Long Interview with Shooting People
‘We’re pushing something that people refer to citizen marketing, where we give people the tools to do a lot of stuff. On our screenings page people can print out a black and white flyer and put it up in their office, school, whatever, and they can email it to a friend. We give people html code for tags on their Myspace and blogs, for their comments and bulletins. More and more sites are used by a savvy audience who copy and paste code, and by people who write their own code. We were part of an Indiewire showcase, called “Undiscovered Gems” and we had a digital invitation. The graphic for that invitation was viewed 100,000 times just on other people’s websites. It made a big difference in letting people discover the project.’
Arin Crumley & Susan Buice
Directors, Four Eyed Monsters
Arin Crumley and Susan Buice are filmmakers who met up in New York City and started collaborating. What ultimately resulted is Four Eyed Monsters – the sweet and fumbling fictional autobiography of the filmmakers’ unusual courtship, made for the cost of quitting their day jobs. It has morphed into a custom-designed interactive experience for its fans, its online and offline viewers, and the 70,000 subscribers to its video podcasts.
Responding to pressure from their on-line fan base Buice and Crumley garnered screening runs in LA, NYC, Boston, San Francisco, Seattle and Chicago.
-So, why did you make FOUR EYED MONSTERS?
We wanted to tell the story of our relationship, and we knew that the way we did it was going to be the best way to do it. I’d never embarked on a large project like this, but I’d worked on enough other projects to know it was doable with almost no budget, as long as we had the equipment. We didn’t know if would be a gallery piece, a film or an internet thing, but once we started working on it, the story included all the right messages and ideas.
Susan and I met each other in 2002, we started the film at the end of 2003, it premiered at Slamdance in 2005.
How long did it take you to write the script?
Being as it’s based on experiences we had, it took a year after the events for us to do the outline.
And we found we needed a script to be able to explain the vision of the project to our cinematographer, to our actors, to everyone.
We adjusted the structure on paper, then went ahead and shot it, then changed our edit, based on the fact that the structure had changed.
That process kept going until we submitted an 85-minute version of FEM to Slamdance. Throughout a year of submitting to film fests, FEM lost 10 minutes. At each one, we had a new cut. They were little edits – condensing and layering.
We’ve been doing the prep for the DVD release, audio mixing and color correcting ourselves, because we’re anal. The question keeps coming up, why not release the DVD sooner? It’s because we’ve been workshopping it this whole time.
Did you know what were you looking for in actors when you cast?
Did it get easier to direct actors with Brad’s guidance?
Haha, We were pretty clueless. The casting happened early on. We only used one person from open auditions, Mark Scrivo who played the roommate character. After that it was a more organic process of finding people from our own lives to act.
Susan and I hit a block where it became more and more difficult to deliver emotional honesty on camera. We realized we should take acting classes to get tools for warm up before we shot the video mail scenes, where we are sending videos back and forth.
Mark recommended the Sally Johnson acting school, as seen in Episode Six, and we took a class with lots of primal screaming. It’s terrifying to be in front of a group of people doing fairly horrible scenes. And we watched our teacher, Brad, walk people through scenes that seemed like therapy sessions.
During the shoot we did scenes over and over. Everything became more authentic and real as we went back and did things over. Plus that’s a benefit of shooting on dv. Just roll and we can depart from the scene for a bit.
Did you get all the rights to the music?
It’s all from independent artists who allowed us to use it. We’re not paying for rights. We are working on paperwork to do a soundtrack CD however. Myspace has been great to search for a particular genre of music, or for bands we like without exposure, so we use the music and the podcasts and link them to give them exposure. We’ve avoided working with bands who are signing to major labels because they will lose the right to collaborate creatively with us, thanks to their lawyers. A lot of the music in the film was composed for the film by Andrew Peterson, who has also made music for video podcasts.
How did you raise money for the film?
We lived off credit cards. Hopefully we will knock off 50k in credit card debt via award money if we win the Undiscovered Gems award (Sponsored by the Sundance Channel).
What locations did you use besides sets in your apartment?
We mostly shot guerrilla style. For two days we rented a studio in Brooklyn for a couple scenes. Those two days in the studio were the top spending days of the film. Most of it was shot in our loft and in a friend’s kitchen, with five different sets.
How many hours did you shoot?
About 225 for the film.
Did you learn a lot about lighting?
We learned a lot from Bry Thomas Sanders, a professional cinematographer and super cool guy who likes to be involved in projects. He came out for a week and crashed on a friend’s couch and taught us for free. He taught us all we needed to know beyond three-point lighting to get dramatic effects. We had bought a lighting kit with three 500w lights and two 300w lights, a reflector, diffusions and etc. He had us get daylight correction filters and other stuff. We realized the benefits of shooting in daylight mode. It comes out cleaner, when you can balance all lights to daylight value.
We utilized a good bit of slow motion and fast motion and color correction, and time-lapse motion, with the camera recording with the shutter open.
We were shooing in 24p, so it has a film quality. To get a filmic slow motion quality when we thought it might benefit the story, we took 60i video frames and played them at 24p. And, we did lots of experimentation on the exact way to get motion blur while shooting on digital. We found out through experimentation that we could combine, say, 10 frames shot with the shutter open into 1 frame, which has motion blur of all those ten frames.
And, we’d combine all the default plug-ins in FinalCut pro to get these effects. It takes a long time to render, ha ha. There are lots of cameras coming out now with 60p which is perfect for slow motion, by the way. We’ll have a tutorial up on how to use 60i for slow motion too! When we get enough questions on anything, we create a tutorial for it.
What about the animation?
SUSAN: The animation is a group effort. We pretty much storyboarded out and then shot. Arin would edit together the scene and do funky compositing, then export the scene into an image sequence of 8 frames a second, and bring that sequence into ToonBoom and trace over that. We were inspired by Waking Life and its use of Rotoscope. We asked the creators of Rotoscope for a copy and they said they weren’t giving it out for free. But in Toonboom, you can draw frame after frame, hit advance, go back and see it in onionskin, which is really important for animation. It lets you see the previous frame in an overlay, so you see it all together.
What did you shoot on?
We shot on a dvx 100 panasonic, we shot in 24 p and used an anamorphic lens adapter. That’s a nice way to get widescreen with out DVX 100A, which can do the squeeze mode (AB and C). We did a lot in post with Final Cut Pro, like color corrections and compositing. We’re pushing the colors in the video podcasts and trying to do with digital what would be done with different film stocks.
The process of making the film was different from what I know is traditional, but we never went to film school, so that’s all hearsay. We did a lot of inventing. We cut stills from scenes, put them on the floor and decided what we needed. We storyboarded a scene in Photoshop just to see what it’s like, visually, to get the scene down, we edited it back with audio in final cut, and then it changed and was totally different.
How did you set up a theatrical run in six cities with virtually no print advertising budget?
Well first, we wanted to get the film in theaters because we have a huge online community. Having an offline screening brings motivating people to a whole new level. We’d been looking for the right way to do this. Now we’ve got it figured out and hopefully it’ll go really well. We talked to a ton of theaters and booked with the ones who had a certain kind of flexibility in terms of more dynamic scheduling, and a looking forward into the future and more confidence in an online marketing campaign.
Opening for week in a city is costly since most theaters have minimum requirements for print advertising and such. We convinced theaters in New York, LA, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco and Seattle to show it one Thursday a week for a month, starting Sept 7th, without buying print advertising, all based on our sold-out NYC screenings and a list of email addresses from those who requested screenings in each city. We added the “request a screening†feature to the site in January and every time we mentioned it on the video podcasts we saw a spike in requests. Once we have 150 requests from a city, we’ll do a screening and we’re going to stay true to that. Our plan is to get 2.5 x the number of requesters to show up to these screening and we’re sure we can do it.
But you’re from NYC, so you must have done pavement pounding for those sold out screenings to get people into theaters.
We did Internet pounding. We made an Internet invitation to the screenings and put them out over the podcasts.
Do you have people in each city doing offline promotion?
A surprising amount can be done when you send out custom individualized emails as opposed to treating people like a mailing list. We put out calls for local liaisons to track down theaters, and to put out postcards and such. We’ve got a ton of people helping us on both ends of the spectrum. The guy who runs Independent film fest in Boston, is helping via his mailing list and putting out postcards. And a friend in SF who does nightclubs and parties lined up the theater and is putting out postcards.
We’re pushing something that people refer to citizen marketing, where we give people the tools to do a lot of stuff. On our screenings page people can print out a black and white flyer and put it up in their office, school, whatever, and they can email it to a friend. We give people html code for tags on their Myspace and blogs, for their comments and bulletins. More and more sites are used by a savvy audience who copy and paste code, and by people who write their own code. We were part of an Indiewire showcase, called “Undiscovered Gems” and we had a digital invitation. The graphic for that invitation was viewed 100,000 times just on other people’s websites. It made a big difference in letting people discover the project.
What’s with the future of your distribution and selling dvds?
People say “You have 75,000 people downloading FEM on the site, why not put it on Netflix?†Well, the film itself exists in an arena where people are going to discover it, and we want that. The best plan for FEM doesn’t require a lot of money. We can utilize one asset to make something else happen. Take our video podcasts and their audience. I’m sure advertisers would be willing at some point to pay us money for access to that many people. We want to use that volume of people for things we are doing.
Have you been approached by advertisers or ad agencies?
Not by ad agencies per se, but there are new media companies sprouting up specifically for getting advertising for podcasts. That advertising isn’t the same thing as a banner or a TV commercial, it’s something else.
Susan spoke at a panel about podcasting at Sundance and everyone was asking “what’s the business model, what’s the business model?” If you build an audience, they will be your business model. Our business model is to get our film out there. Our next project might not be a film. It might be continuing to produce content for our subscriber base, and they hope we’ll keep producing stuff for them.
What feedback are you getting from subscribers?
They want new episodes, and it’s been a challenge to produce new episodes in a timely TV-esque manner. It hasn’t really synchronized for us. We are wrapped up in distribution and other things. We also get feedback like: “You should have done this and that in this situation.” Funny thing is, people want to see a little more of the underbelly of our relationship.
We’re trying to design the full experience of the film as it unfolds over time. The audience will see an episode, react to it, and watch all that’s available. We want to tie the video podcasts and the film into one collective experience that gels. FEM is a weird art project. How it’s going to unfold for the viewer its completely unpredictable. We want the whole thing to add up into an off the wall media experience.
The big idea is that the audience becomes part of the story, and people have called that out, with the video podcasts being one of the central themes of our project. When Susan and I first met, we thought “what if we’re not just having normal conversations and normal dialogue, what if we’re doing something more engaging and elevated, what if we were writing notes and making drawings and videos for each other?†That’s the full circle kind of interaction and integration with the audience we’re hoping to achieve – breaking past the realm of podcast, web, film, whatever, and becoming a larger piece that’s one collective experience.
DIRECTOR’S BIOS
Arin Crumley
In high school Crumley participated in the Art Quest Multimedia Program. There he began exploring abstract video art and short form documentaries. He was also in a touring acting group, which produced Begin Your Tour Here. For two years, Arin played in a band and projected his video art at live shows. In New York City, he continued to make music, shoot and edit music videos and short films including Bush, which traveled the festival circuit.
Susan Buice
With a Bachelor of Fine Arts from U Mass Amherst. Buice moved to New York City where she hoped to continue her artist career. After meeting Arin, Susan and he collaborated and began making short films and experimenting with animation. Her short Fischerchicks has traveled the festival circuit.
indieWIRE ANNOUNCEMENT: “Four Eyed Monsters” Wins The 2006 Sundance Channel Audience Award For The indieWIRE’s “Undiscovered Gems” Film Series
by indieWIRE (December 16, 2006)
[EDITORS NOTE: The following is an announcement from indieWIRE.]
The New York Times and Emerging Pictures, the New York-based digital cinema network, announced Susan Buice and Arin Crumley’s “Four Eyed Monsters” as the winner of the 2006 Sundance Channel Audience Award for the eight-month-long “indieWIRE: Undiscovered Gems” Film Series.
“Four Eyed Monsters”–directed by Susan Buice and Arin Crumley–took home the coveted prize that earns its filmmakers the opportunity for a theatrical release through Emerging Pictures and a television premiere on Sundance Channel. The value of the award is $100,000.
Recently nominated for two Independent Spirit Awards (Best Cinematography, the John Cassavetes Award for Best Feature under 500K), “Four Eyed Monsters” is the darkly sweet, humorous and innovative tale of the online courtship between Arin, a shy videographer, and Susan, an art school graduate working as a waitress. As their romance develops, they make a pact to not speak to one another. So they only write, draw, e-mail, text, instant message, have sex, and make videos for each other–no talking. While no verbal conflict arises, a new world of more complicated problems is discovered, forcing them to deal with intimacy as they meld together and create a monster.
The “Undiscovered Gems Series” is based on indieWIRE’s annual list of the top films from major festivals around the world that have yet to find a theatrical distributor; the series is co-presented by The New York Times and Emerging Pictures, in association with the California Film Institute and Sundance Channel.
Directors Susan Buice and Arin Crumley in “Four Eyed Monsters”. Image provided by the filmmakersThe film series kicked off in April 2006 with Jem Cohen’s “Chain,” followed by the Duplass Brothers’ “The Puffy Chair” in May, Georgia Lee’s “Red Doors” in June, Andrew Bujalski’s “Mutual Appreciation” in August, Kyle Henry’s “Room” in September, Paul Cox’s “Human Touch” in October, and “Massaker,” a film by Monika Berggman, Nina Menkes, Lokman Slim and Hermann Theissen, in November 2006.
With support from Sundance Channel, an audience award competition was launched this year to help provide the winning filmmaker with an opportunity of a theatrical release in New York, Los Angeles and a minimum of five other U.S. cities during 2007, as well as an exclusive television broadcast on Sundance Channel.
Using Emerging’s digital network, the “Undiscovered Gems” collaboration this year brought one film per month from indieWIRE’s annual list to 20 screens across the US in cities including New York City, Tucson, AZ; San Rafael, CA; Wilmington, DE; Ft. Lauderdale and Lake Worth, FL; Martha’s Vineyard, MA; Lincoln NE; Buffalo, NY; Tulsa, OK; and Scranton, PA. The one-film-a-month series began in late April, 2006 and continued through November, 2006, with individual screening dates varying by venue. The winner was determined by audience balloting at each venue.
Now in its ninth year in 2006 and put together by indieWIRE’s editors and contributing writers, the annual list of “Undiscovered Gems” is a roster of extraordinary films which despite their quality have not received U.S. distribution. In 2004, the California Film Institute presented the first theatrical exhibition of indieWIRE’s “Top Undistributed Films,” providing audiences the opportunity to experience the films beyond the festival circuit.
This indieWIRE announcement is excerpted from a press release issued by Emerging Pictures, in conjunction with indieWIRE.]
( posted on Dec 16, 2006 at 03:04AM | filed under DIY, Undiscovered Gems )
