget is limited, you may get more for your dollar advertising with the smaller search engines while still reaching a substantial audience.

META TAGGING

CrackerHammer Productions looks at META tag recommendations written by the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C) and compares them with published information about usage limitations placed by the major search engines to develop the following guidelines.  All website content should contain well-written, keyword-specific META tags adhering to the conditions below.

• META Titles should not exceed 64 characters – longer title tags will be truncated by at least one of the major search engines.
• META Description tags should not exceed 150 characters – longer tags will be truncated by at least one of the major search engines.
• META Keyword tags are no longer monitored by any of the major search engines – their use is no longer recommended.

Following these general guidelines will help ensure your content reaches as wide an audience as possible by ranking well in search engines.  It’s just one thing you can, should and must do to make your content perform well for you.  If you’d like help opimizing your website and content for search engines, contact me.

This weekend, with a little down time, I created this original sketch based on the still photo.  This is done entirely in graphite on bristol board.  I normally do drawings like this for hire, but this one was done just for fun.

If you’d like to leave a comment about the illustration or about Jim Kelly, please do so below.  Contact me if you’d like an original drawing done.

Ice followed this album with, of all things, a feature film called Cool As Ice.  Its three-week theatrical run in 1991 ended in critical and financial disaster – even the director has since disowned the film.  Twenty years later, early on a Saturday morning, I just caught this film on the cable channel Encore.

Cool As Ice tries to do for Vanilla Ice what Rebel Without a Cause had done for its star, James Dean.  And there’s the possibility it might’ve worked, if only Vanilla Ice had died finishing it.  Instead, he lived to see his career, his film and his style of honkey-hop fade into ridicule.

It’s tough to sit through this movie.  Ice apparently didn’t bother taking any acting lessons before jumping in front of the camera.  His performance is stiff and uncomfortable.  The premise is, well, just stupid.  A group of hip hop bikers get stuck in a small town while waiting for repairs and end up in the middle of a fight between crooked cops and a family in witness protection.  Ice falls for a college-bound girl, played by Kristin Mintner.  Interestingly, the role was originally offered to Gwyneth Paltrow, but her dad thought the film would destroy her career and forbid her to participate (nice save there, Bruce).  The girl’s father is played by Michael Gross, aka “Mr. Keaton” from the 80′s sitcom Family Ties.  He doesn’t trust the oddly-dressed biker with his daughter (and really, who the hell would?) and even thinks Ice is involved when the bad guys kidnap his son.

Predictably, Ice and his “homeboys” (wow, I could have gone a lifetime without hearing that word again) save the day by catching the bad guys.  And, predictably, the father must have one of those little “I guess I mis-judged you” talks with the biker-hero.  But the father simply says, “Thanks”.  To which Ice responds with, “It doesn’t really matter.”  What?  What doesn’t really matter – getting a thank you or saving a young boy?  Writers, couldn’t you have spent another half-hour working on a better line?

Witness Vanilla Ice having a permanent seizure.

However terrible this film might be, there are a few things worthwhile.  One is the sheer wonder of trying to figure out where Ice keeps five different leather jackets in a motorcycle with no cargo space.  Another is a standard-but-enjoyable performance by the late Sydney Lassick, who always reminded me of Joe Besser, which makes me think of how great The Three Stooges were, which helps me forget how bad Cool As Ice was.

The big surprise with this film was how absolutely beautiful it was to watch.  This is no doubt the influence of Director of Photography Janusz Kaminski, who went on to shoot beautiful films like Schindler’s List, Amistad, Saving Private Ryan, The Diving Bell and The Butterfly, Minority Report and War of the Worlds.  It was one of his first films, and any students of cinematography or lighting should go back and watch this absurd little rapper/biker movie just to see how a terrific cinematographer really can polish a turd.

An example of a recent email newsletter I created for a client.

Email newsletters to your clients, customers or contact list can be a great way to encourage repeat visits to your website, promote your services and make new sales.  In my email newsletter campaigns for my clients, I’ve managed to obtain open rates as high as 72% – that’s more than three times the industry average!

Understanding Open Rates – What To Expect

What’s an “open rate”, you ask?  It’s the number of people from your campaign who actually opened the email, out of the total number of people to whom you sent it.  It’s almost impossible to achieve a 100% open rate, unless you send an email to two friends and make sure they both open it.  The industry average open rate is 23%, which means that less than a quarter of the people you send an email campaign to typically will actually open it.  Open rates for email campaigns I operate for my clients generally range between 45% and 60%.  Even my least successful newsletters are opened by twice as many people as the industry average!  I’ve also achieved click rates (how many people click on links in the email campaign) as high as four times the industry average.

Is It Worth It?

Email newsletters are a great way to keep people coming back to your website.  It’s a gently nudge to your customer or fan base to check out what new things are going on.  It’s also a fairly inexpensive marketing method, which means you won’t break the bank.  Adding a sign-up form to your website lets your audience do the work of building your list for you.  Anything that helps keep your customers engaged with your project or business is worthwhile.

I can help you by setting up everything from subscribe forms on your website to the written and visual content in each email newsletter.  Contact me to learn more or get your email newsletter set up today.

A Press Kit I created for Philadelphia band Ghosts in the Valley.

Press kits are pre-packaged promotional materials provided to media outlets.  They are commonly used by bands and other artists, and typically provide background and other information.  For bands and filmmakers, hard copies of the press kit can be sent out along with review and promotional copies of your album or film.  Electronic versions can be distributed on CD’s or flash drives, or hosted on your website for easy download.  Electronic versions can also contain song and video clips.  Check out the press kit I designed for the band Ghosts In The Valley (opens an Adobe PDF in a new window).

I charge $50 to create a publicity one-sheet from materials you provide (I will copy-edit your text to make sure it is error-free).  Additional pages in the same press kit are $25 each.  If you are providing the photos, please provide hi-res digital files (300 dpi, minimum 5×7″) for best results.  If you need photos, check out my portrait photography services.

If you’re in a band or making a movie, it’s essential you start thinking about your press kit as an intrinsic part of your marketing efforts.  Let me help you by packaging the right information in the right way to best sell your project.  I’ll even help you further promote with a search-engine-optimized website, targeted email campaigns and press releases.  Contact me to get started today!

Beyond the Big Four (Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn), there are dozens of smaller social networks out there servicing niche markets, often with millions of registered users.  Knowing which ones to target and getting the right information out there can help generate new customers for your business.

Social Media Marketing begins with building a strong brand presence on relevant social networks.  Let me help you accomplish your goals.

Official Website

It’s not enough to just have a band Facebook or MySpace page – you also need to set up your own official website.  Your own website at your own domain gives your music more legitimacy, as well as allowing you to offer more content without restrictions.  It also gives you the chance to track your visitors more closely, to see who’s looking at what content on your page.

The website I’ll build you will be completely search engine optimized and full of interactive features, including photo galleries, downloads, music players, video, contact forms, show and tour schedules, merchandise store and widgets promoting your social media pages.  Best of all, once the site is built, you’ll be able to add or change content easily right from a web browser anywhere in the world, without needing to learn any code!

Press Kit

A press kit is information you provide about your band to review publications, radio stations and record labels.  Generally, it will include a demo CD with two or three tracks on it, an informational/bio page and an 8×10 promo photo.  If you’re sending hand-labeled CDs with a bio page you created in Word, many places won’t take your submission seriously.  If your presentation is more professional, you’ll stand out from the crowd.  I can take your content and package it professionally so that it has the best chance possible to make a first impression.  The whole point here is just to get someone to listen to your songs, and if professional packaging helps cross that threshhold, it’s definitely a worthwhile investment for your band.

Do you have professional photos of your band? Let’s set up a photo shoot!

Music Video

Are you ready to make a music video?  I’m an award-winning filmmaker with the experience and equipment to create a terrific video for your song.  I’m also very skilled at bringing in a professional video on a shoestring budget.

Let’s talk about your song.  Let me listen to it, and we can discuss concepts and budget.  I can give you a good idea what it will cost in advance, and at that point you can decide whether to do it.

Free Consultation!

If you’re ready to take your music to the next level with professional promotion, contact me using the form below.  Let’s talk about your project and what you need.  I’ll give you recommendations and provide you with clear cost breakdowns.  You can then decide whether you want to proceed.  I can work with just about any budget, so there’s no reason not to get started today.  Use the form below to contact me today!

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Getting your website and its content correctly positioned at the top of search engine results pages is critically important to the overall success of your website.  These days, it’s not enough to merely have a website.  You need to have the right web content.

I can help you improve your search engine listings organically – that means without the use of questionable practices that could earn you penalties rather than traffic.

Organic Search Engine Optimization

I’ll analyze your website and provide you with step-by-step recommendations on how to modify your site and content to make it more search-engine friendly.  Once I’ve implemented these recommendations (which can include changes to your keywords, meta tags, page content, et cetera), I will manually submit your website to each search engine according to its specific guidelines.

Search engine optimization is an ongoing process – it will likely take 3-6 months for you to notice an improvement.  I will work with you during this time to ensure that your site and content remain on track toward prime positioning in search engine results.

Contact me to learn more about how I can help you, or get started with my free website audit.

Opening Theme: Driving Health Inventory

Driving Health Inventory is a functional assessment screening software for driving ability.  I created the opening theme for the CD-ROM product.  Here are two versions I created.

Driving Health Inventory Soundtrack Cue #1

Driving Health Inventory Soundtrack Cue #2

Soundtrack Cues: Operation Flashpoint

“Operation Flashpoint” was a first-person military game for which I was hired to create some soundtrack elements.  I also did sound effects and character voices.

Operation Flashpoint Soundtrack Cue #1

Operation Flashpoint Soundtrack Cue #2

Operation Flashpoint Soundtrack Cue #3

Operation Flashpoint Soundtrack Cue #4

Soundtrack Themes: Teen Auto Focus

Teen Auto Focus is a 10-minute novice driver training program I created.  The program, delivered entirely in Flash via web browser, was originally produced for PennDOT but eventually marketed commercially by TransAnalytics, LLC.  Using scripts developed in-house, I recorded voice-over narration and created thematic music to run in the background of each lesson.  I also developed all of the Flash animation for the project.

Theme Music: “Trip”, for Teen Auto Focus

Theme Music: “End Credits”, for Teen Auto Focus

I recently got a call from someone who had three videotapes of a child’s baptism ceremony.  The audio on two of the tapes was so badly distorted that in was unintelligible.  In this case, the digital audio recording was actually “clipped”, which means portions of the sounds were completely missing.  Here is a clip of the original sound (cover your ears, it’s deafening):

Listen To A Sample Of The Original Recording.

Here is an image of the wave form for this audio:

Normally, a wave form will show a series of peaks and valleys that visually portray the sound.  Here, the audio is so badly over-recorded that all of the peaks and valleys have been cut off.  This information is lost forever, and nothing can ever make the sound perfect.  But, with an experienced sound engineer and professional sound editing software, it can be repaired to some degree – at least enough to make the final project listenable.

Listen To The Restored Version Of The Same Audio Clip.

After some experimenting with different EQ settings and several processing passes, the wave form of the restored audio once again displays typical peaks and valleys.

Once I repaired the audio tracks, I burned both audio and video together onto new DVD’s.  This was an extreme problem, but I was still able to find a solution to help improve the project.  If you have a similar need, contact me for a free evaluation.  I’ll listen to your audio and provide you with a realistic evaluation of what I can do to help restore or repair it, as well as an estimate of how much it will cost.

For another example, watch the video below, in which I pulled audio of my grandfather’s voice from an old answering machine and restored it six years after he died.

“Best Concept”: Immoral Desires (nomination)

“Best Legs”: The “Hot Chicks” From Immoral Desires, Becky Scheliga and Erica Mercadante (nomination)

“The EPIC Award”: Michael Mercadante (nomination)

“Best Marketing”: Immoral Desires (Winner)

Our next stop is The Sundance Film Festival.  We’ll find out in early December whether we’ll be screening there or not – wish us luck!

The Immoral Desires movie poster I created a month before we wrote the script.

This past summer, I collected a volunteer team of friends and colleagues and entered the 2010 Project Twenty1 Filmmaking Competition.  The challenge is to create a short film, ten minutes or less in length, in just 21 days, from script to final render.  We met the challenge, and our film, Immoral Desires, went on to receive 4 nominations, including “Best Concept”, and won the coveted “Best Marketing” award following its theatrical premiere at the Project Twenty1 Film Festival October 1-3, 2010 in Philadelphia, PA.

From the moment we entered the competition, I had two goals: create a quality theatrical film as cheaply as possible, and make sure everyone knew about it.

A month before the competition began, we had already begun our marketing efforts.  Co-writer Christian Klusman and I decided to make an homage film to one of our favorite independent filmmakers, Doris Wishman.  Following her low-budget techniques would help us meet our first mission (cheaply made but professional).  With the basic concept of a 1960′s sexploitation film set weeks before competition started, I created a movie poster using still photographs I shot to test costumes and set design.  I had 100 11×17 posters printed cheaply using a vendor I found online.  I also worked with Bill Ivory Larson, a former colleague at The Philadelphia Zoo who co-starred in the film, to develop and distribute advance press releases about the project.

The three-week competition period kicked off with a Launch Event on Saturday, July 31, 2010.  We were the first team in the history of the competition to have finished posters available at the Launch Event.  In the 48 hours prior to this, we’d also been featured on the front page of a local newspaper, The North Penn Reporter, and I had been interviewed by John Ostapkovich for KYW NewsRadio, the largest radio news outlet in the Philadelphia market.  We’d also gotten a bite from Philadelphia’s #1 newspaper, The Philadelphia Inquirer.  We courted the Inquirer’s reporter throughout production, culminating in a terrific feature interview published the day before the film festival.

Between August 1 and August 21, we completed all phases of production, from scriptwriting to final render, and I turned in our film three hours ahead of the deadline.  While the tagline for the poster had little relevance to the finished film, it was generic enough to serve as a teaser, so it continued to work.  I built and launched an official website for the film as well as a production journal website, and promoted the content on both through social networks including Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and LinkedIn.  I made sure the production was well-documented, including a still photographer (Frankie Nocella) and second-unit video camera operator (James Blackledge) to capture all the “behind-the-scenes” action.  I used this content as part of the online press kit and marketing materials.

Within a few days of getting the raw footage in the can, I cut together a trailer for the film.  I tapped a friend and former colleague, veteran actor Peter Salzer, to provide the voice-over narration for our trailer.  Peter can also be heard as the voice of President Harry Truman on the White House tour.  Distributed to YouTube and our own websites, and promoted on social media, the trailer for Immoral Desires has garnered more than 300 views in the first 48 hours it was live.  Here is the trailer:

Following the end of production, I created a Flash animation to “glam-up” the Immoral Desires official website, using stills, music and dialogue from the movie.  I also began submitting the film to other festivals nationwide, including Sundance, Atlanta and Cleveland.  Our team proposed the idea to Project Twenty1 organizers of creating a true “Red Carpet Event” for the Awards Ceremony on the last night of the festival.  We told them we were going to dress in our best regardless.  We worked with them to publicize the idea and raise funds to cover the costs.  It worked well enough to get to television stations, including the Philadelphia NBC affiliate, to showcase our effort on the 11:00 news that evening.

A few weeks before the film festival, I created a fictional right-wing fundamentalist Christian organization called The American Morality Movement.  I invented a leader for them, “Brother Frank Schein”, and built them a website and a Twitter account.  I spent a week writing daily sermons from Brother Frank espousing strict Biblical interpretations of morality, mostly inspired by real-life fundamentalist crusaders like Pat Robertson and Donald Wildmon.  During this week, the AMM’s Twitter account collected followers including former White House advisor Karl Rove and actor Kelsey Grammer.  By the end of the week, I’d turned this fake organization against my own film, with The American Morality Movement promising a protest in front of the theater.  This led to heated controversy for three days.  Some filmmakers sent messages of support, standing behind our film, while others threatened to pull their films from the festival for fear of physical confrontation.  At the end of the weekend, I posted information online notifying all that the website and the AMM were simply a hoax.  By then, however, we’d received more than 500 additional website visitors from across the United States.

By the time the festival hit, I’d generated more than two thousand visitors to these promotional websites, with more than 4,200 page views from all across the United States and as far away as China and Vietnam.  I also picked up a considerable number of social media followers.  Additionally, more than two million people in the Philadelphia region (sixth-largest city in the U.S.) were repeatedly exposed to Immoral Desires, thanks to repeated coverage in print, television and radio markets.

This represents an incredible marketing success for a grass-roots effort by a team of relatively unknown creators marketing a short sexploitation film made for less than $200.

For more information and to donate, please visit this page:  http://www.indiegogo.com/redcarpet2010

If you can afford more than $20, there are some great reward items available, including t-shirts and DVD’s.  And please mention this to people you may know who can.  We really appreciate your help!  Thanks!