23 March, 2011

BIG News!!! ...that is pretty much out of the bag already.

If you are a member of our Facebook group or are connected to us by just about any other means but this blog you already know this...

The Beast of Bottomless Lake has been purchased by Super Channel!

The first showing is April 6th with over a dozen and a half showing scheduled for April (and possibly beyond.)

Obviously this is very cool from our perspective.  Rewind in time to the first post of this blog.  Back then we were just a couple of guys with a big dream, no budget and a lot of heart.  We are now just two weeks away from being film-makers with a broadcast history - which is a BIG threshold to have passed.

I've mentioned the idea of the "four Everests" before... each stage of making a film is like climbing Everest.  Pre-production; production (shooting); post-production and distribution.  Over this past month I have really had to face that metaphor.  Distribution has been a rough road.  We "finished" the film in early 2010.  (The quotes are because we had to do more work on it to close this deal.)  It took a long time, more than one aborted attempt, plus sucesses at film-festivals and so on to get to this sale - and I for one had all but given up hope.  But getting a first sale, makes secondary sales much more likely.  When the call came from our sales agent we could hardly believe it.  Fortunately we had just asked one of our investors for assistance with his business acumen on a number of things (most of which are still up coming), and he was indispensible to have available through the last month.

At some point I may write about the sometimes Kafka-esque process of getting the film ready for broadcast, but to be perfectly honest portions of it were simply too emotionally exhausting for me to want to revisit it so soon... which is also part of why it took so long to get around to posting this announcement on the blog.

Back to the fourth Everest...  It occurs to me now, that as arduous as these past few weeks have been, and how satisfying it is to know that Beast is going to be on TV, and that that represents in a sense the scaling of the fourth Everest... the reality is that the fourth Everest either never ends, or only ends when no one wants to see your film anymore.  Sobering thought.

I will share one small funny story about un-anticipated issues...

When I say "funny," I should be clear - I do NOT mean "ha-ha funny."  Not in a million years as in this case the background to what makes it "funny" involves the deaths of thousands of people.

In order to prepare the film for broadcast the movie had to be mastered to HD-SR tape.  There is one factory in the world that makes HD-SR tapes... in Sendai Japan.  Since the factory was severely damaged ten days ago there has been a worldwide run on HD-SR tapes - check this out on eBay, the price is outrageous.  Our budget for tapes practically doubled as trickle down from the earthquake.  Which compared to the chaos in Japan is nothing - beyond insignificant.  And to be doubly clear... the couple hundred dollars extra we have to pay is really nothing even compared to our own budget.  We suck it up.  We move on.  We hope the best for people in Japan.