SSL at Imaginarium Fest, Spec Fic, Spasm Chasm, and Jingle Balls

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Yo! Science, Sex and the Ladies played at its first Festival over the weekend, and it was pretty damn fun. It was in Louisville, less than 3 hours away, so we drove down there on the Friday it started, got into the hotel, and checked it all out. It was attached to a creative writing convention, which I have, unsurprisingly, never been to, but am glad I got to experience.

Being that our movie played at 5pm on Saturday, we took some SSL post cards out to the main convention area with all the booths and started talking up the screening. We were definitely passing out post cards, but we mostly jibber jabbed with lots of the vendors there. They were mostly authors and publishers of Speculative Fiction (Spec Fic), which I learned was an umbrella term for stuff like fantasy and superhero and science fiction and horror and all the more fantastical fictions. Seriously there were books about every possible combination of fantastical stuff than I could have ever imagined. Superhero, steam punk werewolves in space...is not one that I saw. I came up with it just now, but it wouldn't be out of place at this convention. I just can't specifically remember any of the ones I heard. Point is, there's a whole other world out there that I know so little about.

I haven't read much of anything over the last 15 years except for non-fiction female orgasm related books. Plus, other than stuff I had to read for school, I haven't much read fiction for fun since the 80's and early 90's. I did like science fiction mostly back then (A Wrinkle in Time, anyone?), but I know nothing of this modern and quite independent world that I had entered. Point is, I learned a lot and had a blast talking to some passionate, funny, interesting people.

We also got to see some movies, go to some writing panels, eat some pretty good food (brie, bacon and apricot burger...pretty good). One of the panels, called "Make Me Scream," was late Saturday night and had a bunch of genre erotica writers. They had a give-away for a basket of sexy goodies, which I didn't win, but I desperately wanted to because it had some Sea Salt and Caramel Ghiradelli Squares, and I was hungry and wanted candy...and I love those. I asked the question "What is your philosophy about writing female orgasm, as far as realism?" Mostly the panelists said that every situation is different, and they go with what makes the most sense. Most of them pointed out that they wrote rather fantastical erotica (yeti alien erotica is on its way to ya, people!), so they said that the orgasms are not really human, and human realism isn't as relevant in their writing.

One of the older ones on the panel said when she used to write romance for a more traditional large publisher, she fought a lot with her editor. She said she used to think that if she had to deflower any more virgins, she might kill herself. She would add pain and mess into the scene and the editor would give it back with "no pain" "no mess" and then they'd go back and forth until the editor just did what she wanted and sent it to publishing. This woman said there are definitely unwritten rules about how the orgasms should go, and that during that time she wrote a lot of eternal, universal floating into ecstasy orgasm stuff but working with independent publishing, it's just not like that for her anymore.

Barnaby asked, "What are some terms that you hate in sex scenes?" Their answers? man root, pike staff, fuck stick, sopping wet love cave, fucking wet slop hole, spasm chasm, although they were torn over that last one.  (Need more talk about his from romance writers? Check HERE)

It was a fun panel, and I have to say that my favorite writer name was Crymsyn Hart. she was pretty cool, and her shape shifter romance novels Jingle Balls and Hairy & Hung are, well, they just are what they are. If anyone reads them, I would love - I mean LOVE - a guest SSL Review.

Well, that's about it. We had a few of the authors there ask if they could do a review of SSL on their blog, and I was all hell yeah, so I'll keep you posted on that. We had to leave before the awards banquet on Sunday night, and I don't know when they'll post the winners, but if SSL won anything, I'll let you know.

Marketing Science, Sex and the Ladies - Press Kits, DVDs, and Festivals, Oh My!

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May I just take a moment and give you all out there a little bit of an overview about what is going on here in SSL land. I figure this blog is partially about the experiences and so forth of making this independent movie, so maybe I should catch you up on the background work from time to time.

This is AnC...posed for the camera (on a timer). This was for our 2012 AnC Holiday Card

I would put our current state of affairs squarely in the 'press kit hell' zone...well kinda. I actually like the press kit part. I mean it is time consuming as hell and tedious and it feels like I am never going to get things finished and out in the time frame I was hoping for. That's all true for sure, but I could say that for every single part of the movie making process - it always takes forever, consumes my life, and involves an annoyingly large amount of attention to detail...and I feel like I'm on the brink of failing at every step. It's all terrible, but you know, not really that bad. The whole movie making process is also one where I feel creative and excited, where there's constant fun bullshitting with people I like. I laugh a lot and make new friends and feel like I'm doing something that I want to do. It's very satisfying actually, and the press kit part of the process is really no different. I would say, though, that it has a slight advantage in that at this stage, I know that we've succeeded in making a movie that we are proud of (otherwise we wouldn't be promoting it). So, maybe I should say we're in press kit heaven...or maybe purgatory is a better description...yeah, cause it does feel like I'll be pushing this damn movie for the next quadrillion years. It's gonna be slow process. I'm in for the long game. The way I see it, endurance is the key when promoting a movie by nobodies from nowhere with no one famous in it and about a subject that is not for discussion in polite company.

So, point being we're doing press kits. We had to get some out to Louisville and Minneapolis for the festivals pretty quickly since the turnaround time between finding out you're in and the festival dates are often closer than you think. We didn't get elaborate for this one. We just went with a basic package containing a DVD and a simple color printing on paper - mostly leading people to our more detailed online press kit. We always do snail mailers though for press kits, but have clear direction to easy online content also. We assume people pay more attention to a package, but want their info easily accessible online.

For our Indy premiere in November (details soon btw), however, and for future press kits, we are creating something more elaborate. It's how we do. We like them to be unique, handmade-ish things that almost feel like a weird little piece of art (with clear and pertinent information, of course). These that we're conjuring up now will involve lots of strangely designed business cards, a lovely box (not that kind...although it may be pink...), ribbon, and lots of other surprises. The brainstorming and research that went into this is kinda stupid, although the three of us at AnC are pretty damn good at this kind of shit. In an odd way, we are like a well oiled machine for these things. We price shop, shoot down each other's ideas, make new ones, go through scenarios, and it's long and involved and kinda hard, but we always have a blast doing these. I'll put up some pics when we're done with them.

So, just for some nuts and bolts of our lives here. Here's the stuff that's been on our to-do list the past few weeks.


Pre-work for press kits

• update online press kit (add festival laurels, ad events, add press quotes and links to reviews)
• update SSL movie site
• burn lots of DVDs (we use blank DVDs pre-printed with the SSL logo)
• create DCP and Blue Ray exhibition copies of SSL
• investigate possible places to send press kits
• assemble contact names, email, and mailing addresses

Paper press kits for Minneapolis and Louisville

• design work for quick paper press kit
• write copy 
• investigate possible places to send press kits
• go to post office and mail them
• follow up through email with individualized letter a week later

Indianapolis premiere 

• investigate possible venues / visit venues
• negotiate details of event with venue
• create online ticket purchasing site to sell tickets through
• Send ticket and movie info to venue for their site

Indianapolis Press Kits

• Investigate pricing for boxes, cards, etc and create budget
• order all pieces
• write copy for all pieces of press kit
• design work for all cards, stickers, etc
• create individual cover letters for each press kit
• assembly line for press kits
• go to post office and mail them
• follow up through email with individualized letter a week later

Miscellaneous

• enter 3 festivals (these bitches can get expensive, so we just try to enter a few at a time, but consistently do so)
• investigate blogs, etc that may have an interest in reviewing SSL and query them (this takes a lot of searching and a lot of writing personalized emails to people you don't know)
• communication with people hosting small group showings (sending DVDs, following-up, etc)
• dealing with needs for more data space (cause we made this huge, space eating movie)
• discuss next script (ya gotta keep moving forward, right?)

Minneapolis and Louisville, SSL Is Coming To You!

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It took all the power in my being to write "coming" in the title instead of "cumming." There's no reasonable explanation why I'd want to do that. It's not really funnier or more clever, and it doesn't really even make sense. If I maybe titled the post "Minneapolis and Louisville, SSL Is Cumming Inside Your Theaters" or "Minneapolis and Louisville, SSL Can't Wait To Cum Into Your Town," or "Minneapolis and Louisville, SSL Will Make you Cum Right Away To A Theater Near You" - I mean any of those make better use of "cum" vs. "come" than the title I picked and would simply make more sense in a pun sort of way.

Anyway, I am regularly giggly inside my head whenever the word "come" is used, no matter how innocent. That's just true. It's the same way when I hear "fish taco." I can't even believe that people say it with a straight face. I just truly can't fathom how people go about their lives thinking it's perfectly sensible to order fish tacos and then proceed to eat them without even a hint of joke-iness. It's insane to me. Maybe part of that is that I really didn't actively realize that fish tacos existed as a valid menu item (and not just a crude term for lady bits) until I was about 22 years old - and I will not have you judge me for that. I've lived in land-locked Indianapolis my entire life, and I'm not a big seafood eater anyway. I have friends who feel the same way (although probably less intensely), so I know I'm not insane...although it may indicate the level of worldliness and class of my close companions.

That was not the point of this post though. WE HAVE BEEN ACCEPTED INTO OUR FIRST 2 FESTIVALS!

The Minneapolis Underground Film Festival in, well, Minneapolis obviously. It will be taking place from Thursday October 2nd thru Sunday October 5th.

The Imaginarium Film Festival in Louisville. It's actually part of the Imaginarium creative writing convention, which is kind of cool, and it is held Friday, Sept. 19th thru Sunday, Sept. 21st.

We don't have the specific details on the times our movie will be playing, but we'll post as soon as we know. So, if you are one of my very mysterious readers who lives in or near Minneapolis or Louisville, tell ALL your friends and caravan down to the theater to catch Science, Sex and the Ladies! And if you do get out to see it, say hi. The other 2 co-directors and I will be there, and we'd love to talk or hang out, or grab a drink - we don't care, we won't have to go to work the next day. Seriously. I'd love to meet you.

There will be more announcements in the next weeks and months for showings around the country. We're gonna start touring with this damn movie. Keep an eye out. We might be cumming to your town!

Indianapolis International FF 2013!

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It's that time of year again here in Naptown. The 2013 Indianapolis International Film Festival is on, baby - July 18-28th. I probably said something like this last year, but I'd like to reiterate it. They curate a good show.

Now, I know a lot of you readers are interested in the whole female sexuality and ladygasm thing, but I think at least some of you are probably also into film and maybe even indie film (and of course some of you just happen upon me once in a while looking for porn).

For those of you who are into indie film, you may get me on this. Have you ever been to a film festival or maybe just to an arts theater to see a real indie movie, and while watching the movie you get so incredibly bored and irritated that you contemplate things like scratching out your eyes with your credit card or simply slashing your own throat to just dear god end it? Well, you're not gonna feel like that much at all in this festival - and if you do it will probably just be one short in a series of 5 or 6 shorts, so it's not really that bad.

I'm a realist, and I'm not going to say you will be amazed by every movie at this film fest. You may even happen upon one that irritates you a bit, but that, in all honesty is the nature of the film festivals. Festivals have lots of movies, and their likability is subjective. The very best a festival can really do is to have a reputation for curating a good, solid line-up, giving the viewer a pretty good chance that she will see something that she likes or even loves. That's the kind of reputation the Indianapolis FF has been growing over the years. I can attest to it, because I play Russian Roulette and randomly go to several movies and shorts programs every year for the last several years. I don't worry about just stepping into a movie I know nothing about, because I trust it will be pretty good, and I recommend if you live around here, that you check one out. Plus, the movies are showing at The Indianapolis Museum of Art. You can enjoy the simply lovely grounds between movies, or if you're there during open hours, check out the art - it's free.

Our Second Festival Submission and Near Future Plans

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We just shipped off a DVD of Science Sex and the Ladies for our 2nd festival submission. It is still not a final version, but it is a very watchable movie. The biggest changes from the version we sent to the first festival is, well, a whole lot of vulva and penis animation. The whole section explaining what is scientifically known about sexual response, the physical description of Master and Johnson's pleasure cycle in particular, is a strange sort of animated graphics. There was animation for this in the last version, but it was a rush job. This time it was worked over pretty good, and I'll tell ya what - it's pretty fun and explanatory.

I'm not tootin' my own horn here either, Charlie rocked this (and really all the technical post production bad ass-ery). He did things that I didn't even imagine were possible when we finished writing this a few years ago. Whether it's deemed sucky or worthy, one thing that can be said for this movie is that it taught Charlie a shit load. I mean it schooled all three of us pretty good, but Charlie got some professional level compositing skills out of this. Other than the animation, there were a few other small changes, and the scene relating to the book Dilemmas of Desire got a nice revamp.

Right after our first submission, the 3 of us went through the movie with a fine toothed comb and made a ridiculously large (and Charlie would say a bit confusing) spreadsheet with every change that we thinks needs to be made in order to get this in a polished final form. The changes that were made for this 2nd submission were just the top priority ones. Now Charlie will be starting at scene 1 and moving through all the changes till he gets to the end. Barnaby will be helping out with some rotoscoping and that kind of fun thing, and B and I both will be working on putting together the couple of short reshoots and obtaining needed materials, like pictures, sound effects, and voice overs.

But...before that, we will all be focused on one single thing for the next few days - getting our kickstarter.com fundraising campaign started. It's an awesome site that brings backers together with for-profit creative endeavors. Projects offer project related rewards for different levels of funding. The thing is, though, that once we set a fundraising goal and a campaign time frame, we have to make that much money in that amount of time, or we don't get any of it, and the backers who pledged don't get charged. Kickstarter does that so that backers' money only goes to projects that are fully funded and thus can actually get finished. Anyway, what all this means is that we have to have a kick ass project page and project video, and we have to have our press kits and get-the-word-out-further-than-our-circle-of-friends campaign ready to go as soon as we launch. So, you'll be hearing more about that soon. In the meantime, I will go to sleep and dream of the cinnamon rolls and bacon I will be eating for breakfast tomorrow, cause that's important too.

Our First Festival Submission!!!!

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Oh yeah - we did it...at the very last minute...but we did it. When I say last minute, I mean last minute. I mean 2:59am, the day after it was due - which happens to be 11:59pm the day it was due in the festival office time zone. That's a little too close for comfort, so I didn't really rest easy till we were informed of our submission status, which we now have. We've got the thumbs up from the festival that we've satisfied all submission requirements (the blue check for those of you who have submitted on Withoutabox). We are in the running now.

We knew we'd be cutting it close. We decided to submit in early August. We thought we were close enough and could get it to submission ready if we busted our asses, so we created a timeline to get it done, and really did pretty well (with the help of Nathaniel Blume on Temp Track duty) at getting there. We originally planned to be finished 6 days prior to the deadline so we could mail it and have it be in their offices when it was supposed to be, but then we learned we could upload our screener instead of sending a DVD. Now we decided we only had to be done 3 days ahead of time.

I mean we've dealt with the trials and tribulations of getting a movie finished (finished enough in this instance) and out to a watchable format. It is always problematic - in ways you could never imagine. This situation is where evil lives, and we were aware. We assumed it would take some finagling, and there would be some mistakes. It was much worse than we thought.

Here's how things needed to work. We had to first export the movie from our editing system in a particular format, then upload that onto IMDB/Withoutabox as a the secure online screener. It then needed to finalize. Then it would appear on our Withoutabox account and we could submit it. All our other submission stuff was done. We just needed to give them the stupid movie. Now, a full length movie is a big file, and we were looking at around 4 hours every time we exported or uploaded. That's cool once or even twice, but we had to try uploading this more than once or twice. It would go all the way to the end and then fail. In fact, Charlie watched our last failed upload hit "100%" and then fail.

At about 8pm the day of the deadline, it was in the process of uploading, Charlie had tried yet another format. At this point, he had been watching uploads all day, and I had been obsessing about it all day at work. By this time, he had become calmly accepting that we would not make it, and so we went out for Subway and cat food (we'd been needing to get that, since our new cat Tina eats like it's the end of days) while it slowly uploaded. We got home when it was at about 70%.

For my part, I tried to think the right things so that it would work. I struggled to decide how not to jinx us. I always have a feeling that if I'm too confident, then it surely won't work. But then sometimes, I think maybe being depressed about it will make it surely not work. It isn't easy to control your thoughts to obtain favorable outcomes people. I decided to come to peace with the failure, but continue to look at all possible options towards success. That was my superstitious time passing belief for this instance of life stress.

When it got to 98%, we stared at it, discussing how positive we were that it would fail just after 100% like last time, then.....it gave us the "successful upload" page. This was about 12:10am. We'd already decided that we'd go by the time in LA not here, so we still had almost 3 hours. There was high-fiving, and such, but then we realized that the finalization process might take a while, and by while I mean that it was at 96% when we checked it at 2:56am, and still at 96% at 2:57am. Charlie had got the webpage set up on the upstairs computer so that we could just push the button when the time came. However, it kinda seemed like we were gonna miss it just barely.  It hadn't moved by 2:58, so just for a last ditch, I headed upstairs to check if it had shown up on our page yet. It hadn't, so I pressed refresh again and it still hadn't, then I pressed refresh again, and there it was. It still boggles my mind how it that it actually worked out. I clearly had thought the correct combination of positive, negative and indifferent thoughts.

It would have been fine if we didn't submit. Who knows whether we'll get in or not, but I really would have felt bad if we missed this opportunity, especially since we busted our asses so hard to get it ready. Anyway, that's the story. I have a feeling our next submission will be much less tense.