CongestedCat Shorts: Production Success!

We shot our films last weekend and now Post-Production has begun!

Sorry for not updating sooner. I was busy reviewing & sending our footage off to the editor, getting some much needed sleep and cleaning my apartment (more on that later).

As for how the shoot went? It was amazing. I’m so excited about our footage and cannot wait to see the first rough cuts. Our crew was phenomenal. Most were our usual team of people, but we had some newcomers that I’m so excited to not only have as more talented people to collaborate with, but also as new friends. The same goes for the cast. I was blown away by each one of them. I’ve been reviewing footage for the last week and am just mesmerized by their performances and the chemistry between the pairs.

We had some interesting things happen in the week before our shoot.

First, our location that was generously loaned to us had some change of plans and ended up being unavailable this particular weekend of all weekends. Instead of uprooting our schedule and everyone else’s (coordinating new dates that everyone would have in common would have pushed us back a month) or spending money we didn’t actually have on a new space (since the location was loaned), we adjusted one of the films so that both could be shot in the same location. This location was actually my apartment – thus the need to clean after a weekend of wonderful but very sweaty people plus lots of gear & hot lights inside.

Despite this abrupt need to make some revisions, I feel that it worked out for the best in the end because nothing about the actual story changed, just the set layout. Additionally, this allowed us to not have to breakdown after day 1, do a company move on day 2 & reset everything in a new space. Because of this, while day 1 (NOLR) was just under 13 hours, day 2 (WHP) was under 7 hours! I’ve only been able to shoot an entire short in less than 7 hours once before with my dark comedy “S.K.A.”, but both of these films are miles ahead of that in terms of production value. I’m just really proud of and impressed with my team for making this work. We shot 2 quality films in 2 days!

*Also, side note about the location - the house is still loaned to us for a production, which is awesome because it works perfectly for my next short, planned for production next Spring.

The other minor setback that ended up being for the best was that our selected camera, the Canon C300, was unavailable at Du-All, our usual rental house, and three others we checked with for the weekend. Apparently everyone else in NYC was shooting that weekend and with that camera. However, Du-All, being as awesome and loyal as they are (we used them for Summit & Kelsey), offered us the C500 for the rental cost of the C300! We had already allocated the additional funds we raised to our lighting budget, so didn’t want to spend more to rent an external recorder to shoot at 4K on the C500, but it was still awesome to get to use this camera and get a feel for it, especially since we had not yet shot on it. 

So all in all, despite what initially seemed like setbacks in pre-production, all worked out for production. And while we did have some minor type things that always manage to hold up the start of production (a couple Best Buy runs to replace a monitor splitter, for instance), the shoots went quite smoothly, in large part, I believe, due to how well we all worked together. In fact, Gwen, an actor we had not worked with before but who we’ll definitely have on set again and again, complimented me on the relaxed but productive vibe on set, and the warm welcoming nature of our team; also how well we all communicated with each other. That was really lovely to hear. 

On day 2, we did have some sound issues due to a parade going on midday down the block. But we did our best to work around it and overall I have faith that we got clean audio for most of the shoot and that our sound editor will be able to work with some of the background. In the meantime, I anxiously await rough cuts.

We’ll be posting some behind the scenes photos in the coming weeks, but for now we hope you enjoy seeing these stills from the raw footage!

Adam Jepsen as Chris in "Not Our Living Room"

Rob Ceriello as Jake in "Not Our Living Room"

Lauren A. Kennedy as Elizabeth in "We Had Plans"

Gwen Albers as Diana in "We Had Plans"

Thanks again to everyone who supported us in making these films. More updates to come!

Christina, on behalf of myself, Kelsey & the team

Juice It: Coney Island Film Festival Official Selection!

Christina's latest short "Juice It" has been accepted to the 14th Annual Coney Island Film Festival! This fest is listed every year as 1 of Moviemaker Magazine's 25 Fests worth the entry fee & makes their list of Coolest Film Festivals, so this is pretty damn awesome.

Also, while it did not make Official Selection for either the 10th Annual HollyShorts Film Festival or the 17th Annual FirstGlance Film Festival, it made the runner up division of both fests! So it will be screening as part of the 8th Annual HollyShorts Monthly Screening Series at the Chinese Theater in LA in either September or October. We'll let you all know the date when we're told. It will also take part in FirstGlance's Online Shorts Contest for the whole month of October. Last year, they got a total of 90,000 votes. If it actually wins, it gets to screen as part of their 15th annual festival in LA in the Spring! We'll be sure to share it when the time comes. 

We've submitted to two other festivals that we'll hear back from early next year. Fingers crossed! In the meantime, we hope you can make it out to the Coney Island Film Festival to support & see the film!

IndieWorks: August 2014 Recap

Thanks everyone who came out last week to support the filmmakers of the evening! We hope you enjoyed all the films screened and the opportunity to network with other filmmakers & film enthusiasts! We sure did! 

We didn't have our resident photographer, Chris, this month because he was sick. But Ryan did a great job stepping in and taking on the challenge, so we managed to get a few photos from the night. We'll be back on September 17th with another great lineup of films -- which happens to be our 'web series' themed IndieWorks. If you have a web series, or know someone who'd be interested in screening theirs, send your submissions in! 

The films of the night:

August Heat
During a power blackout on a oppressively hot day in New York City - a young man hears a strange pounding noise which leads him on a journey to the source. He finds it at a Stone Mason's in Brooklyn where an old man is working on a tombstone with his name on it.

Multiverse
A reclusive young woman decides to brave a night out in NYC and is confronted by an increasingly isolating series of strange events.

Monkey Box
Money, greed and human-nature prevail in this captivating short. 

Protesters
A short drama about abortion. 

Downtown 
A girl has a very private moment in a very public place. 

Schlock Fish 
Olav Zanger is a solitary fisherman that seeks revenge on the 'Dimpled Chin Schlock Fish', a psychopath creature that leaps out of water and rips his eyeball off. 

The awards go to...

At the end of the evening, we announced our winning filmmakers for both Audience Choice Award & Silver Whiskers Award. The Audience Choice Award is voted upon by all those in attendance, and the Silver Whiskers is judged by the CongestedCat Team based on a system rating 8 categories of Story, Dialogue/Writing, Direction, Acting, Cinematography, Sound, Editing, and Production Value. It goes on to screen at our end of year Best of Fest event in April. 

For the August 2014 lineup, our winning filmmakers were:
    Audience Choice Award:  "Schlock Fish" Directed by Esteban Uribe.
    Silver Whiskers Award:  "Money Box" Directed by Muzappar Osman.

Check out the following videos below for both of the winning films.

From Crowdfunding to Community Building

Christina was invited to write an article for Seed&Spark.com about her experience crowdfunding for the third time (successfully), and some of the challenges and surprises she experienced with her latest campaign. She ended up writing a piece about how she realized why crowdfunding it so much more than just raising funds and why she's happy she made the switch from Kickstarter to Seed&Spark despite two successes on the former platform. Give it a read on their site or on ours below. 

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One of the most, if not the most important factor in crowdfunding is to know your audience and where to find them. But many people who have crowdfunded will tell you that a good chunk of your money will come from friends and family, the people who watch and support your work no matter what, especially if it’s your first campaign. As someone who had successfully crowdfunded twice before, relying mainly on friends and family, I knew that heavily targeting my audience was going to be the only way I wouldn’t have to lean on them again for my third campaign.

When Kelsey Rauber and I decided not to continue our web series “Kelsey” and crowdfund for two new short films instead (CongestedCat Shorts), we knew we had a bit of a challenge on our hands. The audience we had accumulated was not necessarily the target audience for these shorts. The shorts are companion pieces about siblings dealing with loss and letting go— one about two brothers, the other two sisters. Going from “Kelsey,” a 10 episode comedic web series about the romantic life of a lesbian and her best friends, to two intimate dramas about siblings (one of which featured two heterosexual brothers) was a bit of a stretch. We knew it would be a tough sell to our “Kelsey” fan base, which was quite vocal about just wanting more of our web series.

But Kelsey and I were not creatively satisfied just giving them more of the same. We plan to collaborate on a feature in about two years, so in the meantime we wanted to flex our creative muscles on a smaller scale with a genre and style of storytelling we had not yet explored.

We also wanted to see how many fans of something we had already done we could get to follow us to our next creative endeavor. So we set out to make $20,000 for these two shorts, in spite of this challenge.

Our first plan of action was to release a video for the fans of the series explaining that the campaign was coming and why they should be part of it. We then reached out to the press we got for the series with the same video. Despite receiving generally positive responses from them, I suppose here is where we should have seen a flaw in our plan: the press sites did not share our fan video the way they had shared our episodes. At least two-thirds of our fans that were watching exclusively on those sites were not aware of our coming campaign. However, we did reach some of our fans— we estimated around 1,000 of the series fans had seen the video through our social media and were anticipating the campaign. For this reason, we tailored our campaign to fans that already knew our series and us (though we of course made sure our pitch would grab newcomers as well).

I’m not going to go through every step of our campaign, don’t worry, but I will say that we had prepared the usual stuff that you should have prepared before your campaign: email lists, phone numbers, press releases, etc. We set weekly milestone goals and had contingency plans should some of our marketing ideas not work. Little did we know that we’d lose our Plan A almost right out of the gate.

I wrote about this in a recent update to our Seed&Spark supporters and followers, but the basic idea is this: Kelsey and I were denied coverage on all the sites where we had gotten the majority of our 250,000+ “Kelsey” episode hits because our shorts were “not gay enough.” It was a disappointing thing to hear from sites that had spent months raving about our work, but we had to let it go and figure out how we would make this campaign successful without the press we were anticipating. Accepting this reality, we changed the language of our logline and focused a little more on us as a creative team worth supporting outside of the context of our series. We used “Kelsey” as a tool to pull in new supporters of us as collaborators, rather than targeting existing series fans. We still reached out to the 1,000 series fans we had access to via Facebook, Twitter and Youtube, but were surprised and ultimately disappointed to find that despite getting encouraging replies from many, only 4 actual fans (no relation to me or Kelsey prior to watching the series) contributed money. 

This halted our plans to release enticing “Kelsey” content, such as excerpts from our originally intended series finale script or a contest in the last week that involved Kelsey’s love interest on the series and one of the sisters of CongestedCat Shorts, Lauren A Kennedy. We switched over to highlighting our mission statement as a company and team overall, and did more grassroots outreach, like attending the NYC Pride Parade and convincing our location owner to loan our location in exchange for the credit and prestige of being a producer (he’s also just a really generous guy).

So if our supporters were not pre-existing fans of our series, who were they?

With, Summit, my feature film that I crowdfunded for $12,000 on Kickstarter two years ago, I relied quite heavily on the genre. It’s a horror film, and when horror fans hear horror, they’re in. That’s all it takes. They’re like, “Sign me up, I want to see this get made because I want to watch it.” Don’t get me wrong, that campaign was incredibly hard to make successful and is still one of the most stressful but rewarding experiences of my life (only really beaten by the experience of actually making the film). But it was easy targeting the film’s audience, getting press on the many horror blogs and sites, and just generally attracting strangers to the campaign. The CongestedCat Shorts campaign required a little more finesse in getting people’s attention and standing out from the crowd of character-driven dramas that make up indie film. We managed to reach some historical indie film supporters via twitter to the tune of $10-$50, but only a handful.

With this Summit experience and having crowdfunded once more before that, I knew damn well that you must reach out to everyone who is currently or has ever been in your life. As I stated earlier though, I wanted to avoid reaching out again to many of them precisely because I had done it before. But, when I got over the series fans not contributing (and my bruised ego), I set out, personally reaching out and messaging people. And that’s where the campaign really hit its stride, sparking an epiphany.

I haven’t talked about Kelsey Rauber’s involvement too much because I’m trying to focus on my experience crowdfunding again, but having Kelsey as a partner as committed and passionate as I was, and who had an untapped network— having never crowdfunded before— heavily benefited the CongestedCat campaign. Over a fourth of the money we raised came from her family and friends. That said, an overwhelming amount came from past Summit supporters, most of whom were not related to me in any way. This was the biggest surprise.

During the Summit campaign, about one-fourth of our backers were total strangers. Some were frequent crowdfunding supporters from Twitter or Kickstarter and some were genre fans. What I remembered finding interesting about these people was that almost all of them went on to follow my progress with the series (“Kelsey”). They were taking an interest in my other work, not just Summit. Because of this observation, I made the incorrect assumption that people who were following “Kelsey” would also follow my future work. This was the case for a few, sure, but as our 4 out of 1,000 experience shows, it wasn’t true for most.

When I finally gave in and started sending messages about CongestedCat Shorts to people who had backed Summit, I was pleasantly surprised to find that many were happy to give again; it’s very telling that the majority of people who funded this last campaign were the same as those who funded the first. And most gave even more! Those who gave $10-$25 to Summit were giving $50-$100 to CongestedCat Shorts. I didn’t understand it. They were people who supported Summit because they liked my pitch for that film or were intrigued by my spin on the genre. Why were they immediately onboard for these shorts, and why were their contributions bigger? They hadn’t even received Summit yet. It’s still in post; and while I have been blogging about every step of post-production with visual content included, I have not yet delivered on the product they initially funded. This is part of why I was hesitant to reach out to them specifically, friends and family included. However, I learned that they were exactly who I should have been reaching out to in the first place. They had been watching my progress with that film very closely for two years, and it was clear to them that the product is going to be finished and that my team and I had been working hard to complete it to get it out in the world. That was enough to assure them that I’d deliver not just on that promise, but on this new one as well. The general consensus I got from many was that it didn’t really matter what I was making. They were supporting me and my work because they had enjoyed watching my progress since crowdfunding Summit, or even since my short three years ago, and wanted to continue being part of my progress and success. This was overwhelmingly humbling and encouraging, and definitely not something I expected.

The biggest surprise that came from a Summit supporter was a guy who had given $250 to that campaign without any relation to me or anyone I knew. He didn’t even leave an email address on Kickstarter, but I knew he had been receiving and reading my updates on the film. During crowdfunding for CongestedCat Shorts, I tracked him down on Facebook, sent him a personalized message not expecting much, and was shocked that he proceeded to give $1,000 toward Crew & Cast payments without blinking an eye.

What I realized, when comparing the couple hundred Summit supporters to the thousand “Kelsey” fans we reached, is this: when you engage and build a following before you make the content, that audience is connected to you as a creator, as opposed to the content itself. We had a huge amount of success with “Kelsey,” and although we made efforts to build a following while we were in production, almost all our viewers connected with the series after we had already released the pilot and received critical acclaim. We knew that the majority was watching exclusively on Lesbian-oriented sites that had embedded the episodes. Therefore, most of those fans were not engaging with us, our brand, or our social media presence. The realization I had during this campaign was that our audience was connected with the series itself; so when it finished, they were finished with us because they never felt connected to us as a creative team. I believe this is what makes crowdfunding so much more important than just securing funding. The people who become part of making your project are the people who will follow you to your next one. I intuitively felt this before but had not had the opportunity to really witness what it meant, nor had I experienced the stark difference between a following gained in pre-production versus one gained post-release until this campaign. We self-funded “Kelsey” and did not have an avenue to build a following around the series early on. This early following is an inherent aspect of crowdfunding, as is that following’s attachment to the creative team rather than just the end product.

I don’t mean to discredit the idea that your existing work benefits your ability to raise future funding; I’d be lying if I said our success with “Kelsey” didn’t play a role in our successful campaign. Our two biggest surprises of this campaign were largely due to “Kelsey.” One was when one of those 4 contributing “Kelsey” fans, arguably our biggest fan, gave over $1,500 and became an Associate Producer. The other was when a total stranger came along in our final two hours and decided to give us $5,000 (taking us to 120% of our goal) because our pitch and past content (“Kelsey”) won him over, probably making the Executive Producer credit more enticing as well. That one still blows my mind. They both do. To have someone enjoy our content so much and feel dedicated to us as a creative team enough to fund our new work is just the best feeling an artist could hope for.

However, I think that this conclusion is valid and, moreover, an argument for crowdfunding to be a sustainable aspect of indie film. If not clearly valuable for the creative strings-free funding, it should be prized simply for its audience building potential. This is why I’m very happy I made the switch from Kickstarter to Seed&Spark. Despite success on that platform, I felt like something was missing. On Kickstarter for Summit, I had 207 Backers and 1,253 people had “Liked” the campaign page. But those likes did nothing for me because “Likers” are not Followers on that platform. They may have taken an interest in the campaign but after they liked it, it disappeared from their lives. They’re not receiving updates from the project, nor am I, as the campaign owner, able to see their names. Seeing that number and not being able to reach them in any way was worse than not knowing how many people had gone to our campaign page and taken an interest at all. On CongestedCat Shorts, however, we have 141 Supporters & 175 Followers, with the latter number increasing everyday since our campaign ended. While the quantity of people that took an interest is not comparable, the quality blows Kickstarter out of the water —those Followers are actually receiving my updates and are becoming part of the making of the film(s), even if they didn’t make a monetary contribution. It’s wonderful being on a platform that emphasizes community building in the crowdfunding process and enhances this ability to engage an audience early on, allowing them to follow you to your new work. I’m now really looking forward to this opportunity to bring old and new followers along to my next big project and beyond.

Web Series are the New Black - Cinema Q Recap

Christina and I were invited to be a part of a panel tour on web series a couple of months ago. Kieran Turner, who writes and produces Wallflowers, had reached out to Christina because he had watched our show and thought we’d be a great addition to his panel.

We thought it was a great opportunity for us to expand our audience and meet other filmmakers.

Christina and I are planning on attending as many panels together as possible. This one, however, was scheduled on our original shooting dates for ‘Not Our Living Room’ and ‘We Had Plans’, so Christina encouraged me to go on my own to represent. And who would say no to that? That = Christina. No one says ‘no’ to Christina. Just kidding. I was thrilled to be able to go.

Cinema Q is a Denver based film festival in its sixth year. It is sponsored by The Center and Out Front Colorado, and the panel took place in the beautiful Denver Film Society building. Ernie Quiroz is the programming manager and he coordinated most, if not all, of our travel.

I flew in to Colorado on Friday, July 25th. I’d been patiently awaiting this day, because a) I’m always excited to meet other filmmakers, b) I love anything LGBTQ and c) I’d never been to Denver and I’d heard lovely things about it; I couldn’t wait to explore.

I was the first of my panel to get to Denver. The Film Festival organizers had a volunteer pick me up at the airport. His name was Matt and he was wonderful. I ended up taking the ride with two other filmmakers, Dan and Antonio, who shot Mala Mala, which opened at TriBeCa Film Festival and celebrates the trans community in Puerto Rico.

During the ride Matt gave us a bit of background information on all of the myths surrounding the Denver airport, which made the ride go by quickly.

After settling in at the hotel, two of the four other panelists arrived at the hotel.

Kieran, the organizer or our panel and creator of “Wallflowers” and Jason Cicci, who is the creator/writer/actor of “He’s with Me” arrived at the same time. I had watched both of their shows and was a fan. Both are relatable, down-to-earth comedies about life, love and daily tribulations with LGBT elements.

We all hit it off immediately. I wasn’t expecting such genuinely sweet and hilarious individuals (because Hollywood…), but we could not have had a better time. Kieran, Jason and I got a bite to eat and had a couple of drinks, shared filming stories and personal anecdotes.

Later, we all got a ride to the Film Society. At the building we met up with the final panelist Rick Copp, the writer/producer/actor of “Where the Bears Are”. He was the perfect addition to our team. He’s a super entertaining individual and he has a lovely loud laughter that fills a room.

The panel began on time at 7pm. There were between 20 and 35 people there. I forgot to count. Personally, I thought it was closer to 35, the others thought it was closer to 20… so I’m giving you the range.

Sebastian La Cause, from Hustling, had to cancel last minute, so he wasn’t there in person, but all of our shows got to air one episode.

I got very nervous as ‘Kelsey’ was about to go on. It was weird, because I only get that way when I have to speak in front of strangers, and that wasn’t the case. It is a very nerve wracking, but also humbling experience to see your work on the big screen. Luckily, Rick was sitting right next to me and was laughing throughout the screening, so that boosted my confidence enough to feel comfortable speaking about our show on the panel.

I did miss Christina, though. A lot.

The questions individuals asked were great. They really seemed interested in the medium and what the mechanics behind the scenes were. It did appear that all of us had self funded the first season, and every season the learning curve improved.

As for what the future of web TV is, I don’t think we came to a clear conclusion. More data is needed, more success stories and more outlets. We all had the consensus we’d stay with web, since it’s affordable and we can tell our stories the way we want to, but as far as how to fund projects, there are many ways to do it, but none of them are easy or consistent.

After the panel the four of us went out to drinks to the ‘Shag Lounge’. It was great. I was exhausted (jet lag from the 2 hour difference). We had a couple of good laughs and parted ways.

I can’t wait for the group to meet Christina and to do more panels. I’m also addicted to all the shows now (yay binge watching!). I will say Rick had the best tagline for his show: “Where the Bears Are, it’s like Golden Girls meets Murder She Wrote with big hairy gay men.” Who doesn’t want to watch that?

All in all, it was one of the greatest experiences I’ve had career-wise. And I can’t wait to do it all again. Next time with my partner in crime, Christina Raia.

-Kelsey