FILM PRODUCER | WRITER | HUSBAND | FATHER
Come on, you know you’ve googled that before.
I have.
I’ve got a great personal example for you from the last two weeks. Adding it all up, I’m guessing I spent 50+ hours working on rebuilding and relaunching my wife’s photography website from scratch. I mean COMPLETE redesign.
This week I was able to attend the inaugural Entrepreneur Simplified Entrecon at Utah Valley University. For a first run, it was pretty well put together, and I thoroughly enjoyed most of it.
Better than that, there were two HUGE opportunites. First, Alan (my business partner) and I got awarded scholarships to ES’s retreat next week, a $3500 value. We get to go for free, so that’s pretty exciting. I know a number of people that have gone through it and said it was lifechanging, so I’m excited to see how it goes.
The other one? You guessed it: I got to meet one of my favorite people that I’ve followed over the last few years, Gary Vaynerchuk.
Last night I attended the monthly Creative Collaborative meetup here in Provo UT, featuring one of my favorite humans Chris Clark.
Chris is a theater director, as well as a producer, writer, and actor. His remarks were very poignant and I wanted to share a few takeaways.
What was amazing was how universal his points were. Rather than specific technical ways to become a better theater director, they came across more as universal truths.
When talking about success in an artistic field like filmmaking or music, I usually tell people that I believe that talent accounts for about 20% of success.
The other 80%? Doing the work.
When you’re raising money, you often find yourself doing a lot of waiting. Waiting for an email. A phone call. A text.
It’s freakin’ excruciating.
After the inauguration happened on January 20th, many of us–myself included–felt a combination of “oh man” and “what do I do now?”
The latter emotion took over and by the next week, we had uploaded the first episode of a new web-series we call Zion Politics.
It’s a weekly political show that mixes the topics of what’s going on in politics with the doctrinal teachings of the Mormon Church.
We spent New Years weekend down in San Diego this year, which happens to be where my trainer/nutritionist of the last 5 months lives and works.
A few weeks ago I attended the American Film Market for the second year in a row.
It’s an annual film market where Sales Agents are selling the films they represent to foreign distributors and buyers.
Producers, like myself, will often attend to try and meet with these Sales Agents and find one to represent their films, but it’s also a great place to learn as they have great conferences and workshops centered around every aspect of the filmmaking process.
Here are my notes from the week. Hoping something is useful as you go out to make your own films in the future. To see last years notes, check out this post.
Last night I met another local filmmaker who excitedly told me about how his $150,000 movie made $2,000,000 in foreign sales and DVD. Now, that’s super impressive, and I’m happy for him-
But I’m also massively pissed.
When you make a movie for $150k, you generally — not always — have to make some sacrifices. These sacrifices are typically at the expense of everyone else that worked on the film, other than you and your producing partners.
Some examples —
These are the detailed notes I took at the 2014 AFM Conference Series and Producer’s Forum sessions. The format will be more like a notebook, rather than a blog post, but I hope it’s still valuable for those that want to know what was covered throughout the week.