IFH 818: From Setbacks to Festival Wins: The Filmmaking Path of Dawn Fields

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
You are listening to the ifh podcast Network. For more
amazing filmmaking and screenwriting podcasts, just go to ifhpodcastnetwork dot com.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
Welcome to the Indie Film Muscle Podcast, Episode number eight eighteen,
Cinema Should Make You Forget.

Speaker 3 (00:17):
You're sitting in a theater, Roman Polanski.

Speaker 1 (00:22):
Broadcasting from the back alley in Hollywood. It's the Indie
Film Hustle Podcast, where we show you how to survive
and thrive as an indie filmmaker in the jungles of
the film biz. And here's your host, Alex Ferrari.

Speaker 2 (00:35):
Welcome, Welcome to another episode of the Indie Film Huscle Podcast.

Speaker 4 (00:38):
I am your humble.

Speaker 5 (00:39):
Host Alex Ferrari.

Speaker 3 (00:40):
Today's show is sponsored by Rise of the Film Entrepreneur
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filmbiz book dot com. That's film bizbook dot com.

Speaker 2 (01:49):
Enjoy today's episode with guest host Dave Bullis.

Speaker 5 (01:54):
Hey, everyone shreating me to today is Dawn Films. Dawn
is a Los Angeles based producer, writer, director, and owner
of the feature of film production company Palm Street Films.
She has been She has over twenty years of experience
working as a producer, writer, director, assistant director, editor, and
she has a background in acquisitions and development. Dawn has
raised over one hundred thousand dollars for her short films

(02:16):
socially through.

Speaker 4 (02:17):
Indiagogo, and she has also worked for such.

Speaker 5 (02:19):
Companies as Lucas Film, Twentieth Century Fox, TriStar, ABC, NBC,
Aaron Spelling Productions, and Morgan Creek Dan.

Speaker 4 (02:28):
How are you hey?

Speaker 6 (02:29):
Good morning, Dave. I'm great, How are.

Speaker 4 (02:31):
You pretty good?

Speaker 5 (02:31):
Thanks? It's actually staring right here in pa Oh goodness.

Speaker 6 (02:34):
Okay, well it's cold here too, but everybody just laughs
at us when we complain about the cold in La.

Speaker 5 (02:42):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (02:42):
I think the high today is going to be like
seven or eight.

Speaker 6 (02:45):
No way, yeah, oh gosh. Okay, Well I'm gonna stop
complaining then about how cold it is here.

Speaker 5 (02:52):
So don just to get us started, could you give
us a little bit about your background.

Speaker 6 (02:56):
Yeah, sure, of course. I started in the film business
in Atlanta, Georgia in the early nineteen nineties when all
of the Hollywood companies were coming out to Georgia to
take advantage of the fact that it was a right
to work state, the fact that you know, people were
more cooperative, they actually got excited to give you their location,

(03:17):
and so there was a lot of a lot of
good energy and spirit going on there. So Georgia really
attracted a lot of big budget films that were coming
through the South in the early nineties excuse me, and
I started out as a production assistant and it was
funny because how that happened was as my dad growing up,
my dad always told me I should be an actress.

(03:37):
And so there was a film called Love Potion Number
nine which was in town shooting at the time. That's
the film that actually launched Sandra Bullock's career and was
written and directed by the wonderful Dale Loner. It was
actually his directorial debut. He's a prolific writer and moved
into directing. But anyway, I signed up to be an

(03:58):
extra on that set and I was just it was
my first time on a film set, and I was
just I was hooked. I was just blown away and
I'm like, this is amazing. And I realized very quickly
that I really didn't really want to be in front
of the camera. I wanted to be behind it. And
so one of the pas that was in charge of
the extras I was just really taken with, and I said,
you know, how did you get your job? This looks

(04:19):
really fascinating and he said, well, it's it literally is
who you know. And I turned to him and I said, well,
I know you, and he literally got me my first
job in the business. And the first thing I got
hired to do was go to and Bancroft. And Bancroft
played Madame Ruth, and my first assignment was to go

(04:40):
to her hotel room and read lines with her, and
that was really an amazing experience and she was a wonderful,
wonderful person and I'll never forget that. And then from
there I got assigned to extras casting, and I got
a lot of experience in the whole world of extras casting,
which is a brutal job and I have mad respect
for the people who do that work. And then from

(05:00):
there I just kind of worked my way up. I
thought I wanted to be in the DGA as an
AD I was working towards that and trying to get
my days. At the time, you had to have six
hundred and fifty days as a PA to qualify for
the DGA. So I was working on my days and
I think I got up to like three hundred and
fifty days on various films throughout the Southeast, including Young

(05:20):
Indiana Jones, the TV show where I got the opportunity
to work with George Lucas. That was amazing, So I
thought that was the path I wanted to take. And
then after after I worked all these PA days, I
started like wanting more and to move up the ladder.
So I started being a first AD on some short
form projects like short films and music videos and commercials

(05:41):
and industrials and stuff like that, and I realized very
quickly that I couldn't be that close to the camera
without wanting to be involved in the creative decisions. So
that's when I moved into producing with you know, realizing
that being an AD wasn't necessarily the career path that
I wanted to take, but it was definitely something I enjoyed.

Speaker 5 (06:00):
So you know that that was absolutely amazing. You got to,
you know, read lines of dam Bancroft.

Speaker 6 (06:04):
Yeah, it was, and it's it's uh, it was very
hard for me when I heard that she had passed.
That was tough. I know, I didn't know where that well,
but still, whenever you meet someone and you kind of
share a bond with them, you feel like you know them.
And she was a wonderful, wonderful woman. That was That
was a tragedy for sure.

Speaker 5 (06:21):
Absolutely, I'm sorry don't. Did I die I cut you
off there? I'm sorry if I did. No, No, no,
not at all, Okay, I I thought, uh, yeah, I'm sorry.

Speaker 4 (06:29):
I sometimes have a tendency to do that, just to.

Speaker 5 (06:31):
Interject no please.

Speaker 6 (06:33):
I like that because I don't want to feel like
I don't want you to feel like you can't get
a word in edgeviyes. I don't want to just talk
and talk and talk, but I tell you I could.
I have so many stories, and I have so much
to say about this business. I could talk to for days.
So feel free to cut me off anytime.

Speaker 4 (06:46):
Well, that's good.

Speaker 5 (06:47):
Stories are good because I, like I always say, people
want to tune for the guest, it's not me because I.

Speaker 4 (06:51):
Have a very nasily high, whiny voice and.

Speaker 6 (06:54):
I like your voice.

Speaker 4 (06:55):
Oh thank you.

Speaker 5 (06:57):
When I'm playing these podcasts back, I'm like, oh my goodness,
this is do I sound like.

Speaker 6 (07:00):
Oh god? Them the same way when I see myself
on camera, I can't stand it. So so anyways, so
once I started getting into producing, I realized very quickly
that there was no real money in Atlanta. You know,
you could work on crew because there was a lot
of films coming through, but you know, all the big
shows coming through Reunion, and I had decided not to

(07:21):
go the DJA route and not to be a Union ad.
So I started kind of branching out on my own,
doing my own thing, and tried to raise some money
for a couple of feature ideas and a couple of scripts,
and then I just realized, Wow, there's just no there's
no film At the time, there was no film business there,
and I don't think there still is a film business there.
I think it's still just a lot of movies coming
through and a lot of things being shot there. There's

(07:42):
certainly not the industry that there is out here where
all the agents and managers and distributed you know, studio
heads and distribution companies and stuff like that. Atlanta still
doesn't have all that, but it's blowing up right now.
There's like a thousand things filming there. And so I
realized very quickly that Atlanta was not really where I

(08:04):
needed to be. So in two thousand and I literally
I remember I was walking my dog on a Tuesday,
and I've been thinking about it for a long time,
and I stopped in my tracks and I just looked
down at my dog and I said, you know what
it's time. And two weeks later I was gone, and
I packed up everything I owned in a U haul
and I drove out here with no job, no apartment.
Had a few connections friends that I knew to let

(08:25):
me sleep on their couch till I found a place,
but I really just took that leap of faith that
I came out here with nothing. And the first the
first several years, well, I've had a lot, you know.
I've been here fifteen years now, and I would say
seventy five percent of that have been tough times. I mean,
this is a brutal industry, and for anybody who thinks
that it's not, maybe some people have it easy, but

(08:46):
most of us have to really struggle and fight for it.
And it's been a struggle almost every step of the way.
But I think that just speaks to how badly you
have to want something, because it's still something that I
want more than anything, and it always has been, and
so you just you figure out how to make it work.
So the first job that I had when I moved

(09:06):
out here was for a medium size, kind of on
the small side, distribution and production company where it was
a really interesting position. They put me in I was
the vice president of distribution and I was the vice
president of acquisitions. So that was really cool because I
got to go to all the film festivals to scour

(09:27):
finished films for us to acquire, and I got to,
you know, reach out to filmmakers for finished films to
see which ones we might want to acquire for distribution.
But I also got to go to like pitch panels
and meet with agents. I was wining and dining agents
a lot and looking for scripts that our production arm
could produce. So that was like a really great experience,

(09:48):
and quite honestly, they paid me pretty well. It was
a really nice base salary plus commission, which was real.
So it's really kind of a nice job. But again
I found myself like, we'll.

Speaker 3 (10:01):
Be right back after a word from our sponsor, and
now back to the show.

Speaker 6 (10:10):
Missing being in production. You know. I was working in
an office all day and I was helping other people
with their films, but I wasn't being able to do
my film, so that even though that was a great job,
it lasted about three months, excuse me, and then I
left that job and decided I wanted to do my
own things. So I found a couple of scripts that
I really liked, was in development on those for quite

(10:32):
a while, and before I knew it, like several years
had gone by and I hadn't still hadn't produced anything.
I was ading here and there just for freelance and
helping people here and there with their shoots, but I
wasn't really doing what I wanted to do. So I
remember it was in twenty twelve, I believe late twenty
twelve I finally just said, you know what, I've had enough.

(10:57):
I just want to make a movie. And by this
time I had acquired over five thousand friends on Facebook,
well right at five thousand friends, because they cap it
at that, but I had reached my five thousand limit
of friends on Facebook, which was an account I created,
like I had a friends and family account when I

(11:18):
first moved here. But my friends and family, I think
they got tired of me only talking about film all
the time, because that's all I talked about. So about
five years ago, maybe it's been more now. I created
a Facebook profile for myself just to interact and engage
with other filmmakers, and that just grew organically out of
my need and my desire to friend other filmmakers and

(11:40):
other film companies and just kind of keep up to
date on what everybody else was doing. I was just fascinated.
I simply wanted to know what everybody else was doing,
and that, in a crazy way, just organically grew to
the point where I now have almost five thousand friends.
I have to keep it limited so I can add
new people as I actually make friends, not just connections

(12:01):
but actual friends and people I know, so I have
to kind of keep that limited. But several years ago,
Facebook opened up subscribers and people could follow you even
on top of friending you, and really quickly I had
amassed over twelve four hundred people as subscribers that are
all in the film business. So little did I know

(12:23):
at the time how beneficial overall that was going to
be for me in my career, because as we get
into discussions a little bit later on about crowdfunding and
how I financed all my films, it's almost exclusively come
from that base of friends and followers.

Speaker 5 (12:41):
So you know, that's absolutely amazing, and you know, really quickly,
I just wanted to ask you, how do you decide
who to delete on that five thousand friends? You know,
because I'm coming through that cap too, when I'm just like, well,
who gets cut here at?

Speaker 4 (12:53):
How do you make that decision?

Speaker 6 (12:55):
Yeah? Well, you know, when I first started friending people
way back in the early I would friend anybody from anywhere.
I actually had friended a whole bunch of you know,
back then you could go in and do a search
for terms like film, movie, film industry, those kind of
I was putting in terms like that, and all these

(13:15):
suggestions were coming up, and I just friended and liked
all of them, and a huge handful of them were foreign,
and some of them were in foreign languages even that
I couldn't understand. But at the time, I was just
like reached out to everybody. Once I started getting close
to my five thousand, that's the first thing I went
in and did as I went in and started eliminating

(13:36):
those companies and those people that were foreign where I
couldn't even understand what they were saying. But now it's
actually become quite a problem because every film I work on,
I meet, you know, ten twenty thirty new people, and
I want to friend all of them. And as I
go through you know, various pre production and development and
castings and all that kind of stuff. I'm always meeting

(13:57):
new people, so I've had to go through many times
and just make the tough decision of who to cut,
and Facebook doesn't make it easy. Unfortunately. I wish that
there was a really simple way to just go in
and delete, like people who haven't been active in six
months to a year, because there's a lot of accounts
that people create that they don't ever do anything with.

(14:20):
But they don't really make it that easy. But I
can tell you this, if you have a well, there's
a couple of ways you can do it. If you
go to hang let me just pull my microphone over
here to my other computer. If you go to your
profile on Facebook and you click on the friends tab,

(14:45):
there's a couple of categories there. You can bring up
your friends if you'll notice, you can bring up recently added,
you can bring up work friends, college friends, high school,
current city. There's a couple of other followers following. There's
several selections there. It will group them by that, and
Facebook's algorithms are such that the people you interact with
most are going to come up first, and that everybody

(15:07):
else comes up after. So you could conceivably go into
any one of those categories, or just look at your
friends group as a whole and just scroll all the
way down to the end. Now that's going to take
you about fifteen minutes probably if you have five thousand friends,
but you can scroll all the way down, and you know,
you have to look at the people too and make sure.
But for the most part, the lesser active people are

(15:27):
going to be down at the bottom, and then you
can click on each one of those decide if you
want a friend them or not for unfriend them.

Speaker 5 (15:35):
You know that's interesting because you know, Twitter makes it
a lot easier because you can use different programs like
manage filter or Flitter I think it's called. And then
you know, you can actually just see who's been inactive
for you know, three months, four months, et cetera, and
you can follow those people.

Speaker 6 (15:49):
Don't We all wish Facebook would do that. I you know, Facebook,
I don't think want you to unfollow people is probably
their whole thing. But yeah, I wish it were that easy.
But you know, I think that you shouldn't be friending
people you don't know anyway. But but the truth is,
it's kind of ridiculous that Facebook limits people to five thousand.

(16:11):
That's never made any sense to me how they want
to control how many friends I have.

Speaker 5 (16:16):
Yeah, what I've been doing is with close to my
five thousand friends. A little bit I've started to realize,
like I think a lot of friends from high school,
probably like I don't talk to most of them anyway,
I mean, most of them found me like I, Like
you just said, I usually only from acuest people that
I know or have met at a networking party or
have met somewhere else, and then I'll from across them

(16:36):
or you know, et cetera. But you know a lot
of and also, you know, I think some people too,
like you just said with oh, you talk about his film, like, oh,
I talk about film too. My social media sites are
very rarely anything political or religious or anything like that.
So usually it's all film stuff because that's all I
want to talk about, you know, I don't want to
talk about politics or religion online, you know what I mean?

Speaker 6 (16:58):
Yeah, I know. And that's there's you know, you and
I could be fast friends. That's one of the things
that ties James that I together. James pap Heiden is
a really good friend of mine. He actually started working
for me in my production office a couple of years
ago as an intern and slowly has now made his
way up to helping me produce stuff. He's a producer
now and he's actually in the next month or so,
in the in the month of March, I believe is

(17:20):
going to direct for the first time. So and that's
kind of what we have in common. And I don't
I don't think anybody else outside the business could stand
being around the two of us, pretend, you know, for
any length of time, because it's all we talk about.

Speaker 5 (17:33):
Yeah, I know, which means one of my friends talk
about too. Is you know, we talked about a lot
of film stuff, and you know, screenwriting writers' groups, this
and that. You know, it's just that way, you know
what you're getting stelf into. So so everyone, if you
subscribe to Dawn on Facebook, that's all you're going to
hear is about film stuff, which that's true, which I
think is a great thing.

Speaker 4 (17:52):
By the way.

Speaker 6 (17:53):
However, however, I will say though that the more I
started engaging with my filmmaker friends on face Book, the
less I started interacting with my friends and family. I'm
sad to say I don't even use my friends and
family account anymore. So what you'll find on my on
my Facebook account now is it's kind of a mix.
I do talk about, you know, the foods I like

(18:13):
to cook and the things I like to do for
fun and I do, and my opinions on things. So
it it has kind of become a hybrid because you know,
I do so many crowdfunding campaigns and I do so
many things like seminars now. I'm doing seminars now, and
I have a script contest. I don't want people to
think I'm just trying to like be a business and
shove all my business stuff in their face. So you know,

(18:37):
I just that's my own, my only account now, and
that's where I share really my It's really become my
personal and my professional profile because I'm because I'm on
it all the time. I just I don't have time
to go back to my friends and family, Moore. It's
very sad they all miss me, but I keep you know,
most of them are friends on my face you know,

(18:57):
my filmmaker Facebook as well, so I always tell them
if they want to know what's going on with me,
to you know, click on that one and join that
when and most of them have.

Speaker 5 (19:04):
So yeah, that's it's a good way to keep in
contact too, is I mean, honestly, I I tried to
have multiple facebooks and that that wasn't gonna that. That
just I was like, mine, this is a lot of work.
So what I did was if anyone was keeping contact
with me, like you know what I mean, Like I
usually just post stuff like what I'm doing and this
is what I'm up to and there that's it, you know,
and we've caught up. So yeah, I just want to

(19:26):
usually post everything I'm doing.

Speaker 6 (19:27):
So, but are there Yeah, and there is something to
be said for you know, your friends and family you
should be hanging out with and calling on the phone, so,
you know. So so I tell my friends and family,
I'm like, hey, if you miss me, pick up the
phone and call me. You don't have to go to
Facebook to see what I'm doing.

Speaker 3 (19:46):
You know.

Speaker 5 (19:46):
And just you know, speaking of you know, what you're doing,
you know, just to talk about you know, all your projects.
I really want to you know, cause you have a
lot of really interesting film projects here. Uh you know
you started Palm Street Films in what year.

Speaker 3 (19:59):
We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor
and now back to the show.

Speaker 6 (20:09):
I believe I started it in twenty ten. I had
had another production company before that called Glass Mountain Entertainment,
but we never really had any projects that we ran
through there or had anything really happen with it. We
were more in just development on things. So I don't
even remember why I ended up closing that when and
changing the name, but I did, I guess just rebranding remarketing.

(20:30):
Wasn't sure I loved the name, so rebranded and launched
a new company, I believe in twenty ten. That's when
we started that.

Speaker 5 (20:38):
So you know, then, could you talk about, you know,
your first project with the Palm Street Films, which is
Bonds and Lace.

Speaker 6 (20:46):
Actually, Dave, I will, I'm going to actually go more
old school than that. The actual there were actually three
documentaries that I had in development and in production. Actually
some of them are as much as eighty percent shot.
That That were the first things that I did through
the company. But one we ran out of money for

(21:09):
the documentaries, which is one thing. But then I just
started realizing that documentaries it's a whole different style of filmmaking.
It's a whole different set of rules. It's completely different.
It's really truly apples and oranges from narrative filmmaking, and
as much as I had these personal stories that I
really wanted to tell, I just kept being gravitated back
towards narrative. And so I still want to finish those

(21:31):
documentaries some day. I haven't shelved them, but it's taking
some time to figure out how to get those on autopology.
I would love to hire a documentary person into my
company once we actually have some funds to do that
with and high and have them help me finish those out.
But the actual first project that we ran through Palm
Street Films was Zombie Elves.

Speaker 4 (21:52):
Oh that's right.

Speaker 6 (21:53):
Yeah. Again, it came at a time where I'm like,
I just want to shoot something. I'm tired of all
this talk. I want to make a movie, and I started,
you know, started thinking about what could I do that
I would enjoy that would also be profitable, because for
the last few years, I've also really tried to focus
on how do I make a living at this business?
How do I not only pay my bills, but hopefully

(22:14):
someday make enough money to have a savings account set aside,
to have a retirement plan, to have a little next egg,
bose some financial security. Those kinds of things. So Zombie's
was really my attempt at creating a project that I
thought would really succeed financially. And zombies were really hot
at the time, and you just can't go wrong with

(22:35):
the marketing power of Christmas, and so I thought, you know,
what would happen if you created a situation where there
was a zombie outbreak on the North Pole? And everybody
just went crazy over the idea and they laughed and
they thought it was hysterical, and we just had so
much fun developing that project, and we did actually get

(22:57):
a script written. The script kind of went in a
direction that was not right. We sent it out for
some feedback, and people just really didn't enjoy it. I
don't think I think we went too much Zombie and
not enough Christmas. And people really wanted that there needed
to be some Christmas spirit in there. There needed to
be a lesson learned, there needed to be some magic
of Christmas. We kind of didn't put any of that

(23:17):
stuff in there, and it turned out that it wasn't
very satisfying for audiences. But Zombiell's was actually my first
crowdfunding campaign, and I made a ton of mistakes on
that campaign. That's part of where I start my seminars
now is talking about Zombielves. And that's really the campaign
that I learned all my lessons on.

Speaker 5 (23:38):
You know, I remember Zombie Elves. I actually donated and
I still have that T shirt.

Speaker 6 (23:43):
Well here's the thing that's so funny. It's like, we
were so excited about the marketing power of this film
that long before we even thought about crowdfunding, we wanted
to set up merchandise because everybody was telling me that
horror films love their merch right, and so we were like, okay, great,
well let's do these T shirts. So let's do this calendar,
and let's do bumper stickers, and let's do all this
merchandise that the horror films are And I started. I

(24:06):
created a Facebook account just to start interacting and engaging
with horror fans, and I got up to five thousand
friends instantly on that there's a just a there's a
huge following database of horror fans on Facebook and Twitter.
I mean, it's a huge culture of horror fans out there.
So we had started creating all that merchandise before we
even decided to do crowdfunding. So that's part of the

(24:28):
reason we were like, look, we have all this merchandise
we're creating. Crowdfunding makes sense because we can offer all
those things as perks. And some of the stuff wasn't
finished yet. We hadn't finished the calendar yet, we were
working on it. Some of the one we had done
one T shirt but wanted to do more. So it
just kind of made sense. So we had budgeted the
film at six hundred thousand dollars, and we decided that

(24:49):
if we could raise like forty thousand dollars in development money,
that would you know, get me through the six months
or so that I needed to pay a writer, get
a script written, you know, start tackling the very difficult
task of casting, because there's the question of a movie
like this, do you use little people, do you use
small actors, do you use children? Do use cgi? It's

(25:10):
like how do you make how do you make the
story happen? And at the time, I was a producer,
not a director, so I didn't really have a terribly
clear vision for it. Yet I knew marketing wise, what
I wanted it to be, and from a producers standpoint,
I knew what it needed to accomplish. But I didn't
really have those director skills yet, so I still wasn't
sure really what the film was going to be. So

(25:32):
we did. We made the number one mistake that people
make in crowdfunding, which is they feel like if they
put it out there, they will come. And that's really
not true unless you take years and years to try
to make that happen. But the reality of it is
for a campaign to raise that much money we were
looking for forty thousand dollars. For that much money, you

(25:52):
have to have an existing fan base. You have to
because thirty days or forty five days or how many
of her long days you can run an Indigogo campaign
or a crowdfunding campaign, you don't have time to all
of a sudden whip up ten thousand fans or a
million fans. You have to do all that in advance.
You have to have an existing fan base to already

(26:12):
go out and say to those people, Hey, here's what
I'm doing. You've loved my work before, you love me,
now fund this project. I was under the bad assumption
that if we put it out there, the horror fans
would just glom all and all of a sudden we'd
get all this money and that absolutely didn't happen. Do
my friends and family and Facebook followers and fans. I

(26:34):
did manage to raise about four thousand dollars, and since
we already had all the merchandise anyway, I had two choices.
I'm like, you know, when we didn't hit our goal
or come anywhere close to it, I'm like, well, I
can refund everybody's money and back to absolutely zero, or
I can use that money to go ahead and fulfill
the perks anyway and at least give everybody their perks

(26:55):
because we do still plan on making that film. It's
a very difficult film that's taking a long time toime
figure out how to make that film be what it
needs to be. But it is definitely not shelved. It's
very much alive and well, and we do plan on
making that movie. And now that I'm directing, I'm actually
very very excited about the opportunity to direct it. So
that's a whole nother development that's happened just in the

(27:15):
last two years that wasn't in place there. But I'm
so glad you got your shirt and your calendar, and
I hope you enjoy it. Hang on to it because
it may be worth something someday.

Speaker 4 (27:24):
Oh yeah, I definitely keep well hold on to that.

Speaker 5 (27:27):
I actually took a picture of that and shared it
on some social media sites and people were like, hey,
what movie is this? Where can I get this at?

Speaker 6 (27:34):
I know?

Speaker 5 (27:35):
And it was you know, I was like, hey, check
out this campaign. That's where I got it from.

Speaker 6 (27:39):
It's a great idea. It's it's going to be you know,
I always tell people, the more I talk to people
in Hollywood, the more I find out it's the kind
of movie that everybody wants to see, but nobody wants
to make because it's difficult. You know, you have to
build that world. You have to create a set, you
have to build the north Pole, you have to vision
it because you know, you can have it be a
different North Pole than we've seen before, which is my

(28:01):
vision for it. You know, like I said, there's a
lot of options in casting. None of them are cheap.
By the way, all three of those options that I listed,
Little People, Children CGI, none of those are cheap. And
you know, everybody wants to make Zombielles for two hundred
thousand dollars and put it out on the market and

(28:23):
then just see if it becomes this cult classic. You
can't make that film for two hundred thousand dollars, and
so it's been a bit of a struggle. But the
biggest challenge for me is what is the film. Is
it kind of a dark family film like Gremlins. Is
it funny and over the top like a shan of

(28:44):
the Dead. Is it violent and gruesome but kind of
campy like a you know, Leprechaun, Wasn't that gruesome? But
is it kind of a Leprechaun kind of thing where
you have kind of the comedic element of these small individuals,
you know, because that's kind of funny in itself, really,
you know. Or do you just take it really seriously

(29:05):
and treat it like just this all out zombie survival story,
which is what we did in the first draft, and
that didn't really resonate with people. So the biggest challenge
for me with this film is really just trying to
figure out almost what genre to put it in, but
more specifically, what do you want it to be to
the audience? A comedy, a slasher film, you know, what

(29:29):
is it? That's where I'm hung up right now, and
I'm getting really close to making that decision. But the
choice I'm about to make is not cheap and so
that is its own problem.

Speaker 5 (29:39):
If you ever want someone who bounce ide youself of Dawn,
please feel free to always contact me.

Speaker 6 (29:43):
Oh sure, absolutely, I would love that. Oh you know,
I'm finishing out my last two short films now that
are in post and the than then we are moving
into what are we going to do for our first feature.
I don't know ZOMBIELLS is going to be the first
feature because it is difficult and expensive and complicated, but
it will definitely be the second. I might do a
small character piece first.

Speaker 3 (30:03):

Speaker 6 (30:13):
But it's it's definitely on the list and it's definitely
going to happen.

Speaker 5 (30:16):
Excellent and yes, so please keep me informed of what's
going on, you know, I you know, I again, I
think it's a great idea and honestly, I think, you know,
the marketing in that is so many different creative ways
to market that film.

Speaker 6 (30:30):
It's almost a no brainer. Really, I mean it almost is.
And the reason I love the idea of it right
from the beginnings because we initially we were going to
do it for that two hundred thousand dollars level, and
just you know, we because we were thinking, you know,
even if this sucks, even if this is like the
worst film ever made, it's still going to be a
cult classic. You know, there's you almost can't fail with it.
And there was a movie called Thanks Killing. Yes, I've

(30:52):
seen that, you know, kind of like that. I mean
they just went in so tongue in cheeks, so campy,
low production value. But those guys were just having fun
and you know, kind of poking fun at the genres
and all that kind of stuff, and it blew up
and it did really well and they end up doing
a second movie. So but but I have now that
my taste have evolved, and I I don't think I

(31:13):
was ever really comfortable going that route with that film
because that's not my style as a producer or director.
My style is high production value, high quality. That was
never really resonating with me to make the film that way.

Speaker 5 (31:27):
Yeah I did. You didn't mention Sean on the Dead,
And I think that that is probably the best way
to go, because when I heard the concept of the movie,
I mean even something similar short on the Dead would
be hilarious.

Speaker 6 (31:39):
Well it would, but honestly, the you know, the difficult
part is is I've had the honor of working with
several little people throughout this process. We did some castings.
We we actually in our indiegog video needed someone. We
did some zombie walks where we had you know, some
people dressed up as zombie elves and that was really
funny and people love that and it took a lot

(31:59):
of pictures. But I have a huge amount of respect
for them and I and I just want to be
very careful in this film that we're not poking fun
at them. You know. It's like I want the care
if we do go with little people as the elves,
I want to treat them with the utmost respect. And
I want them to be serious characters and have serious

(32:20):
storylines and character arcs and emotional conflicts and interactions with
each other. And so it's you know, it's like I
I teeter back and forth on how funny do I
really want it to be? There's some you know what
I'm saying, It's like it's it's it's a challenge. It's
a real challenge.

Speaker 5 (32:40):
Yeah, I definitely know what you mean. And you know,
you're always you know, wanting to know that you don't
actually make fun of them. But you know, I honestly
I think you would. You would hit the perfect mix
of you know, humor and horror and you know, without
going over the top. But again, you know again, if
you ever want, you know, boundside these off, someone please
let me.

Speaker 6 (32:59):
Now, absolutely, And I appreciate that. And as I've gotten
more comfortable in my director's hat, I've I've realized that
almost the thing that almost all my films have in
common is an emotional intimacy. And I think, well, except
for one comedy that I did that really was just
kind of a straight out comedy, but all the other

(33:20):
films really have really a very intense emotional thread to them.
So I think a lot of people would question if
I'm the right person to do zombielles and I would
say I absolutely am, because I because I would bring
that to the table.

Speaker 5 (33:35):
Yeah, I know, I know what you mean about you.
Sometimes the comedies can just be comedies because I've done
that too. Like I made a short film one time
and it was literally, I'm sorry, a feature film and
it was literally just you know, uh going over the
top every each every time, and it was it was
what I used as a student film and literally that's

(33:55):
what I used to, you know, to cut my own
teeth on. And it was just, you know, if you
weren't in on the joke, let's saying, people just like
either thought this was so ridiculous, some people actually got it,
or like some people were like, I don't get this
at all, Dave, and I'm like, you know, I completely understand.

Speaker 6 (34:09):
You know. Well, I learned really on when I was
in development at that company I was telling you about
I would get. I would come across some comedy scripts
that I just thought were gold that I loved, and
I would send them out to some agents who specialized
in comedy, and they just wouldn't get it. They wouldn't
think it was funny. So I learned really early on
that what they say is true comedy is subjective.

Speaker 5 (34:28):
Oh absolutely, you know. I was actually just talking to
Steve Kaplan today. Steve Kaplan, if you know, he does
his comedy Chaplincomedy dot com and he is all about
you know, these seminars and he also has his own book.
His book is probably the best book on comedy I've
ever read, and it opened my eyes to what people

(34:48):
find funny. How Come I find something funny, but you don't.
It's kind of like that dress. Everyone saw a line.
Some people saw golden Yeah what coor did you see
I saw golden white?

Speaker 6 (35:00):
Yeah? Me too, Yeah me too. That's kind of crazy.

Speaker 5 (35:05):
But uh but yeah, I'm sorry not to segue too
far before, but you talk about yeah, so addresses and everything. Yeah,
I was actually gonna go into color theory too, and
that's why I was like, let me stop myself, yes,
because so you know, but yeah, if you ever get
a chance to, I highly recommend his book. And his
name was, again is Steve Kaplan, and he's actually been
on the podcast and he is absolutely phenomenal.

Speaker 4 (35:28):
At this stuff.

Speaker 6 (35:29):
So great.

Speaker 4 (35:30):
So okay, so after.

Speaker 5 (35:31):
Zombie Els, after you knew, you know, at that you
know point in time, you know, you didn't have the
you know, the right amount of resources to make that,
you know, what project did you move on to after that?

Speaker 6 (35:41):
Well? It was interesting because I had built enough of
a following on Facebook at this point where I'm like,
you know what, I know a bunch of writers. Let
me just see if I can find a ten page
script or less, something that's easy to shoot that we
can just do over a weekend for very little money,
and let's just do that. So I put out a
call on my Facebook for scripts and I got over
the hundred responses.

Speaker 5 (36:02):
Wow, and yeah.

Speaker 6 (36:03):
It was incredible. And so we narrowed that down to
the top fifteen and we announced that on Facebook, and
then we got it to the top ten and announced
that in the top five, and then the top three,
and everybody was so excited every time, you know, we
made the announcement of who had made the cut and
the final three scripts. I kind of liked all of them,
so I sent them out to about a dozen friends

(36:24):
of mine and colleagues who I trusted, and hands down,
the winning script was a script called Fragment. And this
was a short script written by a UK writer named
Carly Street. And I can't really say what the script
is about because there's a there's a twist in it
to this day that I still don't like to give away.
But it was this very powerful script. You think it's
one thing. You think it's like this horror film and

(36:46):
this kind of torture porn kind of movie, and then
in the end you kind of realize it's something completely different.
But Carly's script took place over like five different locations,
one of them being a grocery store, one of them
being a hospital, and a lot in many parts of
the hospital not just a room, but a room and
a hallway and a bathroom. So we'd have to have

(37:08):
like a bit like a real hospital, not just a
one room set. And anybody in LA knows that those
are not expensive and not easy to get. So I'm like, well,
how am I going to do this? So I put
my producer hat on and I said, Carly, what do
you think about? You know, she she had won one
hundred and fifty dollars cash for the script and that

(37:28):
we were going to make it, so it was a
pretty good deal for her. So we own the script
at that point, and I said, Carly, what do you
think about? Do you mind if I go in and
just kind of make it all happen. I'd asked her
to do it initially, I said, you know, do you
think you could go in and make this all happen
in one location? And she said, yeah, yeah, I'll do that.
So she went in and she did a great job,
but it's still there were still some other locations in there.

(37:49):
It still wasn't exactly what I was hoping for. So
I said to her, I'm like, you know, do you
mind if I go in and take a stab at it,
because I think I know what I want. And she said,
she said, yeah, yeah, absolutly no problem please. And I
think this is the first time I started thinking like
a director. And I didn't even know it yet because
I was still just producing at the time. But I
went in and something I chanced, I channeled something. I

(38:12):
don't know what came over me, but I just really
started resonating with the story and I went in and
I made the whole thing happen inside the house. And
once I started sending that script out to people for feedback,
it was just overwhelming. People were like, oh my god,
Oh my god. And I'm like, you know what, guys,
We're onto something here. This isn't this little, no budget,

(38:34):
two day weekend script with a bunch of volunteers. This
is like a really powerful film now. And it kept
getting bigger and bigger and bigger. Maybe too big honestly
in hindsight, but it just took on this massive life
of its own. And then we started thinking, well, what
actors can we get in this. We started sending the
script out to some agents and some big agents actually,
and the response was unbelievable. There was all these actors

(38:56):
that were dying to do it for free, and they
wanted to be a part of it. And there was
an agent at the Abrams agency that told me it
was the most powerful short script she'd ever read. And
so we just started going, Oh my god, we're really
onto something here, and we changed the title of the
script to Shattered Love. So this is the story of
how Shattered Love got started. So we we realized pretty

(39:21):
quickly that we needed some money to keep this going,
to make this happen. So I took everything I had learned,
because the other thing I learned from Zombie Elves is
I did not factor in the ship the shipping and
handling and postage for all those perks. I sent out
each one of those envelopes that had a calendar and

(39:42):
a T shirt, and it cost three dollars and fifty
cents to ship. And that was in addition to the envelopes,
the labels, the time, the cost of putting it all together,
the cost of manufacturing the shirts, getting the calendars printed.
I mean it took the whole four thousand dollars that
I raised just to get all those perks of a
FE build.

Speaker 3 (40:02):
We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor,

Speaker 6 (40:11):
So when I did the next campaign, that was the
lesson I learned with that is no more physical perks
from now on, I'm only going to give like digital
perks and things that don't have to be manufactured or ships.
That was a really that was the second big lesson.
The first is have a fan base first, and the
second is limit the stuff you're actually manufacturing and shipping

(40:32):
out because the cost of that will be thirty percent
of what you're trying to raise. So what I did is,
I'm like, well, what do we have asset wise, I'm like,
we have a really powerful script. So I created an
Indigogo campaign for two weeks, and I didn't have a director,
I didn't have any actors attached yet. All I did

(40:52):
was scan those script pages and post them as images
on the Indigogo wall. And I because I didn't want
people to have to click on a link. I wanted
to just to be able to read the script as
soon as they landed on the campaign page. And in
two weeks I had raised over five thousand dollars just
based on the strength of the script. And the script,
by the way, was only seven pages. So that was

(41:16):
our first funding campaign. Then we got some actors attached,
we got a director attached. We ran a second two
week campaign and raised another five thousand dollars. And then
but from that point on everything started growing. We wanted
the best DP, we wanted the best location, we wanted insurance,
we wanted to be able to pay people, we wanted
all this kind of stuff. Next thing we know, we
have a sixty thousand dollar budget, and I think in hindsight, honestly,

(41:43):
it just got too big for its own breitches. It
just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger, and honestly,
I think the film itself probably would have been better
off in the long run if we had just done
it really small and simple with unknown actors right from
the start. It certainly would have saved us from the
calamity that that happened shortly afterwards. But anyway, so we

(42:06):
had we had we had cast some name actors that
we ended up not really being, not not really resonating
with through the course of the rehearsal process, and some
other processes that we went down. We decided that we
kind of weren't happy with the direction that the film
was going in. I wasn't happy with the director. I gone,
I had gone through three directors at this point, and

(42:27):
all of them had disappointed me, had tried to change
the script. The one thing we knew was solid was
that damn script, and they kept trying to change it.
And that was a huge sticking point with me. So
we just kind of stopped the whole process. Let all
the directors go, let all the actors go. I'm like,
this isn't working well. We kept one of the actors.

(42:49):
We kept the female lead actor because she was we
always really liked her a lot. So we shut everything down.
We regrouped, and my team kept telling me. They're like,
don you're not happy with these directors for a reason.
We think you need to direct it, and I'm like, no,
I gave up directing a long time ago. I didn't
do so well my first time out. I realized I
was a better producer than I am a director. It's like,

(43:10):
I don't know if I want to go down that
road again. But they're like, no, no, you have a
vision for this. You have to do it, so I
stepped up as director. We hired some unknown actors, cast
some unknown actors. We raised about by this time, including
the money we had already raised plus the new batch
of money to shoot on, we had raised about fifty
thousand dollars. So we rented a stage, we got our

(43:33):
actors involved, we set everything up. I was so excited.
I told everybody, I'm like, guys, I'm an inexperienced director.
I need a lot of support around me. I'm telling
you right now, I don't really know what I'm doing.
You guys have to help me through this process. Well, unfortunately,
I made some unfortunate decisions with the people that I hired,
and the film shut down a day and a half

(43:53):
after shooting. It was a three day shoot. It shut
down at lunch on day two. The biggest problem being
the art department really screwed up and they could never
get They started late day one, they never got caught up,
and literally by day two we had no rooms that
were dressed and ready to shoot in. And I didn't

(44:14):
have enough experience as a director to deal with that
and to figure out how to make that work. So
it was really an unfortunate situation. I found out afterwards
that the Art Department had been on two different shows
at the same time, and the six days of prep
that we had agreed to got done in the twenty
four hours prior to my shoot. They tried to cram

(44:36):
six days of prep into literally twenty four hours around
the clock before our seven o'clock am call time, and
you can imagine the Art department band didn't even show
up to the set. So it was just I don't know,
It's like a comedy of errors. It was like, Oh
my god, I'm like, how are all these tragic, horrible
things happening to this beautiful script? I was like, how

(44:56):
is this possible? And about sixteen thousand of that money
had been crowdfunded. It was people who donated, and so
I was heartbroken. I didn't know what to do because
and tens of thousands of that was money that I borrowed,
that I put in that I had to pay back personally.
So it was heartbreaking. It was absolutely the most devastating

(45:19):
thing that's ever happened to me, And I blamed everybody
else at first, because I was angry and I was
upset at the financial loss and the fact that my
film had gone through that, and I went to a
deep dark place for about three months. I curled up
into a ball and I went to a really dark place,

(45:41):
and I finally started accepting my responsibility as the director.
Because the thing is the thing about directing that people
don't understand. One it's a very vulnerable position, and two
you're responsible for everything that goes up on the screen,
whether it was your fault or not. Other people can
make mistakes and not do their jobs, but it's still
your fault. Now, the good news is is that if

(46:03):
it does go well, you also get most of the glory,
so it's kind of good news bad news. But on
that particular film, I think people particularly pointed the finger
at me, and that was really tough, and I thought
about leaving the business. I had convinced myself that I
wasn't right for this industry and I was about to
pick up everything I owned and moved to LA and

(46:24):
move out of LA and just go do something else
for a living. And that lasted about thirty six hours
and then something clicked in me, something kicked out, and
I don't know, the warrior in me stood up. I
picked myself up, I dust myself off and and I said,
you know what, I'm not going down that way. This
is what i want to do. It's what I've always

(46:44):
want to do. There's nothing else I want to do,
and I've got to figure out how to make this work.
And so I went on this tear. I went on
this mission to direct as many films as I could
possibly get my hands on, so that I would have
enough experience to be able to handle something like that
better in the future, because mistakes always happened, things always
go wrong on a film set, and I just clearly

(47:07):
I just wasn't simply wasn't ready to handle it. I
wasn't prepared, didn't have the experience. So I and I felt,
you know, I felt an obligation to all the donors
who had donated to that FULMB. I mean, I could
have just shut it down and not moved on and said, Okay, guys,
you know it's too bad, this mistake happened. We had

(47:27):
some people that screwed up, I screwed up, are bad
my mistake. You know that We're going to accept that
loss and move on. But that's not who I am,
and that's not what I'm made of. I'm like I'm
going to get this movie made if it kills me. Literally.
I said that, and I still do this day. Mean it.
I meant it when I said that.

Speaker 5 (47:48):
So when when you actually got with the art department,
you've actually found that out.

Speaker 4 (47:51):
Did they actually admit it right away?

Speaker 6 (47:53):
Oh yeah?

Speaker 5 (47:54):
Oh okay, oh yeah, oh yeah.

Speaker 6 (47:56):
I had no idea actually, and I kind of wish
he hadn't told me. When he told me, I went ballistic.
I was, Oh my god, I've never been so angry
and so upset in my life. This when you know
he admitted it.

Speaker 5 (48:11):
Wow, I mean that is you know, uh, you know,
one of the pretty bad story because you know some
of other people have been on TU they've had, you know,
share their war stories as well, and.

Speaker 4 (48:25):
You know, it is.

Speaker 5 (48:28):
All about, you know, putting together that team. And sometimes
you do hire people who just they they project themselves
as one way and then you find out they're they're
either lying or they just you know, or just maybe
a sociopath.

Speaker 6 (48:42):
Well here's what I've come to realize with a little
bit of hindsight. This is a tough business and the
economy is really bad, and they really all they're guilty
of and I hate to sound like I'm condoning it
or even forgiving it. I guess I have forgiven it
at this point. But in this industry it's called double dipping.
And what he had done was the show he was

(49:04):
working on prior to that ran long, and I think
he truly, honestly, I think he was coming from a
good place. I think he had he wanted to be
loyal to them and finish out that job, but he
also wanted to be loyal to me and not quit
or leave me hanging. And I honestly think he thought
he could do it in twenty four hours. But to
some extent, that was disrespectful to me in my project,

(49:26):
to think that you could cram six days of prep.
You know, we decided and agreed on six days of
prep for a reason. It was a big show. It
was a huge art department show. We were working on
a set and everything had to be built and set
dressed from scratch. It was a huge job, and he
had four people on his team to make that happen
on the day. But it just.

Speaker 3 (49:51):
Will be right back after a word from our sponsor,

Speaker 6 (50:01):
I don't know's I'm trying to try to understand the situation.
In hindsight, he really should have just told me his
job got extended, then I should hire somebody else. In hindsight,
that's what it should have happened. But you know, he
was trying to satisfy me, to try to satisfy the
other production he was working on, and unfortunately for him,

(50:21):
it just it didn't work out. Now, was he the
only reason the show was troubled? Absolutely not. There were
other problems. There were other issues that the show didn't
shut down because of that. I wasn't doing a very
good job as director because I was rattled by the
whole art department thing. We had to We had a
very specific shooting schedule that we had to do so

(50:42):
the art department could keep up because it was very ambitious,
and when when art department arrived on the set that
morning with no Van, it screwed up the whole schedule,
and that threw me off my game, and I was
just flustered and rattled the whole time. So would the
film have probably turned out poorley and had to have
been reshot anyway? Probably, I can honestly say it probably

(51:04):
would have, But at least we would have finished it.
And maybe something would have been salvageable, but the way
it went down, it shut down because there was there
were no rooms available to shoot.

Speaker 5 (51:17):
So you know, when you went onto your next project,
did you ever use even any of the same crew?

Speaker 4 (51:23):
Was it a completely new cast and crew?

Speaker 6 (51:28):
Well, no, it was a completely different I mean, I
have my core people. I hate James and Debbie Rankin.
They they've stayed with me as part of my core team.
But no, not, And there's a couple of crew people
that I enjoyed working with. It wasn't their fault that
I have worked with since. But no, for the most part,
Two to nine was our next film after that, and

(51:50):
that was a whole different cast and crew.

Speaker 4 (51:53):
You touched on something too with the experienced director.

Speaker 5 (51:56):
You know, I actually think it's good that you said that,
because I think it's you know, there was someby once
told me when I first started that, you know, the
director is the only person on set who doesn't need
to have any experience, And they saidnew that the centhotographers
got to know how to do all his or her work,
the actors, everybody else, but really the director doesn't have

(52:16):
to have a certain x amount of experience and you know,
I think that's good in a way because when you
actually mentioned that, like I need support, I think it
really at least you up front and honest with the crew,
and that way, at least you you're on the same
page there, so you know, they're not too many expectations.

Speaker 6 (52:36):
Well, it's it's not so much that I was afraid
of expectations. It's just I literally needed the help. It's like,
you know, it's like, honestly, it's like, you know, I've
never I haven't done this in twenty years, and you know,
I know the importance of a good DP and I
know the importance of a good production designer. Those are
the two people that you lean on the most. And unfortunately,
in this situation, you know, those things didn't work out

(52:58):
so well. You know, it's unfortunate, and I went to
a really bad place and I almost didn't recover from it,
quite honestly. But it's interesting how something deep inside once
I It's funny, once I made my peace with it,
and you know, I debated and debated. Once I made
my peace with it and decided I was going to
leave LA and where am I What city am I

(53:19):
going to move to? And what job am I going
to do now? Once I made my peace with it
and kind of decided that's what I was going to do,
that's when that little thing, that little warrior deep inside
me finally was allowed to come back up and say, oh, no,
you're not going down like that. But it wasn't till
I made my peace with it that my true desires
and my true nature kicked in. And I wonder if

(53:41):
some people don't wait long enough, or if that doesn't happen
for them soon enough, and then they end up giving
up on something and moving on to something that they're
not happy with. It makes me wonder. But it took
me about thirty six hours before that little warrior stood
up and said, huh huh, that's not gonna be your
that's not gonna be your history, that's not going to
be your your bio.

Speaker 5 (54:01):
Yeah, you know, you made a good point there. I
was just in a seminary ES today with Corey Mandel.
He was just on the podcast too, and he actually
mentioned about this where if you have like a mind's theater,
and he said, you know, there's all sorts of people
in the audience, and he said, the people in the
front row are the ones who are really controlling the show.
And he said, you know, if you have too much negativity,

(54:24):
and he goes to this whole thing and in this books,
but he say, if you go too much negativity and
there's people always in the front row, that's where you
start getting all these doubts. And that's where we start
getting all these you know, you can't do this, you
can't do that, and and basically, you know, and part
of it is, you know, you know, not only just
our self doubts and self sabotage, but it's just you know,

(54:44):
almost like our bodies natural way to react sometimes is
almost like a fear, a fear response. Yeah, so you know,
and he says, you know, these things all tie in together,
and which is why you know, sometimes we're writing, you're saying,
oh this sucks, and we just some somebody would never
come back. I mean, I've known screenwriters who they started
writing a script and they started before me, and I

(55:07):
you know, run into them nowadays and it's just.

Speaker 4 (55:09):
They I'm not in it anymore.

Speaker 5 (55:11):
I'm you know, doing whatever now.

Speaker 4 (55:13):
As you know. I always find that kind of interesting.

Speaker 6 (55:17):
Yeah, you know, and I, like I said, it makes
me question, do people wait long enough sometimes for that
warrior to kick inn or they just give up. Maybe
some people don't have it. I don't know.

Speaker 5 (55:28):
So you know, so after you know, Shattered Love and
you finally we were to pull yourself together, you know
what project did you work on after that?

Speaker 6 (55:37):
Well? I was determined at that point to prove that
the film didn't shut down because of me. Would it
have been poorly directed, probably because I didn't know what
I was doing and I didn't have the right support
around me. But I really wanted to prove that I
have twenty years of experience in this business. I've worked
on big budget movie sets. I know my shit. I
was trained by some of the best ads in this country.

(55:58):
I know how movies work, and I know how a
film set works, and I know how to get a
movie made. So I just I just became a hell
bent on proving to people that that I was capable
and I was I was able to do this. So
I was inspired by a workshop that I took one

(56:18):
day to write a script called two O nine and
two O nine was a very simple story two guys
in a hotel room, and my theory was, what's the
worst thing that could happen between two dudes in a
hotel room who have come together for some very dramatic reason.
And I came up with this story about a childhood
friend who had ten years prior accidentally murdered his best

(56:40):
friend's little sister, and he's come back ten years later
to confess. And so we cast our actors. We raised
about seventy nine hundred dollars on Indiegogo for that one,
and that one reached. That one exceeded its goal. We
made our goal on that one, and we had a
set built and we were all ready to go, and

(57:00):
we shot it, and you know, there were some issues still.
I was still trying to figure out how to work
properly with the DP, how to communicate, how to get
my vision across, how to command and control a crew.
And by the way, I do not agree with the
statement that a director has to be the least experienced
person on the set. That has not been my experience whatsoever.
Mine has been the opposite. My experience has been the

(57:21):
director absolutely has to know every single thing that needs
to happen, and they need to know how to tell
the crew to do it, and how to express their
vision and how to communicate that vision so that everyone
can execute it. That's been my experience, and I still
hadn't really gotten very good at that, So there were
some struggles on two on nine. It didn't really turn
out the way I wanted. The story I think was

(57:43):
still smaller and more contained than I had hoped, and
it just wasn't the It wasn't the redemption piece that
I wanted it to be, and I was very much
seeking redemption at this point. I was hell bent on redemption.
At this point, it meant everything to me. Me. I was
determined to build up a good director's reel to prove myself.

(58:05):
So James and I had many many conversations about do
we attempt it again and what do we do? Do
we just let it go and move on? And at
the end of the day we both agreed that the
kernel of the two nine story was good enough where
if we embellished it more and really took that little
seed of an idea and really fleshed it out, it

(58:27):
could be like this really moving, impactful film. And so
we made the decision, even as tough as it was,
to rewrite, not rewrite, but to embellish the script, make
it longer, build more character arc more character background, more
character history. Really tell that whole complete story, not just
a moment in time, but build this whole story and

(58:49):
raise the money again and shoot it properly. So that's
what we did and two o nine became Found, and
I'm extremely proud of Found. We just submitted it a
couple months ago to the twenty fifteen Idle Wild International
Festival of Cinema. It was the first and only festival

(59:12):
that we had submitted to at the time. It was
my first time in competition as a director, and I'm
thrilled to say that we won Best Short Film, Best
a Best Director award and we were nominated for Best
Cinematography and Best Score.

Speaker 4 (59:26):
Oh wow, congratulations, thank you.

Speaker 6 (59:29):
And it changed everything. I mean, that redemption that I
was looking for and that success that I was hoping
would launch me and kind of make me relevant and
make people take notice. That film did that, and that
was exactly what I wanted it to do. I wanted
a I wanted a film to do that, and if
it wasn't going to be that film, I'd have to
just put all my efforts into the next film and
make that film the film that did that. But Fortunately

(59:50):
for us, the very next film that we launched after
Shattered Love shut down ended up even though we went
through a lot of trials and tribulations and quite a
bit of expense with it ended up being a hu
huge phenomenal success.

Speaker 3 (01:00:02):
And we'll be right back after a word from our
sponsor and now back to the show.

Speaker 6 (01:00:14):
Yeah, it's just it's blown me away. It's it's succeeded
all my expectations and it's finally giving me a little
bit of sense of confidence that I can do this,
even though I know I still have so much to learn.

Speaker 5 (01:00:27):
So, uh, when did you actually make fragil Store with
Lance Hendrickson?

Speaker 6 (01:00:33):
Okay, so what it happened was when so so we
had done because because here's there was a time where
I'm like, oh my god, this is like crazy. You know,
Shattered Love didn't work out, and then two o nine
wasn't the film I wanted it to be. It's like,
oh my god, It's like do I really even need

(01:00:53):
to be doing this kind of work? But what I
realize now is I'm a fighter and I'm a survivor,
and I will do whatever it takes to make my
films the absolute best movies that they can be. It's
not about me. Maybe it's a little ego driven, I
think everything in this business is, But I really I'm
hell bent with every project I work on to make

(01:01:14):
it the best film it could possibly be. And we
never intended on not shooting Shattered Love. Reshooting Shattered Love.
I just needed to put some time and distance between
me and that project, you know, I needed to clear
out all the negativity. I needed to build up my skills.
So basically what I did is I spent the next
year and a half after Shattered Love shut down, I
spent the next year and a half directing as many

(01:01:37):
films as I could to get ready to reshoot Shattered Love.
It was all about everything I did, every step of
the way, was one hundred percent designed to put me
in a position where by the time we were ready
to reshoot that film, I was ready and I was
going to make it a good film. And I was
fortunate enough during the whole time that we were doing
two oh nine and found during that whole time, so

(01:02:00):
other opportunities had come up. There were some volunteer groups
like the all women sen Ale Ladies Group. I got
the chance to direct a film for them, and that
was Bonds and Lace that you mentioned before. That was
done for no money, all volunteer group. That was a
script I wrote and directed, co wrote with Lucy Delatt.
That film. You know, it was okay, it turned out okay.

(01:02:20):
We did it all on a day. It was a
hugely ambitious, vicious project all in one day with no money.
But I'm still very proud of it. And then there's
another group of all independent filmmakers that I actually organized
and created called the Los Angeles Film Collective and I
did one short through that group called Better with Friends.
That was another one that was done for no money,

(01:02:40):
all volunteer. So I got the opportunity along the way
to do some other projects. And then there was a
specific lull where nothing was going on where James and
I are like, ah, we just want I just want
to direct again. I want to might shoot something, and
so we wrote and created Touch and Touch was literally
conceived and shot in like a three weeks time. And

(01:03:01):
while I still felt like I made some mistakes on
that one, I wasn't quite where I wanted to be directorially,
the film still turned out extremely well. I'm very proud
of it. It got huge response online. That film actually had
its world premiere Dances with Films this past year and
that was a huge success. So very proud of that one.
So you know, I was just my problem is I

(01:03:24):
love directing now that I've started doing it, and now
that I've got a little bit of confidence in myself,
I just love directing, and I want to move on
to the next one before I've even finished the first one.
It's like, what's next, What's next? I want to direct
something else. Get me on set, Get me on set.
So that's caused a little bit of a problem actually,
and that we shot way too many films back to
back and then they got bottlenecked and posts and we're
actually still dealing with that a little bit now. But

(01:03:46):
getting found out the door was a huge accomplishment and
that was, I guess, a huge catalyst to moving forward
with everything else. But to answer your question, there were
all these other projects, including a short film that I
really wanted to do, but I felt like Shattered Love
still had to get done and it was still there,
and I realized that part of the problem was there

(01:04:09):
were some casting decisions that we made when we used
those unknown actors that when I looked at the dailies
of the stuff that we did shoot before we shut down.
It just wasn't working for me. There was some physical
resemblances that were supposed to happen for one of the
characters that wasn't really quite there. We were trying to
work around it with some makeup and effects and stuff
like that, but contact lenses, things like that, trying to

(01:04:32):
pull some tricks, but it just wasn't really working for me.
And I was having a hard time imagining raising another
fifty thousand dollars for this project, relaunching this whole thing
after the massive loss that we took on the first one.
For actors, I wasn't absolutely thrilled about. And I realized
that that was holding me back, and it was paralyzing me,
and it was keeping me from moving forward with the project.

(01:04:55):
So again James and I much debate. We had many,
many discussions about I had become friends with these people,
I was loyal to them, I love them to death,
But it just came down to I had to do
what I had to do that was best for the film.
So I made the calls. I pick up the phone
and I told the actors, much to their heartbreak unfortunately,

(01:05:15):
and this was so tough to make this call that
we were going to recast them. And at this point,
I'm feeling like such a loser. I'm like, oh my god,
I've had to recast all these actors. One of the
film shut down. I fired three directors. It's like, oh
my god, this is such a mess. But it's amazing
because once I hung up the phone from those phone calls,
that little warrior jumped back up again. And I made

(01:05:39):
those calls the end of August, and by the end
of September we were shooting. That's how fast it happened.
Because once I was unburdened from the things that were
really kind of holding me back, I was like a
locomotive and everything just went on hyper speed. And so
while I initially wanted to use unknown actors for this film,

(01:06:00):
started thinking at this point, it's like, you know what,
We've invested so much money in this film. At this point,
it's like, we need an actor. We need a name
at this point to just really, you know, give the
film some credibility, to kind of raise the bar. It's like,
you know, it just felt like the right thing to do.
And as we were researching actors in that age range.

(01:06:21):
Lance Hendrickson came across our radar and as soon as
I looked him up, I mean I knew who he was,
of course, but I hadn't like, as soon as I
looked him up, like what he looks like? Now, I
was like, that's it. That's the character. That's Norman. And
I'm like, there's an We were still talking about some

(01:06:41):
other names, but I'm like, no, nobody else makes sense,
nobody on this planet makes sense. But Lance Hendrickson. He's
our guy. He's the one, and he's and I literally
told my people, if we don't get Lance, we're not
doing the film. And so we picked up the phone
and we called his manager and she loved the script.
And it was a tough negotiation because you know, these

(01:07:04):
guys don't work for free and they very rarely do
short films. So it was a tough negotiation and we
ended up not being able to negotiate. I tried and
tried and tried, but you know, basically, at the bottom,
at the end of the day, you have to give
them what they ask for, and we did. And you know,
the other thing that we had to do was a
pay or play, which is very typical, and that was

(01:07:26):
very stressful on me. But in a way, that's what
helped it happened so fast, is because once we had
to lock into a shoot date, you know, paying his
fee and being locked into a shoot date. That'll motivate you.
I'm telling you right now, if you're having trouble getting
the film made, just lock yourself into a pay or
play date with the big actor and you'll get your

(01:07:48):
film made. And that's what happened. So you know, thirty
days later we were on set and we were shooting
and Lance Hendrickson is so amazing. It was my first
time working with the name actor and he was He's
so passionate, he's so dedicated, he's so talented, and also

(01:08:08):
just a beautiful spirit and a beautiful person, and everybody
on set just fell in love with him. And the
girls were all like these you know, crushes on him,
and they were like, you know, it was just like
it was. It was wonderful, and the chemistry between him
and our actors with other actors was was amazing. And unfortunately,
because of the rate we had to pay, we could

(01:08:31):
only have him for two days and the film was
never scheduled for less than three and we even wanted
four at one point to shoot it. So I unfortunately
had to go back and shave back the script a
little bit, make it a little bit more lean, and
so that we could so that the scenes we did
shoot in two days weren't really compromised. But I have

(01:08:51):
to I'll be the first to admit, you know, we
were we were pushing it to shoot this film in
two days, so you know, yeah, I think there's a
few things that got sacrificed along the way story wise,
but I think to have Lance Hendrickson in our film
and to still have the film tell the story, the
amazing story that we were trying to tell, it was
completely worth it. And so that film got shot the

(01:09:13):
end of September and we're currently in post production.

Speaker 5 (01:09:16):
Awesome, and you know, excuse me, you know, it's great
that you were able to get Lance Hendrickson. I've heard
nothing but amazing things about him from people who've worked
with him.

Speaker 6 (01:09:26):
He's unbelievable. He really is an amazing person, and we
were totally blessed that he agreed to do our script.
We really feel very fortunate, So.

Speaker 5 (01:09:36):
You know, just you know, and again you know, congratulations
and everything with found and I'm glad you know you're
able to get you know, your redemption and you're able
to you know, actually prove to yourself you can do this,
and you know, you know, forget those negative voices that
we all face sometimes. So you know, you know, recently
you've started your own fund, your own short film seminar.

Speaker 3 (01:09:58):
We'll be right back after or a word from our
sponsor and now back to the show.

Speaker 5 (01:10:08):
And this is what I want to talk to you
about with terms of crowdfunding. You know, I saw you actually,
you know, did a live event of this, so meaning
in person, So if you could, could you just give
us like a brief synopsis of we know what you
go over and things of that nature.

Speaker 6 (01:10:25):
Well, yeah, teaching has always been something that's been a
goal of mine because I really truly enjoy enjoy it
and I find it extremely rewarding. And ever since I've
moved to LA as you've heard from my history, I
haven't really gotten the credentials. You know, to teach and
to justify charging people for seminar, you have to have
a certain amount of credentials, and that's what I was
working towards and trying to build up this past decade,

(01:10:48):
and it was just a real struggle. Finally, with Found
being made and winning awards and doing as well as
it did. Plus the fact that I've crowdfunded now eight
short film projects, actually I actually eight, eight of them
we crowdfunded, I feel like I have some knowledge now
and some credentials to speak knowledgeably about that particular subject.

(01:11:12):
So I'm very clear about I'm only teaching raising money
for short films because I have not raised money for
a feature, and I think that is different if you're
trying to raise more than like fifty sixty thousand dollars.
And I've never used any other platform other than Indigogo.
So in my classes, I'm very specific, and in my marketing,
I'm very specific to tell people this is a specific
class on how to raise money for a short film

(01:11:34):
on Indiegogo, and the amounts of money that I feel
like I can specialize in helping people raise is between
five and ten thousand dollars. That's a real sweet spot
with me. I feel like I could raise that much
money for film like every time where I've gotten into trouble.
And I'm also very honest about this. In my seminars.
Where I've gotten into trouble personally is trying to raise

(01:11:55):
money in the amounts of thirty thousand or more. I've
raised up to twenty five thousand, but not in one
single campaign. That's where I have a sore spot. And
I think part of this is because it's for a
short although there have been several people who have raised
more than fifty thousand dollars for their shorts, and I
can speak to that, and I can tell them what

(01:12:15):
I think they need to do in order to make
that happen. But it's a different process because there's raising
money inside your circle and then there's raising money outside
your circle. And to hit those high numbers of twenty thirty,
forty thousand or more, you have to go outside your circle.
You have to hit communities and organizations, and you have
to get press and publicity and marketing. And that's like
a whole nother animal can't but I can't speak to that.

(01:12:39):
I do understand that, and I've just never actually done that.
And the two campaigns that we did try to run
that were thirty thousand or more, there were various reasons
those campaigns didn't succeed. But what I like to do
in the seminar is I use those as an exam
as examples to show what does not work because it
didn't work for us, and I know exactly why it
didn't work. I think sometimes you can learn from people

(01:13:01):
of what to do, but I think you can also
learn from what not to do. Like I could tell
people all day long with my experience with Shattered Love,
I'll tell you what not to do, you know.

Speaker 5 (01:13:11):
So Daan, now let you know you've had some of
these live seminars. Are you playing on, you know, having
any online seminars for people who couldn't make it out
of La.

Speaker 6 (01:13:19):
Yeah, it's really funny. When I posted the first live
one on Facebook, I was like, oh, yeah, hopefully all
these people in my area will come. But what happened
was everybody started sending me emails and messages going I
don't live in LA, but I really want to take
this class, and so I'm like, maybe I need to
do an online version, and everybody was like, yeah, yeah,
I do an online version. So I'm like, okay, well
that might actually even be more popular because a lot

(01:13:42):
of my followers aren't in LA. So I've been working
real hard on an online version, and I'm actually launching tonight,
as a matter of fact, my very first webinar. It's
Secrets to Funding your Short Film on indiegog and it's
going to be tonight from six thirty to eight thirty

(01:14:02):
Pacific Standard time, so that's Los Angeles time, six thirty
to eight thirty live, live webinar that you can sign
up for and interact and ask questions and all that
are kind of stuff. And I will be that's posted
on my wall and on my on my website.

Speaker 5 (01:14:18):
Okay, excellent, And you know I'll make sure I linked
that in show notes as well.

Speaker 6 (01:14:22):
Yeah, that would be La Filmseminars dot com. You can
register there or Palmstreet Films dot com you can register
there as well.

Speaker 5 (01:14:29):
Awesome cool and yeah, I'll make sure linkedos in the
show notes by the way, Oh that'd be great. And
you know, speaking of you know, you know Palm Films
by the way, you know, is there you know, just
to get to your short script competition? I know you
s this is you've held us for a couple of
different excuse me, held this for a couple of years,

(01:14:51):
you know, is uh is there an impetus to you know,
why you started this. I mean, I know you kind
of touched on that earlier, but is there you know,
have you really sort of evolved this meaning like, is there, like,
you know, any other reasons why you may have do
these competitions.

Speaker 4 (01:15:06):
Oh?

Speaker 6 (01:15:06):
Yeah, absolutely, there's a very specific history with these. The
first script the first script contests we're calling the one
with with that Callly one with Fragments and Shattered Love,
where I just put out a call on my Facebook
that's we're calling that our first Palm Street Films contests.
Later that year, we got access to a series of
standing sets in Orange County where it's a it's a

(01:15:27):
stage where they filled a couple of standing sets. A
standing set is like a pre built living room or
hospital room, or it's a set. Everybody knows what a
film set is. It's like it's pre built sets that
all exist in one space and it's a series of them,
like all spread out throughout the space. And we were
given access to use one of the standing set space

(01:15:48):
where they had a house, the house where we actually
shot Shattered Love. Actually it's the same stage. They had
a house, they had a jail cell, they had an
executive boardroom. At the time, they had a hospital set
and they had even an airplane thing. It's called Silver
Dream Factory in Orange County. If you haven't heard about it,
it's fantastic. It is within the sixty mile zone thirty

(01:16:10):
mile zone. Sorry asked for Roland Kanamar. He's a good
friend of mine. He's treated us very well every time
we've shot there. But we had access to the stage
and we wanted to shoot something last minute. So I
put another call out to my Facebook. You know, no
submission fee, nothing like that, just because of an informal
call for scripts, and we told people we needed like
a five page script, something we could shoot in one

(01:16:31):
day that's set in one of these locations. And we
listed all the locations and John Whetstone was one of
my Facebook followers who sat down and actually found this
really brilliant way to utilize two of the sets. And
that was the Interrogation. And so Shattered Love was the

(01:16:51):
first script contest and that film got made eventually into
a film starring Lynce Hendrickson. And then the second contest
was the Interrogation, which ended up getting made and actually
in my seminars both live and online, I show the interrogation.
Even though we never actually released it publicly online. That
one's still because Virgin Produced is still considering showing that

(01:17:13):
on their airlines. So we haven't. And that's a deal
that we got through Dances with Films because the Interrogation
had premiered at Santa Barbara International Film Festival. That was
its world premiere, and then it had its La premiere
Dances with Films, and through Dances with Films is how
we made the connection with Virgin Produced. So we're still
waiting to hear about that. So we haven't released that officially,
but I do show that film in my seminars, which

(01:17:33):
is really great. People love seeing that. I also in
my seminars, I show the original ZOMBIELLS campaign video, which
a lot of people thought was like at the time,
it was like people thought it was like, oh, that's
a great hook, that's a really cute video. There's been
a whole lot of really great videos since then that
have kind of eclipsed that. People do some really great
and wonderful and creative things with their campaign videos these days,

(01:17:56):
but we still thought it was kind of a fun
little thing, so I show that in the seminar. But
and then last year we were starting to think about
our first feature film and what we were going to do.
So last year was the first time we decided to
launch an official script contest where there was a submission
fee and a cash prize, a significant cash prize, So

(01:18:20):
we launched a contest, charged a submission fee. We got
just under one hundred submissions total. So the good news
about this festival is you're not competing with thousands of
other scripts. So I really encourage anybody listening to this
if you have a short film, and we opened it
up to both this year. We did short films and
feature film scripts, so I really encourage you. We're about

(01:18:42):
to launch the fourth annual FALM Street Films Contest. You
guys should really enter your scripts because you're not going
against thousands of other scripts. You may not even be
going against hundreds of other scripts because we're a very small,
intimate kind of in contest. But the prize is five
hundred dollars for winning short and one thousand dollars for

(01:19:02):
winning feature, So that's that's pretty groovy. Also, and this
is announcement I just made last last week. We've decided
the winning short film script from last year was a
really wonderful script called Five Days in Calcutta, which was
written by Fred Perry. That script not only won our contest,

(01:19:22):
but I didn't realize this until after we had awarded,
it has also won like a dozen other short film
script contests. That's how good it is. It won Houston
Comedy Fest and it also won DC Shorts. And we
love that script and we love Fred, and so we've
decided that we're going to produce that one and I'm directing.
So every single script contest that we've had, the films

(01:19:46):
have gotten made.

Speaker 5 (01:19:48):
Oh wow, that is huge.

Speaker 6 (01:19:50):
That's to some people that's more important than a cash prize.
But this year, as in last year, we're offering a
cash prize and the chance for your film to get produced.
But this year I'm specifically looking for features because I'm
looking I'm looking to direct my first feature.

Speaker 3 (01:20:05):

Speaker 5 (01:20:14):
So basically it kind of ties with my next question,
which is, you know, what is your next project that
you have?

Speaker 6 (01:20:21):
Uh, well, I'm in post production on Fragile Storm right now,
and one other short film that we did early this year.
This a small, smaller film. We're trying to get those
two things wrapped out and post and then we're gonna shoot.
Once that's done, we're gonna shoot five Days in Calcutta,
and we hope to do that in the summer. It
depends on how long it takes to actually get Fragile
Storm finished. There's a lot that still needs to be

(01:20:41):
done on that and we want to focus on that
exclusively before we move on to anything else. But five
Days in Calcutta is up next, and then, like I said,
after that, I'm looking to jump into my first feature,
and then after that I want to do zombiells. So
that's kind of the I guess two year plan.

Speaker 5 (01:20:59):
And you know, I really wish you the best with
Zombiell's and everything else too. I think I think honestly,
doing I think Zombie Elves, when you come and revisit
that you're going to have a whole new no pun intended,
but a whole new life to it.

Speaker 6 (01:21:13):
Yeah. Well, because I look at you know, since I
started directing two years ago, I look at everything differently.
I look colors seem different, people seem different, I see
movies differently. I have literally a whole new perspective on
not only on life, but or not only in the
film business, I guess, but also on life. But I
see movies differently now, I see them in my head

(01:21:34):
and I form visions more quickly, and I and everything
comes to me more quickly. And I'm super excited about
all the visual possibilities of Zombie Elves.

Speaker 5 (01:21:46):
Yeah, and also also what I meant to us, you know,
just the market is changing too, and you know, I
just think there's gonna be even more opportunities. I mean,
because you know, when you first started that, I don't
think Amazon Studios was around. They were looking for new stuff.
But now if you look at it, everyone's.

Speaker 4 (01:22:02):
Looking for new material.

Speaker 5 (01:22:03):
I mean, I mean, I as I was talking to
you know, Richard Botto from say thirty two, he has
you know, he never going back and forth with just
all of the new content, uh stress streams out there
that are just looking for that that need content.

Speaker 4 (01:22:18):
So honestly, I think.

Speaker 5 (01:22:19):
You will have you know, more of of an opportunity
with Zombie Elle's.

Speaker 6 (01:22:23):
Yeah, I think so too. I'm excited. And you know,
it's just that film has so much potential on so
many levels. But it's also an awesome responsibility because you
you know, you have to be loyal and true to Christmas.
You have to be low and true to zombie fans.
It's it's quite you know, it's it's a bit daunting,
to be honest with you. But I am excited for
the challenge, and we were even for a time we

(01:22:45):
were even thinking about doing it in three D. But
I'm not sure if that makes sense. These days, it
doesn't seem like three D is taken off the way
people had hoped it would. Yet.

Speaker 5 (01:22:52):
It just seems to be in certain movies that three
D is accepted. Obviously anything that James Cameron does, and
few things here and there, but yeah, three D. I
don't think even with the three D TVs that they released,
I haven't seen much for them.

Speaker 6 (01:23:07):
Oh gosh. I got a three D TV for Christmas
three years ago and I watched maybe five movies on
it and now it's collecting dust. It's like, you know,
and it's a great experience. I love stuff in three D.
I'm a total fan. But it's just you know, putting
on the glasses and charging them up, you know. I
had one of those systems and it just you know,

(01:23:27):
it just I don't know, it's just not the experience
that I think people were hoping for, and finding content
in three D that you could buy for your home
system was a huge challenge at the time. You know,
like three years ago when I got it, you couldn't
buy anything for less than fifty bucks. That's true, there
was and there was very little content available in the stores,

(01:23:48):
and that became really frustrating.

Speaker 5 (01:23:51):
Yeah, and a lot of the stores too, are even
getting rid of their Blue rays. I mean it's just
you know, if you're like a Best Buying, they sort
of consolidated, they've bumped out all the DVDs, and now
you know that's that whole entire area is getting smaller
and smaller basically.

Speaker 6 (01:24:03):
Right, Yeah, no, gohd.

Speaker 5 (01:24:06):
I was just gonna say, basically, they want you to
go online or they assume you're gonna buy a digital copy.
But I'm sorry, what are we gonna say?

Speaker 6 (01:24:12):
No? I just remember a couple of years ago, I
bought a Blu ray burner and I went out to
like Office Max and Best Buy. In all these places,
I couldn't even find like blank Blu rays.

Speaker 5 (01:24:21):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (01:24:21):
It was like, what's happening to the Blu ray market?

Speaker 4 (01:24:23):
And why?

Speaker 6 (01:24:24):
Yeah, you had to special order them online. You can't
even just walk into a store and buy blank blu
rays Like really.

Speaker 5 (01:24:31):
Yeah, it's uh.

Speaker 4 (01:24:32):
I mean it really depends too.

Speaker 5 (01:24:35):
I've noticed, unlike the area and whatever they seem to stock.
But I even had trouble getting black blue rays before.
I actually had to order them from online from somewhere
I think maybe the Amazon I heard him from.

Speaker 6 (01:24:46):
Wow.

Speaker 4 (01:24:47):
Yeah, So, uh, you know, don We've we've.

Speaker 5 (01:24:50):
Been talking probably close to two hours now.

Speaker 6 (01:24:53):
I told you I'm a talker.

Speaker 5 (01:24:56):
So what I might have doing is I might end
up splitting this into much sure, yet I'm gonna when
I put this together off, I can, you know, have
a better picture of everything. But just you know, in closing,
is there anything you want to discuss that we haven't
touched on.

Speaker 6 (01:25:10):
There's a thousand things I could talk about that. I
have so many stories, I have so many thoughts on
this business, so much in my head I want to
share with people. You know, I could go on for days,
but you know, just to just to give people some
ideas about the script contest. I believe we're gonna launch
that sometime this month, sometime in March. And if you

(01:25:31):
follow me on Facebook, it's Facebook dot com forward slash
Donfield's producer. I tag that name when I was producing.
I wish I could change it to director. But if
you just follow me on that, you'll see all the announcements. Also,
if you go to Palm Streetfilms dot com and join
our mailing list, there's a subscribe button there where you

(01:25:52):
can join our mailing list, you'll also be notified. But
we're hoping to launch that in March, and we're super
excited and I'm hoping that my next feature film or
my first few your film is in that group of submissions.

Speaker 4 (01:26:04):
Awesome.

Speaker 5 (01:26:05):
So again, everyone, I will link to down's all of
Dawn's websites that she's discussed in the show notes.

Speaker 4 (01:26:11):
So again, if.

Speaker 5 (01:26:12):
You're a screenwriter and you want to you know, have
an opportunity to you know, have something produced, check out
Dawn's uh uh new opportunities. I mean, you hear the
the contest sounds amazing and you know, like I was
just saying, go on about all the different you know,
conscient content streams. I mean, this is another opportunity for
people now, and it's just it's amazing. With everything else,
I mean, everything's coming up to at once, you know,

(01:26:33):
you got the Nicole Fellowship coming up, and you got
i mean stripped the Balus I think is coming up.
I mean there's just so many, you know, but yeah, everyone,
you can uh find me at Dave Bulls dot com. Twitter,
it's at Dave Wonderscore Bullets and Facebook it's at Dave
dot bullets. But again in the show not you can
just click on that and request me and stalk me.
So Dawn, thank you very much for coming on.

Speaker 6 (01:26:55):
Thank you, Dave. This was awesome. I really enjoyed it.
You're you're an awesome host. Thank you so much.

Speaker 5 (01:27:00):
Well, thank you very much. Anyti, I'm gonna come back on.

Speaker 4 (01:27:01):
Let me know.

Speaker 6 (01:27:03):
You know, I feel like with all the trials and
tribulations that I've been through, I always like to say
from one of my favorite movies, Galaxy Quests, never give up,
never surrender, because this business is hard and it will
tear you down if you let it. But if you
want it badly enough and if you work hard enough,

(01:27:23):
you can accomplish any filmmaking dream that you want to accomplish,
and you can be anything that you want to be.
And it's funny now that people are telling me that
I'm an inspiration. I always felt like, oh my god,
I'm doing everything wrong and I'm making all these mistakes
and nothing's going right. But things never go right in
this business. It's the nature of it. And whether you

(01:27:43):
succeed or fail is going to be determined not by
how many failures you have, but how many times you
pick yourself up and make it right.

Speaker 5 (01:27:52):
And then, you know, that's a great piece of advice.

Speaker 6 (01:27:54):
Don and that's what I always try to do. I
just try to keep pushing them forward and try to
do the right thing as often as I can, and
do the right thing for my films and never give up.

Speaker 5 (01:28:06):
And that that's that's amazing, you know. There there have
been other people in the podcast too who have you know,
mentioned that, uh, you know, it's it is something we
have to just keep going. And you know, once you
you know you've done a project, just try to move
on to the next one, you know, and the you know,
if some of the other stories that I've heard too,
in yours included, I mean, even if some people can

(01:28:27):
use these stories to avoid these pitfalls and sort of
learn from everybody else's experience, I think, you know, they
would be it would behoove them to actually, you know,
make a game plan, actually listen to these uh these
podcasts and stories like yours and and something like you know,
Kelly Baker's and piece together. You know, how could I
avoid the same the same the same instances, the same
scenarios playing out, and you know, and the steps they

(01:28:49):
could do to prevent those.

Speaker 6 (01:28:51):
Yeah, it's it's a tough business. It'll tear you down,
it really will. And I feel like if I can,
if I can direct, anybody can direct, because it does
not come easy to me, does not come naturally to me.
I've had to learn it. I've had to practice it,
of had to hone my crap. And I still feel
like I may be twenty five percent there. I have
not done my best work yet.

Speaker 5 (01:29:13):
And you know, and I wish you the best because
I mean, you know that that's we're always looking to improve,
We're always looking to evolve, So you know, again, don
I wish you the best with everything.

Speaker 6 (01:29:22):
Thank you so much, Dave. I really enjoyed this. Thank
you so much.

Speaker 2 (01:29:25):
I want to thank Dave so much for doing such
a great job on this episode. If you want to
get links to anything we spoke about in this episode,
head over to the show notes at Indie film Huscle
dot com Forward slash eight eighteen. If you have it already,
please head over to filmmaking podcast dot com, subscribe and
leave a good review for the show.

Speaker 3 (01:29:43):
It really helps us out a lot, guys.

Speaker 4 (01:29:45):
Thank you again so much for listening to guys.

Speaker 3 (01:29:47):
As always, keep that hustle going, keep that dream alive,
Stay safe out there, and I'll talk to you soon.

Speaker 1 (01:29:53):
Thanks for listening to the Indie Film Hustle Podcast at
indiefilm hustle dot com. That's I N D I E
F I L M h U S T l E
dot com.

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