TAG | business
As continued from The New Deal: the Prologue…
The thing is, is that certain practical constraints changed the nature of our project, Life’s Waltz, and therefore they changed our schedule. Originally we thought the whole thing wouldn’t take more than 2 or 3 months. By now we’ve had a drastic reality check. Among the practical things that changed the nature of the project were the quality and type of footage we were getting, the realization of how long it takes to film enough to do justice to the subject matter, business matters like record-keeping, minutes, accounting, and insurance, and other random things that came up that we didn’t know we’d have to do or didn’t expect to do in the original framework for the project. This all compelled us to keep shooting and not edit at the same time. So after the couple of months that we shot, we ended up with almost 200 hours of footage and not having edited any of it. Then came some legal, business, and technical issues that delayed our beginning editing, which all took time to work on and resolve. Additionally, family members visited and we took some brief and uncoordinated vacations since real life was still going on, and meanwhile we continued to follow up on a few stories that had emerged by shooting, and we also went to film a few special events, such as Valentines Day. We would’ve been remiss had we not filmed the election of the elected Valentines King and Queen.
See, we had originally only even formed an LLC for the litigation protection. That’s it. We almost tried doing this film without even forming a company. We were just in it for the experience, after all. But once we decided to form an LLC for the legal safety, we realized unwittingly that it opened some unexpected doors. First off, in dealing with the nation’s largest senior services provider at one of whose community we’re shooting Life’s Waltz, they definitely aren’t going to enter into any agreements with two random people who aren’t even behind a company. The LLC was equivalent to legitimacy and credibility, more or less. Though obviously we still couldn’t walk in with clown suits on. It made it official. Though we hadn’t thought about it, they required us to have insurance if we were going to be there, and having the company helped with that as well. But both of these things, most importantly to this story, started changing the nature of the project without us really thinking about it. It was becoming more business-y and by-the-books. Soon after forming the company, we thought we’d better have image and location releases/agreements for everyone appearing in the documentary. This led to a ton of time and work drafting the appropriate agreements (having no legal background and getting free consultation by BDD’s Legal Services *wink wink*) to turn out agreements that even changed as we kept shooting. Also, we showed up to the meeting to sign our “Location Release” with TVND, they took one look at it and their lawyers went and drafted a real one. So much for that effort – but it’s come in handy for shooting off-location. At any rate, the picture I’m trying to paint is that things started, not by design, taking a very official, by-the-books form. And this was certain to change the nature of the project.
We realized also, after talking to a number of professional, successful documentary filmmakers, and also after seeing the quality of footage we were getting–truly outstanding–that the process would probably take much longer than we expected as well. Remember, we originally though the whole thing from beginning to end would take 2 or 3 months, and then we’d part ways. Guess again!
So we started drafting a business plan. We started talking with people about their approaches to sales and distribution. We spent a few weeks figuring out how to best manage our footage in the editing room; because we filmed with Panasonic’s brand new HMC-150, the footage poses a number of technical challenges to be able to edit it. Ultimately, we had to figure out a way and get the correct hardware to convert all of the footage twice over into a severely degraded, much smaller storage requirement format (this is called “downrezzing”, in other words “downgrading the resolution”) to keep potentially immense storage costs down, and then not to mention the amount of time and coordination it took to convert all of the footage twice over and back it all up onto three separate external drives in addition to what now are the two computers that we have to edit on. But the good news is, our process is correct and will work solidly and provide a lot of stability. We now have two computers to edit on, as well, so that we will both be working on different selected characters up until the rough assembly of the film.
We finally started editing, well… Ashley did. I was still converting footage and taking care of a lot of other business stuff, such as getting all of our books in order and preparing taxes for the first time in my life. What a learning experience. Plus, we came up with some more consolidated and streamlined approaches to the marketing campaign, namely focusing on Old Stories, the Sam Show, and the Ceil series (we haven’t named it yet because we haven’t done an “episode” yet). But during this time period, things were very crazy, and we re-prioritized what we were doing, thus less frequent blog posting.
Now, we’re running full steam. We’re both editing full time. All taxes and business matters are sorted and settled. Old Stories are in the pipeline. And mostly importantly, as we were advised by my friend Daniel who’s consulted us so much on this project, we’re focusing on the product, because without that we’ve got nothing else.
To do this, we’ve sat down for a few hours (and will continue to keep the dialogue open and dynamic) to hammer out a few basic guiding principles for how we edit so answer the questions of what are we doing and why, all in order to create the best film possible. As a practical matter, since we’re editing on separate computers and we need to remain coordinated and collaborative, we sat down to figure out to what extent we should be creating rough assemblies of each scenes, which type of scenes we should be doing rough assemblies of, and what the timeline/schedule of getting things done, who will do what work, and what our goals are.
I’ll put it very concretely in the next blog post, detailing our schedule, timeline, goals, character arcs and conflicts that we’ll focus on, what our process will be for doing the full rough assembly, and much, much more.
To be continued again…
The many of you who read this are probably wondering what’s really been going on in Life’s Waltz Land the past number of weeks. There hasn’t been much reporting from the frontlines, there’s been a substantial amount of fluff posted to the blog and it’s felt like you’ve just been checking up on, essentially, a spree of forwarded emails posted to a blog, and you don’t really have much of a clue what’s going on except that you think we’re editing.
Well, while you’ve been left to wonder, many things have happened over here that beg reportage. But let me start off with the story of how we got to this point before I get into the meat of what’s happened in the past few weeks in my next post.
Once upon a time, Ashley and Jared made a 17-minute short-subject documentary called Life’s Waltz, about life, love, and loss in old age in their final semester at the University of Southern California. Though there were definitely some hitches along the way, they emerged with an overall wonderful learning experience and a solid, very enjoyable, professional product on their hands, screening it to a theater of over 400 people who hooted and hollered in applause for two filmmakers that the vast majority of them didn’t even know when they entered that landmark Norris theater that May 3. On the heels of this small but substantial success, the high-as-kites Ashley and Jared submitted their short film to a number of film festivals. It was rejected by every single one of the 15 or so that they submitted to, except that they’re still to this day waiting to hear from 3 or 4 more. No matter. Esteem untarnished, they kept their heads high. Who cares? Not they. In the meantime, they continued to show the film to friends, family, and absolute strangers the world over, as they each departed for 3 months to opposite ends of the Earth on backpacking trips.
When Jared returned to New York at the end of July, he walked around Times Square and made a couple of phone calls. One of them turned out to be fate-sealing: the one to none other than Ashley. “Yo, doozle. I’ve been thinking. The entire time I was traveling and meeting all of these amazing people, I had the growing compulsion to do a feature documentary. It’s what I want to do. What do ya say, pardna?” And so it was that Ashley and Jared committed to making a feature version of Life’s Waltz, one that would go deeper, hit harder, mean more, and defy all expectations. Jared hit the ground in LA in mid-August while Ashley was finishing up her job at her beloved ranch. They went through 9 drafts of a treatment (film summary, outline, plan and proposal) and got to work approaching various retirement communities in Bend (Oregon), Los Angeles, and Dallas to see where they could seal the deal on an opportunity to shoot their full-length documentary at an amenable retirement community of active, independent seniors.
Of course, things always take longer than one expects them to in film, and so finally, Jared went back to Dallas in mid-October, and it was then that they finally struck the golden deal at TVND (though other communities made themselves available in Dallas and Bend, as well). After a lot of time spent researching equipment, research, and how to create and run a company, signing some business and financial agreements, and a lot more planning (and with innumerable, crucial, and invaluable help from some key players in the business and legal departments), Ashley booked a ticket for Dallas. That brings us to late November, when we actually started filming Life’s Waltz. You see, originally Ashley and I had estimated that we’d shoot for about a month while also editing to see how our film was shaping up, then edit for a little bit, go back and shoot some more based on whatever story was emerging, and then wrap the entire film after a total of 3 months. We thought, “Hey, even if nothing comes of it, at least it will have been a great learning experience and we’ll have a feature film under our belts in 3 months, and we can part ways and go about our lives, nothing lost, and a lot of experience gained.” Well, remember how I said that things always take longer than one expects?
To be continued soon…
Our company is called Life’s Waltz Productions LLC. But that’s close enough I guess. We can now accept your credit cards.
And by the way, despite what Ashley says, if you’re a senior and do something really crazy, get in touch with us and let’s collaborate! We’d love to go skydiving with you.
