Month: October 2012

Remedy returns to SMack

This weekend please join us at SMack! for their 16th Annual Halloween Fetish Ball “HELL-O-WEEN II”
NYC’s Premiere Multimedia Fetish Play Party returns with this years Debauchery
New York City’s Longest Running Fetish Event!

Xris SMack is a talented multimedia artist and has inspired many things, but his world famous events are where Remedy got her start. Please join us this Saturday 10/27 to celebrate kink and see some very salty sneak peeks of Remedy for your visual stimulation.

To purchase tickets please visit:

http://www.smack-fetish.com/

The wages of art

I don’t make people work for free.

I remember what it felt like when people asked me to work for free and I accepted. First, there was a self-reflected warmth from my benevolence and charity bedazzled by the heap of compliments from the favor-asker about my talents, my hair, my pants, my parallel parking skills…

Second, there was the realization that I was about to be very much exploited, indefinitely, and without recourse.

I resolved, when I made Remedy, never to put anyone in that position. I simply would NOT ask anyone to work for free. No interns. No unpaid non-union actors. If someone said they wanted to donate services, I accepted — but I slept better if I knew I had an invoice coming.

As of right now, I’m in the middle of my second Indiegogo campaign and while its hits exceed that of the first campaign (which raised $5001) by about threefold, the money just isn’t coming in. This is troubling because just one day of post production costs me between $400 and $1500.

Let me break it down like this:

I get the studio time for free. It’s my dad’s barn. I’m fucking lucky.

But I have to pay the engineer, the actors, the musicians, update or repair equipment, buy software so that it won’t take three more months to finish this thing (which would be a disaster if I make it into any one of the six festivals I’ve applied to), and hope that my computer makes it through the day.

Add the cost of promotions, advertising, and marketing — even on a minute scale…

Add the cost of color correction, special effects, music licensing…

Legal fees, accounting fees, festival fees, liability insurance…

You get the point. Or maybe you don’t.

The point is, I cannot finish this film without money, and it’s more money than I can make and still have enough time and energy to complete the film. This is why I’m pimping on every social networking site I can think of. This is what true independent filmmaking means.

But I also cannot bear to ask my friends for *more* money after they’ve already been so generous.

But I can ask my friends to ask their friends to ask their friends to interview me for their blog, and I can hope that the right stranger hears about it and decides they have a few thousand dollars of disposable income to invest.

I can finish this fucking movie, goddamnit.

Now I just need you people to prove me right.

Things they never tell you about independent filmmaking…

I have days when I ask myself, “Why am I doing this?” I don’t eat. I don’t exercise. I can’t sleep normally. I’m depressed. I’m anxious. I yell. I pace. I don’t see my friends. I stand people up. I forget my keys. I forget my wallet. I forget to put on clothes before I take the garbage out.

If there were opium dens in the Lower East Side, you’d never see me again.

Independent filmmaking is a completely all-consuming and defeating venture. Time not spent creating is spent desperate to find ways to help fund the creation. I can’t divorce my thoughts from my dwindling coffers completely while I try to conduct (rather than direct) ADR… the New Year’s resolution to not multitask really didn’t hold.

I have forgotten what weekends are. I have forgotten what a vacation means. I bring my iphone into the tub with me and my right hand never gets pruned.

I repeat to myself… one month. One month and I’m done with this beast. I had rather naively posted to facebook a projection of 16 non-consecutive days. This was very much wishful thinking. I see a light at the end of the tunnel, but I haven’t laid eyes on my boyfriend in five days.

I do not like filmmaking, but I do like having made a film. That’s my mantra.

Yet somehow I’ve already written four scenes of the next one…

Quelle Masochism.

Wearing too many hats…

And it’s hard to find ones that fit because my head is too damned big.

At the moment I wish I had taken some sort of class in web design because it pains me to update something I do not understand — when I don’t have the time to learn how to understand it.

I’m just too busy doing post.

Remedy has not been an easy movie to make. It’s been at the mercy of many things, and the threat of technological obsolescence has been one of them. This weekend, while doing ADR, my father’s studio and my computer both showed signs of undeniable wear, slowing the process to a crawl. I began this movie in 2008, and I have not updated my computer or my editing software (like any editor with intelligence would use FCPX anyway) for fear of some sort of file structure meltdown. So there were crashes and noises and incompatibilities and miscommunications — it was sort of the machine equivalent of a bad polyamorous relationship — which led to us having to invest in some new equipment to keep us afloat.

Could I cut corners now? Yes. But then I would be putting out a substandard product, and that I simply refuse to do. I’ve come this far. So far that the amount of blog posts on this site is pitiful due to working so hard on actually finishing the film. But I’m not stopping until I’m putting out something I’m proud of… no matter how many wrong sides of the bed I wake up on.

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