Well, it looks like my long journey with "My Most Difficult Case" is
now over. I hope. I posted it with dailymotion.com's Open VOD service. In this
post I look back at the long struggle to make this film, why I chose Video on
Demand, the final touches to the film and promotion.
Release of "My Most Difficult Case"
"My Most
Difficult Case" is now posted at:
The cost is $0.59 per view. There is a 30 second free
preview.
Description: A judge faces a difficult choice with his latest
case. He hardly listens to the lawyers as they try to influence his decision.
A Long Struggle
It has been a long struggle to finish "My Most Difficult Case". The first draft of the script
is dated march 1991, and I based it on a story board I'd done before that. It
wasn't until 2002 that I began to make the film. I had a version done on film
in time for the 2004 $100 Film Festival. I was never happy with that version
and planned to re-cut it before I tried to distribute it.
I had the original film scanned to digital video before I
edited the movie, so I planned to use that. That dragged for a long time and it
wasn't until 2010 that I finally got started. Vildo Sturam did a new edit of
the video for me, then I started to make some of my own changes. I got stalled
again when the person I hired to do the sound didn't follow through. Patrick
Aull showed me how to do the sound myself and I made some progress after that.
The affair with the sound person left me with a bad feeling
about the project, so I found it hard to work on it. It was only a few weeks
ago that I decided to put this project behind me.
Why Video on Demand
I had hoped to distribute the film through Ouat media. They
had done the distribution of "My
Next Film", which I was quite happy with. When I talked to them in
2009, they said that it might be hard to market because it would be seen as an
"old" movie. It doesn't look any newer 5 years later. That led me to
consider other options for distribution, such as Video on Demand.
I get a share of the advertising on my YouTube videos, but
the return is quite small. You need to have large numbers of views to get any
substantial revenue. The kinds of movies I do are unlikely to generate that
kind of volume.
I felt that it would be better to look at Video on Demand
for my movies. I looked into Distrify and identified some other VoD services.
Several years ago, I posted some of my films on DailyMotion, but hadn't
followed up on it for a long time. A few weeks ago, they added a Video on
Demand feature to their site, so I thought I'd try it out.
Since people have to pay, I expect that I would have much
fewer views. But I believe I would get more revenue from those fewer views.
We shall see.
Final Touches
There is an old saying that no work of art is ever finished,
merely abandoned. While I suspect that there is more I could do on the film,
but decided to stop after a few changes I made this week.
I wasn't happy with the actor's voices. They all seemed too
insubstantial. I played around with several audio adjustments to try to improve
them. In the end I found a combination of compression, equalization and reverb
gave me a sound I felt better about. I did a slightly different reverb for the
judge because his voice is supposed to be his thoughts.
I did a small change to the video in one shot. In the shot
of the jail cell at the end I could see the actor's face clearly before I
wanted it recognized. A couple slight adjustments to the brightness and
contrast gave me what I wanted. I had thought that higher contrast would give
me what I wanted, but it turned out that I needed to use a lower contrast.
I added a few sound effects to the sound track. I felt that
it needed more, but I couldn't see anywhere that I could justify additions.
Promotion
I will try to do some promotion of the film, although I have
trouble imagining how to reach people who will like it. I am open to
suggestions if you have them.
The Future
Now I can leave this film behind and move on to new
projects.
This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog
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