Big Bad Wolves
Some good friends of ours are making a film called Big Bad Wolves.
It is about a group of girls who turn into a vigilante gang because of a sexual assault on one of them.
So it is a serious topic, but it also a fun film about young people growing up in NYC.
The team is starting with a short film that kicks off the story and will use that short film to introduce the four young women who are at the heart of this story and to build support and audience for the larger feature they plan to make over the next year or two.
When our friends approached us about helping them make this short film, we both said “Do A Kickstarter!” and so that is what they did.
Here’s the Kickstarter “trailer” for it:
If you would like to join us in supporting this film, you can back it on Kickstarter.
Comments (Archived):
Interesting.Mixing epidsodic storytelling (preview to a feature–their short) with the more collared format of a film is interesting.I’ll support this.The arts are the stuff of life to me.
Yes. I like the idea of starting with a short to build the audience and financial support for the feature. Kind of how they he pilots in the TV business. I think this should be a big part of the Kickstarter playbook for emerging filmmakers
Agree.Honestly for storytelling like this, and for the way we create narratives for brands, an episodic approach is more attuned to our way of consuming and becoming attached to ideas we want to support.
Actually, I was asked to pitch a book recently. The agent suggested that products worked backwards now – you envision the commercial first, the emotional connection to the product, then produce. It surprised me that this was now acceptable for books, though it has been true for products for a while.Being a content creator, this seems backwards to me , that marketing now leads content. I must be old school.
Novelization has been around for a while no?
Sure. But Arnold – we are ironically croaking under the weight of the acute thinness of content these days in popular arts. Reductionist to serve ease of marketing and consumption. As a marketer you know the dangers of slick and empty. When our arts are so infected, then yes, such novelization is an issue IMHO.
of course i understand this but i don’t know whether I agree on the state of content,the amount of creative storytelling coming out in episodic tv is quite astounding. and bold as well, much not good but tv crazy at is seems has become the creative medium of the day.
I agree TV series have taken off as a fresh medium. I don’t really watch TV.My shock was that this was the pitch for a book. About learning.Here’s what I was shown – https://www.youtube.com/wat… – it’s ABCMouse.I was asked to come up with the equivalent to pitch the book (about my work).PS The “content” here is learning, which schools seem to have sucked all the fun out of. And the response is a music video, not of the caliber of SchoolhouseRock either. I find this very slick and empty.(full disclosure – I grew up with the SR family, and of the key people who launched ABCMouse is an old friend.
I know nothing about the educational or learning markets.There are a host of quite interesting episodic stories being created and I would say that they are one of the great connectors we have with people.Don’t cut yourself off.Stories are what makes us able to find common ground.
Interesting that (great commercial btw thanks for showing it) abcmouse was invested in by Zuckerbergs fund. [1]What’s more interesting is that while the commercial is super slick yet the website is more homespun ‘no vc money here’ in appearance.Odd that Disney didn’t object to this or ‘hassle’ them. Not that they have a super strong case but certainly enough legal muscle to make someone cry uncle. I actually thought this was Disney related when I watched it up until the end. (Slickness, song and so on..) Disney, mickey, children and so on. Not a stretch for confusion.Disney and trademarks, one example:https://www.theverge.com/20…[1] http://www.latimes.com/busi… https://uploads.disquscdn.c…
Yes I have known about Iconiq for a while via my friend who launched them in Asia.The commercial makes me sad. If it works ok good. I don’t like their product much. The design is subpar.
I wonder if they are taking interns this summer – do you know Fred? My teen wanted to work for a comedy show, but the spots all go to older girls (10-12th grades) in her school.
while we’re on the subject of movies with female leads… here’s some amazing data (presented beautifully well). https://pudding.cool/2017/0…ex: “In January 2016, researchers reported that men speak more often than women in Disney’s princess films. We validated this claim and doubled the sample size to 30 Disney films, including Pixar. The results: 22 of 30 Disney films have a male majority of dialogue. Even films with female leads, such as Mulan, the dialogue swings male. Mushu, her protector dragon, has 50% more words of dialogue than Mulan herself.”
I think the WHY here is pretty obvious: animation is written by men.And, if there is a subset of the gender that really really really does not understand how women thinks, feels or talks (don’t get me wrong, the right side of this bell curve still knows almost nothing ;-), …………..it would be the ComicCon crowd.;-)
91% of women surveyed said … ADVERTISERS don’t understand us.Well, we are only responsible for over 60% of household buying decisions, including big ticket items like cars…
.Not trying to be funny — nobody “understands” women. Men don’t. I don’t. Nobody.Why would women ever admit anybody “understands” them?JLMwww.themusingsofthebigredca…
In the words of many teen girl’s idol:https://youtu.be/DK_0jXPuIr…
See also Bechdel test.http://bechdeltest.comhttps://uploads.disquscdn.c…
That’s an awesome link Reece – and yes so beautifully presented. The story it tells is a grim death by 1,000 cuts that women in tech/media/_________(fill in the blank yourself) all know.
a vigilante gang? fine, but i hope they keep any misandry in check.
CONTRIBUTORS:If there is an issue violating anyone we will just reach out to Gal Gadot.https://youtu.be/qeZ8X5FKl78
This is the future of media – due to the dramatic reduction in cost & increase in quality, the pitch will die and this staged funding format: trailer, short & then feature will really grow.It happens in the traditional funding channels but it could explode with crowd funding. am not a big fan of Lena Dunham’s work or worldview, but her approach to her career is crackerjack. Why is it relevant? Judd Apatow wanted to work with her after seeing a school shot short film……….
agree
Its the toughest niche for social media to crack.The bigger the investment, the more you need experience.Seth McFarlane’s new Sci Fi show is directed by Jon Favreau, who has been directing big budget Sci Fi stuff for almost a decade now.Even a person w Seth’s track record thought…..better bring in an adult who can show he is comfortable with this level of investment and operational complexity.Seth is v, v smart IMO.
.This notion of building interest through tantalizing serialization has been around for a long time. Many a novel was the spawn of a short story which the author could not end.The Count of Monte Cristo (1844, Alexandre Dumas, also wrote The Three Musketeers) was the outgrowth of a short story by Jacques Peuchet which only came to light after he (JP) died.Dumas purloined that story as the core of the book.The book was published in episodes — eighteen, I think, can’t remember — in the Journal des Debats. It was released over a year.It was a contrivance to increase circulation by teasing each episode.Since 1844, that book has become a cornerstone of English lit even though it was originally written in French. It is well into its second century.The ability to craft a film, given current technology and editing, has now become as easy as putting a pen to a piece of paper.If you pick your current favorite Netflix show — House of Cards, as an example — it is essentially the Count of Monte Cristo jerked into the present time with an episodic flair.The story in its time was quite political with Louis Napoleon being at the center of things, the emergence/re-emergence/imprisonment of Louis Napoleon and subsequent events related to the French Second Republic (1848?).Nothing is really new.JLMwww.themusingsofthebigredca…
And yet things are constantly new.Kickstarter is just a new way to find patrons, which has been around for nearly a 1000 years. They could have called it Medici, if they wanted to be history snobs.
Having read both parts of your response here @JLM:disqus, I find what you have written to be an Interesting dissertation, however, I’m not sure of the point that you are attempting to make here? Maybe I’m just tired!
How it is distributed and sold maybe new. Binge watching may seem new too, as Spacey puts in the video, but I guess everyone has read a really good novel from start to finish in one night, at least once.Kevin Spacey talks about interesting aspects about the production of House of Cards in this talk:https://www.youtube.com/wat…
.I think the binge watching is a newish thing though I cannot tell you how many books I got hooked on and read through a night.The binge watching is possible because they load every single episode at the beginning of the season, meaning they had to shoot them all first. That is new.JLMwww.themusingsofthebigredca…
.In pitching any creative idea — think traditional query letter — one sends out some kind of synopsis of the story, usually a plot summary.When the medium is film, it makes perfect sense that the synopsis would be in the same media and of a shorter duration than the finished product.Go to Fandango and look at the package of info they publish on any film. There is always a synopsis and an excerpt.Today, we have the attention span of an amoeba. The “slush pile” is being read by grad students and the flow is increasing with each day.With self-publishing, we are losing the wisdom of the agents who knew a great product — even one which needs to be edited — and knew the right publisher for that product.More deal flow, lower quality screen. Lousier finished product. Fewer guard rails.Reviewers are looking for the same things they always have been: identifiable genre, a story told in an identifiable and interesting voice, plot (subplots), characters/development, conflicts, twists, setting, time, length, and writing style.A lot of people think an idea, a subject, a quirk, a twist, a gimmick is a plot. It isn’t.There have to be interesting characters — not the people you meet in the grocery store line and not an endless stream of flawed but good-hearted persons — and they have to go from one disaster to another until they vanquish the formidable, cunning antagonist/antagonist force.There has to be a climax and a denouement.There has to be a story arc and a character who emerges at the end different than they were at the beginning.At the professional level, reviewers and agents know what’s in the publishing pipeline — is this the year for a cowboy movie? A military flick? A chick flick? How about a vampire movie? A movie about venture capital?<iframe width=”1280″ height=”720″ src=”https://www.youtube.com/emb…” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen=””></iframe>Crowdfunding is the extension of the screen directly to the individual. Crowdfunding is real and powerful. Kickstarter is not alone in proving this every day.What happens with crowdfunding is the discernment level drops to its lowest common denominator and some of the guardrails disappear. Not bad for the artist, but maybe not supportive of the best work.For plenty of artists, the art itself is the final stop on the subway. That subway doesn’t even go near the pay window by design.Somebody is out there funding pics of dogs playing poker. A great pitch without the fundamentals is just that — a great pitch. Selling pics of dogs playing poker, well, who knows?JLMwww.themusingsofthebigredca…
Conversely, platforms like Kickstarter allow individuals to create projects with small amounts of cash. In the traditional publishing world, any endeavor requires a much larger cash outlaw see something to publication. The publishing / producing world is forced to allocate as much resources into as few projects as possible. This is why large private equity funds only invest in large deals. This concentrates risk, which is shown by how little many big budget films make.Also Dogs Playing Poker: http://money.cnn.com/2005/0…
I feel bad for these girls. They seem to hold a lot of hostility towards men, and have fully bought in to the leftist conspiracy theory of some omnipresent ‘patriarchy’ that holds women back from achievement in traditional male domains. This belief in their own oppression also gives them a privileged role in the liberal victim hierarchy.The liberal victim hierarchy also explains absurdities such as feminists who completely ignore wide scale rapes of women and genocides in the Muslim world and Africa, but who are hypersensitive to any anti-egalitarian social faux pas by white male frat boys (for example) since white men are supposedly the ‘least victimized’ group in the West.Holding these sorts of beliefs screws women over in two big ways: they become disagreeable/cut off from their innate femininity and thus unattractive to high value men (and are thus unlikely to fulfill their Darwinian prerogative to reproduce with a quality mate), and in the event that they’ve successfully been brainwashed hard enough to repress their mating drive, they prevent themselves from ACTUALLY achieving in those traditional male domains since they’re so hyper-focused on their own sense of victimhood and vulnerability instead of on doing a good job and taking entrepreneurial risks.As Tony Robbins once said, there’s one thing that I wouldn’t wish for even my worst enemy: to think of himself as a victim. Few things in life prevent you from achieving your goals more than believing you’re a victim, subject to the whims of some external conspiracy and unable to steer the course of your own ship.A lot of people will probably instinctively reject the points I made in this post. But my hope is that at least one or two of you will be open minded enough to consider what I’m saying, even though it contradicts the official leftist narrative that the media and mainstream society attempt to condition us into believing.