Latest / Indie Film Hustle® - A Filmmaking Podcast / IFH 697: Building a Filmmaking Brand on Youtube with Darious Britt

Transcript

IFH 697: Building a Filmmaking Brand on Youtube with Darious Britt · Indie Film Hustle® - A Filmmaking Podcast

• 0:03
  You are listening to the IFH podcast Network. For more amazing filmmaking and screenwriting
• 0:08
  podcasts, just go to IFAH podcast network dot com. Welcome to the Indie
• 0:13
  Film Hustle Podcast, Episode number six ninety seven. I've been trying to squeeze
• 0:17
  a dollar out of a dime and I even got a cent. DJ Hustle
• 0:22
  and Flow broadcasting from the back alley in Hollywood. It's the Indie Film Hustle
• 0:28
  Podcast, where we show you how to survive and thrive as an indie filmmaker
• 0:33
  in the jungles of the film biz. And here's your host, Alex Ferrari.
• 0:39
  Welcome, Welcome to another episode of the Indie Film Hustle Podcast. I
• 0:41
  am your humble host, Alex Ferrari. Today's show is sponsored by Rise of
• 0:46
  the Film Entrepreneur How to turn your independent film into a profitable business. It's
• 0:50
  harder today than ever before for independent filmmakers to make money with their films from
• 0:54
  predatory film distributors ripping them off to huckster film aggregators who prey upon them.
• 0:59
  The odds are stacked against the indie filmmaker. The old distribution model of making
• 1:03
  money with your film is broken. And there needs to be a change.
• 1:07
  The future of independent filmmaking is the entrepreneurial filmmaker or the film entrepreneur. In
• 1:14
  Rise of the Film Entrepreneur, I break down how to actually make money with
• 1:17
  your film projects and show you how to turn your indie film into a profitable
• 1:22
  business. With case studies examining successes and failures. This book shows you the
• 1:26
  step by step method to turn your passion into a profitable career. If you're
• 1:32
  making a feature film, series, or any other kind of video content,
• 1:36
  the Film Entrepreneur method will set you up for success. The book is available
• 1:40
  in paperback, ebook, and of course audiobook. If you want to order
• 1:45
  it, just head over to www dot film bizbook dot com. That's film
• 1:49
  Bizbook dot com. Enjoy today's episode with guest host Jason Buff. Today we're
• 1:57
  talking with various brit Ka d for Darius. Now. Darius is one of
• 2:01
  these guys who has just taken over on YouTube and has a filmmaking channel that
• 2:07
  is really, really amazing. It's got tons of information and one of the
• 2:09
  things we're going to be talking about in this episode is the concept of personal
• 2:14
  brand and branding yourself on YouTube and Facebook and the concept. You know,
• 2:19
  it's not a new concept any anybody who knows Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese,
• 2:23
  Danley Kubrick, all of these names that are always coming up in filmmaking classes,
• 2:29
  and whenever you're talking about filmmaking, you're always like, oh, well,
• 2:30
  Kubrick and Hitchcock and these guys, those people have a brand. And
• 2:35
  I know that it's not a popular way to think about it in the same
• 2:38
  way that you would say, Okay, well, Starbucks is a brand and
• 2:40
  Nike is a brand. But there's a difference between branding and marketing, and
• 2:45
  branding is really when your name has all these things represented with it. Okay,
• 2:49
  when you think about Steven Spielberg, you think about certain things. When
• 2:53
  you think about Eli Roth, when you think about Stanley Kubrick, when you
• 2:55
  think about Hitchcock, they all represent something and their names would be at the
• 3:00
  very top of the posters. And there's a reason for that. And there's
• 3:02
  a reason why Spielberg's name is at the top of Transformers posters and Back to
• 3:07
  the Future and all these other things, because that name means something. When
• 3:10
  you say Spielberg, it means something to people. So what we need to
• 3:15
  do as filmmakers is to pay attention to the connection we have with our audience
• 3:19
  and to start making a personal connection with our fans and the people who you
• 3:23
  want your film to be for. And there's tons of people that have never
• 3:28
  done they don't understand this concept. But the people that are really out there,
• 3:31
  the people that you remember, are the ones who make sure that their
• 3:35
  name is always front and center and there. You know, their image is
• 3:38
  out there and people know who they are. They do interviews, they do
• 3:40
  behind the scenes, and they get in front of the camera. I remember
• 3:43
  one of the first things, the first time I ever thought about who the
• 3:46
  filmmakers were. We're seeing like Rages at the Lost Art documentaries on PBS,
• 3:50
  and you would see Steven Spielberg doing interview after interview after interview and talking about
• 3:54
  filmmaking and talking about that. You know, he was out there before most
• 3:58
  of these people. I think one of the first people to do it was
• 4:00
  probably like Hitchcock used to do, you know, all the kinds of behind
• 4:03
  the stuff. And Disney was also out there and they branded themselves and they
• 4:09
  created a connection with their audience. And if you really want to kind of
• 4:12
  go to the next level, with your filmmaking. Instead of focusing completely on
• 4:15
  your film, try to focus on building your own personal connection with your audience.
• 4:19
  All right, here's my interview with Darius sprit Typically like to find out,
• 4:25
  is you know when filmmaking kind of inspired you when you were you know
• 4:30
  what films inspired you? What was the thing that kind of made you want
• 4:33
  to get into filmmaking. That's kind of a strange story for me, but
• 4:38
  maybe not so strange. Maybe there's other stories that are better. But originally
• 4:42
  I wanted to be a comic book artist for the longest time, and it
• 4:46
  just wasn't in the cards for me to be a good illustrator. I found
• 4:48
  out the hard way that I think to be competent you need to have a
• 4:53
  certain level of photographic memory. So and I didn't have that. So long
• 4:57
  story short, at the age of twenty three, I realized I would never
• 5:00
  be able to achieve what I wanted in that medium. But I still had
• 5:05
  the itch to tell stories. So then I started looking elsewhere and thought of
• 5:11
  filmmaking. I was considering do a novel writing, but I'm not a writer
• 5:14
  like that. So can you draw though? No well? After I mean
• 5:19
  literally it usually it usually helps to be able to you know this second I
• 5:24
  put the pencil down, I thought I would regret it for so long because
• 5:27
  it was such a huge part of me. But as soon as I found
• 5:30
  filmmaking, I never looked back. I don't even really miss drawing at all.
• 5:33
  So what that tells me is I really just needed to find the right
• 5:38
  medium to express is what it was. And I thought it was drawing and
• 5:43
  it wasn't that. But we you always been kind of artistic. Yeah,
• 5:45
  I always had stories in my head. I think I mainly was attracted to
• 5:48
  illustration because of the control you There weren't as many factors that could you know,
• 5:54
  ruin an idea, you just had mainly a writer and an illustrator,
• 5:59
  whereas filmmaking you have so many moving pieces and parts. So that's what attracted
• 6:02
  me to that. But but yeah, I found filmmaking and a film called
• 6:04
  Possession with Sam Neil was the one that really launched me off into it.
• 6:09
  It's it's a transgressive film, but I think showed me. It showed me
• 6:13
  something I had not seen before at that time, and that's what kind of
• 6:16
  woke me up to the possibilities of the media. Generally with transgressive films you
• 6:21
  can find a lots of They pushed the boundaries on I guess violence, and
• 6:29
  I don't know the best way to describe it. I'd have to google it
• 6:30
  and give you the definition so I don't misrepresent it, you know, But
• 6:34
  a transgressive film, they're they're kind of the touchier films. You could say.
• 6:39
  Gasper No makes a lot of transgressive films. They really pushed the boundaries
• 6:44
  on what's considered acceptable or what you can show in a film. So what
• 6:47
  is your background? Where it tell us a little bit about where you're.
• 6:49
  You know, I want to get into your YouTube channel, but how did
• 6:51
  you end up? You know, what's Yeah, well, what's you're a
• 6:54
  little bit of your biography, so we just kind of know a little bit
• 6:56
  about you. I could give you the abridge version of that one. I
• 6:59
  was in the Air Force for four years as a jet mechanic, got out,
• 7:02
  went to the University of Arizona for film And while I was going to
• 7:08
  the university, I was writing a feature link script. As soon as I
• 7:11
  got out of film school. A month out, I shot that feature link
• 7:14
  film called Unsound Fast Forward a year later. Test screenings later reshoots later a
• 7:19
  year and a half on the festival circuit later and I am where I am
• 7:23
  right now. But I think the departure point between would really kind of pushed
• 7:28
  me onto the online space was when I was doing the festival circuit for my
• 7:33
  senior thesis film, Seafood Tester. In order to graduate, you had to
• 7:36
  make a senior thesis film. I was doing the festival circuit in tandem with
• 7:42
  producing Unsound, So I was shooting Unsound while I was submitting Seafood Tester,
• 7:47
  and I started realizing that maybe the festivals weren't what I thought they were in
• 7:55
  terms of getting yourself out there. You know, all the Cinderella stories we
• 7:59
  hear, would Kevin Samana, Tarantino, the usual list. So I started
• 8:03
  realizing, based off the reception of the short film Seafood Tester, that maybe
• 8:07
  my expectations were a little too high with regard to the marketing power and you
• 8:13
  know, getting into top tier festivals in particular. And sure enough, when
• 8:18
  I started touring Unsound, I was right like, you know, you got
• 8:20
  rejected from Sundance. It's the usual, Like, oh man, I thought
• 8:24
  I would get in. So I started looking elsewhere. Right after the tail
• 8:28
  end of my short film Seafood Tester. I started looking online for other ways
• 8:31
  to build a sense of community around my work, connect with other filmmakers,
• 8:35
  connect with an audience, and then that's when I found YouTube. I started
• 8:39
  looking up other YouTubers and I was like, you mean to tell me there's
• 8:43
  more than just people doing cat videos and like they're garnering these huge, massive
• 8:48
  audiences. What like, why didn't anybody tell me the word YouTube? Must
• 8:52
  have popped out of somebody's mouth maybe one time in my entirety of film school,
• 8:58
  and it was like, oh, yeah, you can just throw your
• 9:00
  film on YouTube. That was it. Like there was no talk about the
• 9:03
  entire world, the brandability, what people are doing online. There was no
• 9:09
  talk about that at all. So yeah, it was a huge, huge
• 9:13
  departure for me. And as soon as I saw that, I was hooked.
• 9:15
  What years were you in film school? I graduated in twenty twelve,
• 9:18
  and so yeah, they should have been probably, you know, talking about
• 9:20
  that, I'm always amazed at how little people understand about getting online and putting
• 9:26
  your film online, connecting with an audience just kind of it's the way things
• 9:30
  have kind of moved. You know, you if you're not online. As
• 9:33
  a creative, you don't exist pretty much. In my opinion, you don't
• 9:35
  exist because it's so tough to reach it levels. The playing field is what
• 9:39
  it does. If you understand how to leverage micro content to get yourself found
• 9:45
  and to build community to reach audiences, then you're stuck doing the old method,
• 9:50
  which is print media or PR you know, and that all costs a
• 9:52
  lot of money. Like, yeah, we'll be right back after a word
• 9:58
  from our sponsor and now back to the show. So, in my opinion,
• 10:07
  you really need to be online, and not just be online. You
• 10:09
  need to understand how to use the tools to engage audiences and connect. So
• 10:13
  while I was on YouTube, I I learned that a lot of it the
• 10:16
  hard way. The first six months I was on YouTube, I was splashing
• 10:20
  around. I wasn't really I was treading water for the first six months because
• 10:24
  I didn't understand how to create content that pulls audiences towards you. I was
• 10:28
  pushing myself onto people. So, well, how do you mean pushing yourself
• 10:33
  onto people? Well, for instance, certain things are going to get views
• 10:35
  and certain things are not. So if you make content tailored towards what people
• 10:41
  are looking for, you will be found. If you make content that no
• 10:45
  one is looking for, it's going to be a lot it's going to be
• 10:46
  a lot tougher for you to get found. So in my case, I
• 10:50
  was making vlogs about my adventures on the film festival circuit and getting distribution.
• 10:56
  Now that seems like that would be a heavy hitting topic, only you have
• 10:58
  to remember a large portion of the audience on YouTube is still fairly young.
• 11:03
  It's changing, lots of older people are jumping into the pool now, but
• 11:07
  it's still fairly young. So I was making vlogs about things that most people
• 11:11
  aren't even on that level. Most people are on the how do I make
• 11:15
  a short film level? How do I light? What is three point lighting?
• 11:16
  So I was not getting any kind of traction, so I needed to
• 11:22
  push myself. So, for instance, I would go to I wouldn't recommend
• 11:24
  doing this anymore, but when I was starting, you know, I was
• 11:26
  very aggressive. So I'd go to a bigger YouTuber's page, bigger filmmaking channel's
• 11:31
  page, see one of their videos, and then I'll go down the comment
• 11:33
  section and personally message every person who commented on their video, Hey, how
• 11:37
  you doing? And I basically pitched myself start a new YouTube channel. I'm
• 11:41
  a filmmaker hitting the film festival Stary with the first feature length film. You
• 11:46
  can follow us to learn about the distribution process, what it's like to submit
• 11:50
  to film festivals, and I'd pitched the value of my channel to them and
• 11:52
  that worked. It worked very well. I was getting like maybe twenty subscribers
• 11:56
  a day doing that, But at the same time, it was extremely time
• 12:00
  consuming because I'm pushing myself onto people, so my amount of growth is limited
• 12:05
  to the number of people I directly contact. And I didn't just do that
• 12:07
  on YouTube. I did it on Facebook. So I joined like four or
• 12:11
  five hundred filmmaking Facebook groups across the world that would look up every city and
• 12:16
  join find the Facebook group and join it, and then I would advertise my
• 12:20
  films or my vlogs whenever I had one out. I did it on Google
• 12:24
  Plus, and I was doing it so much that I started getting all kinds
• 12:26
  of problems on all the platforms, Like YouTube took my comments away for a
• 12:31
  year because I was like doing three hundred messages, spend like straight two hours
• 12:37
  boom just messaging because I really wanted it, you know. But then I
• 12:41
  began to realize and I know, I'm kind of just going off here,
• 12:45
  so you can no, No, this is great. I began to realize
• 12:48
  that the amount of time I was spending reaching people could be better spent generating
• 12:54
  more content. And I also realized that these bigger YouTubers they're not doing what
• 12:58
  I'm doing in order to get where they got. They're growing organically, they're
• 13:03
  not having a personally message people. So then I reevaluated my content strategy and
• 13:09
  I started really studying their channels before I would see them and then okay,
• 13:13
  you're making filmmaking stuff. Cool, I can do that. But I wasn't
• 13:16
  really seeing what they were doing. So then I started kind of reverse engineering
• 13:20
  their channels. Okay, well, what are the videos that are hitting the
• 13:22
  hardest on their channel? Oh? How to do this? How to do
• 13:26
  that? How do this? And then I'd start looking up search fields and
• 13:28
  see, okay, well there's this one guy who only has thirty five subscribers,
• 13:33
  yet he has a video on three point lighting that has five thousand views.
• 13:39
  So if this guy who has thirty five subscribers, nobody knows who he
• 13:43
  is, yet this one video has a ton of views that tells me that
• 13:46
  if you make a video on a topic like that, you're guaranteed to give
• 13:48
  views anyway, just because people are looking for that. In the video,
• 13:52
  of course, the guy made was not very good, so that tells me
• 13:56
  even more. It's like, okay, so instead of pushing myself onto people,
• 13:58
  I need, I need to generate content that people are looking for.
• 14:03
  And sure enough, the first video I did using that strategy, the first
• 14:09
  video I did for you know, I think it was how to how to
• 14:11
  make a short film. That video and one day got more views and did
• 14:16
  better than all my other videos did in a week without me even marketing it,
• 14:20
  without me even pushing it. It's just like boom. I was like,
• 14:22
  oh, that was a various prettier. So today were recovering five things
• 14:26
  that you can do to improve your filmmaking skills. So these aren't in any
• 14:28
  particular order, but number one would be taking acting classes. This is going
• 14:33
  to give you a sense of the acting process, and you're gonna learn about
• 14:35
  the acting lingo. And these two tools are going to make you a much
• 14:37
  better communicator when it comes to talking with your actors and getting what you need
• 14:41
  out of them. Oftentimes you're asking things of your actors, but you don't
• 14:43
  really know what it's like to be on the other side of the camera and
• 14:46
  what you're actually asking of them. So by being on the other side of
• 14:48
  the camera and performing yourself, you'll thus know what it's like to be an
• 14:52
  actor, and you'll thus understand their predicament a little bit better. And it's
• 14:54
  gonna make you again a much better communicator. This is a great way to
• 14:58
  meet new talent. You'll meet and work with new actors that you might work
• 15:01
  within the future, and you guys will already have a working relationship and kind
• 15:03
  of understand how each other works. And Number two, watch Inside the Actor's
• 15:07
  Studio. The episodes aren't very long and it is a great resource to learn
• 15:11
  about acting. You can pretty much find all the episodes online for free,
• 15:13
  and if you watched one video every day for a month, you would learn
• 15:18
  so much about acting. I promise you if you are not comfortable directing actors
• 15:22
  now, if you watched Inside the Actor's Studio every day, one episode for
• 15:24
  a month, by the end of that month, you feel like you can
• 15:28
  direct anybody. And number three, watch your favorite films with the SoundOff.
• 15:31
  By doing this, this allows you to focus on just the visuals. You'll
• 15:35
  be surprised at how much more you pick up with the sound off and you
• 15:37
  just watching the visuals that everything feels different. Watch how they move the camera,
• 15:41
  How does it affect the narrative, How does it make you feel as
• 15:43
  an audience member? How does it affect the pacing of the story. If
• 15:46
  watch five of your favorite films with the SoundOff at least twice and just really
• 15:50
  study the camera movements, and I guarantee you you will learn a lot.
• 15:54
  And number four, shoot as often as possible. If you want to get
• 15:56
  better at directing actors, the best way to get better at directing actor is
• 16:00
  to direct actors. Grab a couple of friends, script out a scene and
• 16:02
  shoot it. Don't worry about lighting it, don't worry about making it look
• 16:04
  pretty. Just focus on working with actors. Don't dump any resources into these
• 16:07
  scenes studies. Just shoot them for free. You don't have to upload them
• 16:11
  anywhere. You just shoot it, work with the actors, cut it up,
• 16:12
  learn your lessons, and then delete it. If you want you want
• 16:15
  to get better at working on your visual effects, perform VFX test. Just
• 16:18
  practice, practice, practice, Stay prolific, stay busy, stay at it,
• 16:22
  and number five. Watch a lot of movies. And I don't mean
• 16:23
  watch a lot of movies, I mean watch a lot of movies. Watch
• 16:26
  movies until you're sick of watching them, and then watch some more. On
• 16:30
  the face of it, it seems easy, but you'll be surprised at how
• 16:33
  quickly you get sick of watching movies after a certain point. The more you
• 16:37
  watch, the more familiar you'll be with storytelling, the more you'll see certain
• 16:40
  trends and cliches. You'll see things done well, things done not so well.
• 16:44
  But you'll have all of this experience to reflect on when you're making your
• 16:45
  own movies, thus making you a better filmmaker. And if you have any
• 16:49
  time after that, actually break down the movies that you watch, as in
• 16:52
  watch them repeatedly. Study the ones that you found were good, break them
• 16:56
  down to figure out why they're so good, and study the ones that are
• 16:57
  bad. Break them down and figure out why they're so bad. It's no
• 17:00
  coincidence that usually the best filmmakers tend to be centiphiles, as in, you
• 17:03
  know, Tarantino, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg. They've seen so many movies
• 17:07
  that they have such an archival knowledge of films that they can't help but make
• 17:12
  better movies. So the moral of the story, watch a crap ton of
• 17:15
  movies until you vomit, and then watch more. And so I still didn't
• 17:18
  learn my lesson though, So I did both. I was like, Okay,
• 17:21
  well, if I can make videos that people are finding organically and I
• 17:26
  still push, I could get double the double the lammy, you know.
• 17:30
  And I did that for a little while, but then it just became very
• 17:33
  counterproductive because I was getting more growth organically than I was pushing myself, and
• 17:37
  I was still getting messages from Facebook saying you're misusing the platform and all I
• 17:41
  got it. So I just stopped. I'm telling me like they were shutting
• 17:45
  down on me. Man, they were shutting down. So then I stopped
• 17:51
  doing all that stuff altogether and just relied on making good content that people are
• 17:56
  looking for. And then, you know, it's just kind of been history
• 17:59
  every now it's like not worth my time to even really push any and of
• 18:02
  my stuff out there. I just I just create it. And you know,
• 18:04
  there's something to be said about when you take the time to understand the
• 18:08
  mechanics of searchability and what people are looking for. It can really really make
• 18:14
  all of the difference. And I feel like that parallels a lot of what
• 18:17
  Hollywood's doing too. So now I'm not so upset about everybody you know groans
• 18:21
  about genre pictures and you know them exploiting licenses that are already huge brands.
• 18:26
  I completely understand why they do what they do, because even on the online
• 18:32
  space, you're still be holding to supply and demand, or you're not supply
• 18:36
  demand, you still be holding to what people are looking for. Because I
• 18:38
  can make the best film on the planet, I can make the best video
• 18:41
  on the planet on YouTube, but if it's not, if it's not in
• 18:47
  that stream of what people are looking for, it's not going to get found
• 18:51
  and it's not going to get shared as much. But there are strategies to
• 18:53
  straddle defense. But just in my journey online, I definitely understand the important
• 19:00
  of creating content that's essentially marketable and sellable. So so yeah, there is
• 19:07
  there a way to you do you do like a mailing list and stuff like
• 19:10
  that, or is it just purely like getting subscribers. I do have a
• 19:14
  mailing list. I haven't put as much emphasis on that mailing list I'm going
• 19:18
  to be putting more on it when I release on sound, but right now
• 19:22
  it's mainly using all the fish nets too. You know, I've got the
• 19:26
  YouTube and then Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat. Those are my main
• 19:30
  main ways of communication at the moment. Tell me about Snapchat. I keep
• 19:33
  hearing about that. I know nothing about snapchat. How how is that a
• 19:37
  way to connect with people? First off, I think before I jump into
• 19:41
  the platforms, I think what's worth mentioning is the strategy behind them first,
• 19:47
  because then you better understand their use. The way that I've viewed social media
• 19:52
  is um I am. I am after building a strong brand. I don't
• 19:56
  just want people to know my name. We'll be right back after a word
• 20:02
  from our sponsor and now back to the show. I want to pull them
• 20:10
  in close to me. I want to build a relational connection with them.
• 20:14
  I want them to connect to me as a creative for me as a creative,
• 20:18
  not just my body of work. That's what I'm after. Basically,
• 20:21
  I would like a cult following. You know, I don't just want people
• 20:23
  who are like, oh, yeah, I saw one film by that guy.
• 20:26
  I want people to be like, oh Darius, yeah, I know
• 20:27
  him. That's what I'm after. I want that relational connection, and I
• 20:32
  think platforms like YouTube or particular YouTube, is like the best for that,
• 20:36
  extremely powerful because you can engage your audience. You know, not only can
• 20:41
  you release a film, but you can answer the comments, so you can
• 20:45
  build that connection with people. And I think when you view the other social
• 20:48
  media platforms in that light where it's about connecting, it's not about hey,
• 20:53
  it's not about it's not so much about self publicizing as it is connecting.
• 20:57
  And I think one of the biggest miss people I see people doing is all
• 21:02
  they do is push what they're doing on these platforms. They're not giving any
• 21:07
  kind of value. They're just pushing they look at my short film, look
• 21:10
  at my feature film. You can buy it here, you can buy it
• 21:11
  there, look at look at, look at, look at And they're not
• 21:14
  sharing anything. They're not they're not thinking of what can I give to someone
• 21:18
  else to make what they're doing better, to empower them. So it's basically
• 21:23
  the givers Gained principle. You need to give value to them, give them
• 21:26
  a reason to want to follow you. It can't just be about you.
• 21:30
  You know, you've got to You've got to kind of empower others and give
• 21:33
  to others. So what I do on the other social media platforms is it's
• 21:37
  a way for me to connect to them off of just YouTube and give different
• 21:44
  types of content to you know, share quotes, inspirational, things I found
• 21:48
  inspirational, you know, literally any anything that I think they would find valuable.
• 21:56
  That's what I do on those other platforms, and I do it on
• 21:59
  a consistents because it's just like marketing where it's about impressions. You can't build
• 22:03
  a relationship with someone off of seeing them one time, Like how well can
• 22:06
  you get to know a girl off of one date? Not very well?
• 22:11
  Like you need to see them repeatedly. You know, it's about the number
• 22:15
  of times that you make contact with them. That's how you build a relationship
• 22:18
  with your audience. So even though you know, take Instagram for instance,
• 22:25
  even though yes, you take a picture, you have a little caption.
• 22:29
  You know, they scroll through, they see a little picture and they like
• 22:30
  it. Right, And that may seem like a very small thing, but
• 22:34
  when you multiply that over say three months, if somebody's been following on Instagram,
• 22:38
  that really builds a connection there, especially if the content that you're sharing
• 22:42
  on Instagram is something they can find valuable or entertaining. So it's those impressions,
• 22:48
  that repeated contact that builds that trust, that builds that relational connection.
• 22:52
  So now you're not just hobo filmmaker, but now you're Jason buff you know.
• 22:56
  Oh yeah, I know him. I follow on Instagram. I like
• 23:00
  his pictures or he told me it's one quote that I you know, I
• 23:03
  remember, you know, like it's it. That's that's the whole game.
• 23:07
  Giver's game. Building a connection, working on fostering that sense of community,
• 23:11
  that's the whole that's the whole point of those social media networks. That's I
• 23:15
  mean, outside of that, you're wasting your time. Really, in my
• 23:18
  opinion, Yeah, I totally agree with you. I Mean, one of
• 23:21
  the biggest things that I see, our biggest mistakes I see is so many
• 23:23
  people just putting pure stuff like all about me. You know, look at
• 23:27
  my stuff. Can you can you do me this favor? Can you like
• 23:30
  my this or like my that? You know? And it really is true
• 23:34
  what you're saying. You know that you the thing it should be about giving
• 23:37
  to people, and that's what's going to attract That's what's going to make people
• 23:41
  like your page or you know, subscribe to you, is that you're giving
• 23:45
  them what they want to have exactly. It's about I think you know,
• 23:48
  it's not It's not unlike the older forms of marketing, you know, where
• 23:52
  it's like, hey, I've got this pdf. You know, I'll give
• 23:55
  you a free e book or whatever if you join my mailing list. It's
• 23:59
  the same thing, just different and it's a little more engaging, Like you're
• 24:02
  still giving people things for free and in return, they know your name,
• 24:07
  so it's givers gain, like when you boil it all down. In order
• 24:11
  to survive in this climate now where everybody can do anything as an artist,
• 24:15
  you have to have a brand. You have to have a strong brand.
• 24:19
  You know, you have to have brand awareness. And the best way to
• 24:22
  get that now is either you're creating content that has a massive following. Like
• 24:29
  Scott McMahan put it with the classic marketing is like if you want to be
• 24:33
  a leader, jump in front of a parade. You know, you're either
• 24:37
  connecting to something that is already huge. You know, you're connecting in those
• 24:41
  eight guys, or you're connecting into Star Wars or a brand that already has
• 24:44
  a huge following that is ravenous for content. You're either connecting into that or
• 24:48
  you're giving people what they're looking for in terms of empowerment. You know,
• 24:53
  people trying to learn filmmaking, Well, if you're the guy who shows them,
• 24:56
  guess what they know you? Oh this video. Oh he's got a
• 25:00
  whole series. You know, Like, now they know you. And even
• 25:03
  though that takes a lot of work to do that, I think the rewards
• 25:07
  are numerous. Like there, it's amazing. It's like once you start rolling
• 25:11
  that snowball, it starts rolling itself after a while. But that's not to
• 25:15
  say every artist needs to make how two videos. I'm just saying as an
• 25:18
  artist. As an artist, you need to find a way to give value
• 25:22
  to people on a consistent basis. You can't just crank out a movie and
• 25:26
  then disappear for a while. You need to find a platform, and you
• 25:30
  need to find a constant content strategy where you can leverage micro content, whether
• 25:34
  it's blogging, whether whatever. But you need to have something else where you
• 25:40
  can build your brand while you're making your masterpieces. You know, because if
• 25:45
  you just wait till you make a movie and then you collect emails and you
• 25:48
  disappear for a while, okay that three years, that year away. You're
• 25:52
  not growing, you're not building your brand. You're gone, You're off the
• 25:56
  grid. Whereas the person like me who's still creating micro content, still hitting
• 26:00
  the search engines with the content strategy, still still planning the seeds you know
• 26:06
  all the time. Well, the next time I make a movie, you
• 26:08
  know it's going to be that much easier, you know. So uh,
• 26:11
  and that that's another big thing I think is artists just want to make what
• 26:15
  they want to make, but they need to realize you're not just an artist,
• 26:18
  You're an entrepreneur. Now. You can't just make your art. You
• 26:21
  need to find a way to market yourself. You need to find a way
• 26:23
  to brand yourself. So yeah, I like I like that you quoted Scott
• 26:30
  because he's a good friend of mine. M most filmmakers don't really understand this
• 26:36
  aspect of the filmmaking world, you know, marketing and and a lot of
• 26:41
  the stuff that you just said. What was your kind of what brought you
• 26:44
  into that world? Did you like read any books that influenced you or was
• 26:48
  it was there something that like got you into the marketing side of filmmaking,
• 26:51
  to be completely honest with you, Desperation is what plunged me in because I
• 26:56
  have this huge movie that I have literally charged up all my credit cards for,
• 27:00
  pulled out loans for. I went into debt to make this film,
• 27:06
  and now when I'm on the fest circuit, you know, and my expectations
• 27:10
  were not what I set out to do because I was still going off the
• 27:12
  old model that I learned in film school. You know, make a film,
• 27:15
  get on the fest circuit. You'll meet producers, you gonna meet all
• 27:18
  this stuff. They'll help you make your next film. You made a distributor
• 27:19
  to sell it. And the reality is that's not what's happening out there.
• 27:23
  That is not what's happening. So, you know, I got this golden
• 27:26
  egg on my back that I spent a lot of money on and I can't
• 27:30
  just say, oh, well that didn't work out, so let me just
• 27:33
  go get it, you know, let me flip burgers like that's not an
• 27:36
  option at this point. I'm not paying this debt off for the next twenty
• 27:37
  thirty years. Like, So what really got me into it? It wasn't
• 27:42
  a book because I kind of found out about Gary Vannertuk after I had already
• 27:47
  kind of codified my way of doing things, but it was just studying other
• 27:51
  YouTubers, to be honest with you, studying what works for them, and
• 27:53
  usually what works is giving content that people are looking for in engagement the two
• 27:59
  big things, because if you give people content but you're not engaging them,
• 28:03
  you're not building a community that will evangelize what you do, you know,
• 28:07
  like building that relational connection. That's the second step. But that's kind of
• 28:12
  where I saw most of the patterns. It's like, Okay, these videos
• 28:17
  did well, and not only that, this is what they're doing on their
• 28:18
  social media platforms. Oh, I can see where that works because I liked
• 28:22
  it when you know, when I go, oh that's cool, this is
• 28:23
  a cool quote. Oh this is you know. So then once you start
• 28:26
  thinking of it in those terms, then the ideas everything makes sense when you
• 28:30
  think of it as givers gain. You know, the more I give,
• 28:33
  give, give, give, At the end of the day, it all
• 28:36
  comes back to you. You know, people know you. Now you don't
• 28:38
  have to work as hard for people to take interest in what you're doing.
• 28:42
  So I think once I got that concept, everything else just kind of fell
• 28:48
  into place right. It's if you like duping somebody into being curious. It's
• 28:55
  literally about making a connection, a personal connection, as personally as you can
• 29:00
  get it. I used to accept a lot of friends on my personal fan
• 29:04
  Facebook page for a while. I had to stop doing that, though,
• 29:07
  you know I was trying. It was all about how to bring people closer
• 29:11
  to you as a as a creative, but as a person too, you
• 29:15
  know, like, yeah, if you ask me a question, I'll answer
• 29:18
  it. If you tweet me, I'll try my best to tweet you back.
• 29:21
  All my Facebook messages I answer. And it gets tough because I'm getting
• 29:25
  comments and questions from all these platforms Instagram, people PM you, dming you,
• 29:30
  So it is definitely tough to do. And if you go through most
• 29:33
  of my YouTube videos, you'll see how to answer a ton of comments and
• 29:36
  a lot of youtubeer some of them, when they get bigger, they don't
• 29:37
  answer comments, you know, and it's like you're missing a huge component to
• 29:42
  branding right there. That's an opportunity to make some money who could have been
• 29:48
  just a passive viewer, to make them that much more engaged, Like how
• 29:52
  would you feel if you tweeted Tom cruise right now, and he tweeted you
• 29:55
  back. We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor and now back
• 30:03
  to the show. Or like, who who do you look up to?
• 30:07
  I'm sure there are a lot of people um in the community that you well,
• 30:11
  actually you probably get a hold of everybody that you're Oh no, I
• 30:17
  mean the stratosphere, you know, like yeah Smith or something like that,
• 30:21
  right, yeah, yeah, I mean for me, like if I if
• 30:23
  I ever talked to somebody like Spielberg or you know, Scorsesey or those guys,
• 30:29
  that would just like, you know, be the end for me.
• 30:30
  Except like if you were to tweet Scorsesey and he tweeted you back, and
• 30:34
  then he even put the sign so that you know it was actually him and
• 30:37
  not his you know, social media manager. Yeah, right, Like what
• 30:41
  would that do to you? Be like, oh man, he now you're
• 30:45
  not you know, It's like that does something to people that's like wow,
• 30:49
  Like he took the time to tweet me back. Now, obviously somebody on
• 30:52
  his level that would he couldn't do that all the time, but you get
• 30:56
  the idea though, It's like that kind of opens up another their door where
• 31:00
  you're not just this guy on this pillar off in the mountain somewhere. I'm
• 31:03
  making masterpieces and pooping rainbows and unicorns. But now you're now you're an actual
• 31:08
  person now, you know, like I've actually contacted you and you responded like
• 31:14
  that, And my that's what it's all about, in my opinion. You
• 31:17
  know, it's not just the work, it's the connection. So when you
• 31:19
  make a flop, they still support, which because they support you as a
• 31:23
  creative. It's like all that last movie you did that wasn't the strongest,
• 31:26
  you know what, I I don't know what I thought about, you know,
• 31:29
  like I'm not I don't know how I'm feeling that last one. But
• 31:32
  if you've got a connection that goes beyond just your work, it's way easier
• 31:37
  to rebound from that because they're looking at you as a person and not just
• 31:40
  oh yeah, all you do is shell out products. You know, Like,
• 31:42
  as YouTube changed since you got involved with it, it's always changing some
• 31:48
  ways for the better. I think when I first got onto the platform,
• 31:52
  it was fairly turbulent for a lot of the older YouTubers who've been on the
• 31:56
  platform for a while. I'm not older in age, just older, and
• 32:00
  you know, vet status, right. I'm used to the way YouTube has
• 32:06
  changed. I was around when they did the whole merger and the comments and
• 32:08
  everything got all wonky, and they try to make everybody go through Google Plus
• 32:13
  to do anything on YouTube, So I was there right when they were doing
• 32:16
  all of that, So I think it has changed. But the mechanics of
• 32:21
  searchability and getting yourself found and generating an audience is the same, and I
• 32:24
  don't think that's going to change. Even though there are a lot of fish
• 32:28
  in the sea now, there are a lot of people doing some amazing things
• 32:31
  on YouTube. It's more than just cat videos. Obviously, you've got short
• 32:36
  films that are rivaling the quality of Hollywood, you know, literally, But
• 32:38
  I think that there is still tons of room for people to get out there
• 32:45
  and cultivate an audience. Because, to be honest, even though it seems
• 32:49
  like, oh man, there's so many people doing it now, once the
• 32:52
  secrets out it's over, that's not necessarily the case because everybody when I joined,
• 32:57
  everybody was saying, oh yeah, you know YouTube, it's so saturated
• 33:00
  now there's almost no point in jumping in because now you're competing against this person
• 33:04
  and that person, this person but what I've found is, yes, it
• 33:07
  is very saturated, but just like in the filmmaking community, where there are
• 33:13
  there's a glut of content, but not all of it is well thought out
• 33:15
  and executed, it's the same thing on YouTube. There is a glut of
• 33:19
  people starting up new channels, but there are so many people who are not
• 33:22
  really executing it right. You know, they're not consistent, they're not they
• 33:27
  don't have a content, there's a lot of basics that are not being done.
• 33:30
  That for someone who's really taking it seriously and really studying the platform,
• 33:36
  they'll do fine. You know, even if you struggle for a little bit,
• 33:38
  but you're gonna learn and you're gonna figure it out and you'll do fine.
• 33:42
  You will get an audience. You're a rate that. You know,
• 33:45
  everybody is different. It depends on what you're doing. If you're doing basket
• 33:46
  weaving, then yeah, it's going to be a very very slow job for
• 33:51
  you, you know. But but in small niche markets you don't need to
• 33:53
  be a big fish as well. So that's the other caveat. Like,
• 33:57
  I have a friend in the aquarium community on YouTube. I've learned a lot
• 34:00
  from him. He only had up to ten thousand subscribers. But he was
• 34:02
  a huge fish in the aquarian community. I mean he would get sponsors,
• 34:07
  he was getting flown out places. Oh yeah, he was killing it.
• 34:10
  He was killing it. So for people who take the time to really learn
• 34:15
  how to present themselves online and how to build a connection and understand branding,
• 34:20
  understand concepts like givers gain, there's plenty of room to jump in. The
• 34:24
  water's fine. You know. What I find interesting is that there have been
• 34:28
  a lot of videos that I really liked about topics filmmaking, topics that you
• 34:32
  know, I wanted to know more about, like something very few people go
• 34:36
  into is are things like budgets and funding. And I actually found a couple
• 34:39
  of videos that I liked and I was watching them. I was like,
• 34:42
  oh man, this is a great series. And then all of a sudden,
• 34:45
  they just stopped and it was like they quit putting up videos or I
• 34:47
  guess maybe they decided that it wasn't like working out the way they wanted it
• 34:52
  too. And it seems like so many people, and it's the same thing
• 34:54
  with podcasting, a lot of people just give up, like right before they
• 34:59
  kind of bray they start getting followers. Do you see that a lot.
• 35:01
  You know, the harsh reality of it is you do what you gotta do
• 35:05
  until you can do what you want to do. And that applies to that
• 35:07
  very very much applies to the online space, because basically I could have been
• 35:15
  the guy that you saw who made that budgeting video and then he stopped.
• 35:19
  Had I not delved into the platform. Basically, if I just gave up,
• 35:22
  that would have been me too, because when I first started, I
• 35:28
  was very aggressive, but I was also treading water. To a large extent.
• 35:30
  The growth was not organic. And that guy who you saw, I
• 35:34
  assume he probably made videos, but he wasn't doing what I was doing on
• 35:37
  other platforms, so his growth was probably twice as frustrating. It's like,
• 35:40
  man, I'm in this great value, but it's like man, it's like
• 35:43
  snails. Yeah here, crickets. You know, I get maybe a view
• 35:45
  every other day, like what's going on? You know. The problem then
• 35:49
  becomes you got two choices. You know, there's a fork in that road.
• 35:52
  You can either keep doing what you're doing and say, okay, well
• 35:54
  I'm going to produce the content I want to make, and I just have
• 35:58
  to change my expectations. So I know that this isn't a heavy hitting topic
• 36:01
  as say a Star Wars fan film, but I get gratification out of doing
• 36:06
  it, and if two hundred people see it, I'm happy with that.
• 36:08
  Or you can say, well, if I change my content strategy, I
• 36:13
  can still do what I want to do. I just may have to take
• 36:16
  a round about way of doing it. So for that guy, I would
• 36:21
  say, yes, if you're making film videos about budgeting, you can still
• 36:24
  do that, But maybe what you should do is mix up your strategy so
• 36:29
  that you can incorporate videos that people are searching for first, and then do
• 36:35
  the budget videos once you've tapped into the stream, because now you've got a
• 36:40
  few Billboard videos out there that get you found. And then once they find
• 36:44
  you, then they find something else that they didn't even know that they want
• 36:47
  it, so because they wouldn't have been looking at up in the first place
• 36:50
  if they don't even know it's out there. One and then there's a lot
• 36:52
  of people who aren't even necessarily at that level yet where they would be looking
• 36:57
  that up. But when they find your channel off of something they are looking
• 37:00
  for, then they can, you know, kind of be directed into other
• 37:05
  areas that they weren't looking for you know, So for that guy, that's
• 37:08
  what I would say, and actually for a lot of people that's what I
• 37:13
  would say. You have to sometimes you have to do the things you have
• 37:16
  to do in order to do the things you want to do. Like there's
• 37:19
  always there's always that. Every job is like that. Every job has that,
• 37:22
  even filmmaking. I think, you know, there's what you want to
• 37:24
  do straight up, and then there's the things you need to do to make
• 37:28
  it sustainable, you know. And as as creatives, we all want to
• 37:31
  grow. That's all part of our plan. We don't just want to make
• 37:35
  stuff, We want to grow as well. We want people to see what
• 37:37
  we make. So when you're realizing you be, when you're honest with yourself
• 37:42
  and you're like, yes, I want to do this, but I also
• 37:44
  want viewership, then you need to change your strategy to incorporate content that is
• 37:50
  going to bring you that viewership as well as the content that you just want
• 37:54
  to make. How about in terms just in terms of monetizing YouTube, is
• 37:59
  there do you recommend that at all? It seems like you have to have
• 38:01
  like a billion views before you ever even make anything from that. It's true,
• 38:06
  like and generally speaking, if you get around a million views, that
• 38:09
  roughly translates to about two thousand dollars. So for somebody who's making about two
• 38:15
  grand a month, they got to be pulling in, you know, over
• 38:19
  a million views a month. But I have found that YouTube is a lot
• 38:23
  like filmmaking, and that in order to monetize what you do, it's much
• 38:30
  smarter to use your channel as a an advertisement for something else that you sell
• 38:37
  directly, which is you know, that's something I'm still working on. I've
• 38:39
  been in a brand building phase for so long, but I'm starting to branch
• 38:43
  off into monetizingmore. Like all my videos are monetized, and I do make
• 38:47
  some I can't really disclose what it is, but it's not nothing to write
• 38:51
  home about, you know what I mean, Like already do the million views
• 38:54
  is roughly what that equates to, and right now I'm only getting I think
• 39:00
  fifty thousand news you know, to have to look at my metrics here.
• 39:07
  Let me pull it up about the viewage that I get per month, so
• 39:10
  you can probably do the math. I think. You know, again,
• 39:15
  you're falling into the creative entrepreneurship if you just like filmmaking if you look at
• 39:20
  if you look at YouTube, just like filmmaking it there's a direct parallel filmmakers.
• 39:23
  You make the film, you do the creative side, and then you
• 39:25
  go and you look for somebody to hand the keys to. Hey, I
• 39:30
  got the car, here's the keys, you know, take it, gas
• 39:31
  it up, get it polished, do everything, get it, make it
• 39:35
  nice, get it found, take it to a car show. That's exactly
• 39:37
  what the old model of filmmaking was, whereas the new model now that's cropping
• 39:42
  up, which is creative entrepreneurship. You make the movie, but you also
• 39:45
  handle how to monetize it, which goes beyond just selling the movie. You
• 39:50
  get into exploiting the license, you know, like shirts or other additional merchandise
• 39:54
  or video downloads of things that orbit around your film but aren't exactly your film.
• 40:00
  We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor. And now back
• 40:07
  to the show or consulting or offering packages where you know, for a thousand
• 40:15
  dollars you can you know, talk to the cast and you know, those
• 40:20
  are things that you can monetize far easier, and it will take you way
• 40:24
  further than literally just selling your film, or worse yet, handing the keys
• 40:29
  over to a distributor who's probably I mean, there's so many pitfalls with that.
• 40:31
  You've kind of talked about that one in depth. Well, YouTube is
• 40:36
  the same way. If you literally make videos and you try to just live
• 40:39
  off of AdSense, you need to really be pulling in serious volume to make
• 40:45
  that model work for you, and most people don't reach that level. But
• 40:51
  if you take a creative entrepreneurship approach where you do not rely on just being
• 40:57
  the creative and letting a company make change off you're doing. But you say,
• 41:00
  how can I monetize what I'm doing on my own? What can I
• 41:04
  sell you know, whether it be an e book or whatever. What can
• 41:07
  I generate where I can sell directly to my audience that I've cultivated. That'll
• 41:12
  take you way further, And it like it's a direct parallel that I've seen
• 41:16
  anyway. It's like, wow, man, that's just like YouTube. A
• 41:19
  lot of the YouTube channels I follow that talk about the game of YouTube and
• 41:22
  the craft of it and understanding the industry and how to monetize, how to
• 41:25
  make a living off of it on platform as well as off platform. It's
• 41:30
  the exact same thing. They're all talking about ways to generate passive income and
• 41:35
  revenue by doing something to sell to your audience at different price points, the
• 41:43
  exact same thing. Some of them, I mean, some of them are
• 41:45
  making a killing like six figures and they're not huge YouTube names at all.
• 41:50
  And then there are some YouTubers who are you know, they have crazy viewership,
• 41:53
  but you'd be surprised that what they're actually making. They're still living home
• 41:58
  with mom and dad, you know, And there's something you know what I
• 42:00
  mean Like, So it's all the way you look at it. Like,
• 42:01
  if you take an entrepreneurial approach, you can make a lot of money.
• 42:06
  But if you just want to be a creative and you want to hand the
• 42:09
  keys to somebody else, then you're always going to be stuck wondering why.
• 42:14
  Man, it's like I can't seem to make anything. It's like everybody else
• 42:17
  makes money but me. You know, it's the exact same thing. You
• 42:20
  know, you got to take control of that. Does Google Plus have any
• 42:25
  is that kind of died out or is that like even a factor anymore?
• 42:30
  I think Google has backed off of pushing that onto everyone, so it's not
• 42:35
  as it's not as big of a thing as when they try to force it
• 42:38
  down everybody, it's still around. But I honestly, personally, I don't
• 42:45
  put a lot of juice into Google in terms of you know, how I
• 42:52
  mark it. Let's put it this way. When I release a video,
• 42:55
  I put it everywhere. I don't think about Google Plus, okay, you
• 43:00
  know, right. And I used to go to the groups in Google Plus
• 43:05
  and all of that, but I just noticed I wasn't getting very much bite
• 43:07
  there at all, and they have a lot of you know, I'm not
• 43:12
  gonna say it's not worth anyone's time, just saying to me, in my
• 43:15
  experience, I haven't gotten as much mileage out of it as I would have
• 43:20
  expected or liked, you know, and then you have these other platforms that
• 43:23
  are you know, killing it essentially. So I just didn't find it worth
• 43:30
  worth it to me to to maybe later on, when they you know,
• 43:34
  get the ducks in a row, you know, I'll go back to it.
• 43:37
  Yeah, but right now, it's it's not there yet to me.
• 43:42
  And even I consider doing Google Hangouts as a way to connect with fans more,
• 43:46
  but I think that's probably sooner due Periscope, to be honest with you,
• 43:51
  so i'd be done much with pariscope. I haven't yet. I've been
• 43:54
  looking into it. I just got I just got on the Snapchat game like
• 43:59
  ago, you know. I was like, man, then you get in
• 44:00
  the Snapchat. I mean, it's the biggest platform out there right now.
• 44:05
  I don't even I don't even. I mean, this is sad. I
• 44:07
  don't even know what it is. What is it? And they were like,
• 44:12
  no, we're good, We're good on that. So it's, uh,
• 44:17
  if you think of Snapchat as so basically you can take pictures and video,
• 44:23
  but it has a shelf life. It only lasts for like twenty four
• 44:25
  hours. So it's kind of the anti Instagram, Facebook, Twitter in that
• 44:30
  everything is effervescent. So what ends up happening is you can make these things
• 44:37
  called stories, whereas say, if you take twenty four pictures throughout your day
• 44:40
  right now, each one of those twenty four pictures will kind of get put
• 44:44
  together and you can watch it like a story, and you can put little
• 44:46
  texas over it. And the interface is such that it's a very ragtag you
• 44:51
  know, it's not polished like Facebook or Instagram. It's very kind of messy.
• 44:57
  So the type of content that people put on there. It also messy,
• 45:00
  like I find like certain things you'd put on Instagram are like well composed
• 45:05
  pictures, right what you'd put on Snapchat are pretty much all the pictures that
• 45:09
  you wouldn't put on Instagram because it's just like, oh, literally, this
• 45:15
  is what I'm doing right now. Boom, snapped it out, cute little
• 45:17
  text, boom, it's out there. It's not even it's not even gonna
• 45:20
  last longer than twenty four hours. So it allows you to just generate content
• 45:24
  without the pressure of trying to make it anything because it's literally just about the
• 45:29
  moment. And I think that's why it's so powerful, and it's hard to
• 45:34
  understand until you're actually in it, because for me, I didn't get it
• 45:36
  either. I was like, I don't understand. I just don't get it,
• 45:38
  Like why would I want to put stock into something where it only last
• 45:42
  twenty four hours? So you just have this naked profile up there unless you
• 45:45
  put something up. But outside of that, it's just it's nothing, Like
• 45:49
  I don't get it. But once I got into I was like, oh,
• 45:51
  wow, this is the greatest thing ever. It's like I can literally
• 45:53
  just take pictures of anything in the moment, and it's I don't have to
• 46:00
  be held is some kind of quality check, you know what I mean,
• 46:04
  Like, oh, you're a filmmaker, what's up with that picture? You
• 46:06
  know, it's not about that at all. It's literally just about connecting in
• 46:12
  the moment. And is it anything like Vine at all? Vine is Vine
• 46:15
  is different. I put Vine more in the YouTube category where you've got you
• 46:20
  know you I don't have a Vine account. I think Vine works way better
• 46:23
  with humor, which yeah, I'm you don't see a lot of people doing
• 46:29
  like bummer vines or like maybe some people do infultainment, but I've seen everybody
• 46:35
  who's flourishing on Vine. It's all humor based. So I haven't had a
• 46:39
  particular reason to migrate to buy for that reason. Mine's more infultainment. So
• 46:45
  it's like I'll pass on the Vine. It's kind of hard to teach a
• 46:49
  class and whatever. It is like but five seconds, Oh yeah, I
• 46:53
  think that the thing I would tell any any filmmaker now, or any creative
• 47:00
  really, to be honest with you, any creative is to my platform was
• 47:07
  YouTube. But you know it doesn't have to be YouTube, it can be
• 47:08
  blogging. But I would tell anyone your biggest challenge right now isn't your movie
• 47:17
  or your painting. Your biggest challenge is marketing in branding. Like ever since
• 47:22
  I got out of film school, what I learned the most, the hard
• 47:28
  knock school I learned was marketing. That was the mammoth that I feel like
• 47:32
  I spend all of my time doing. I mean, if I could equate
• 47:36
  the amount of time I spend with my film versus YouTube, now, it's
• 47:40
  like the polar off set. I spend way more time studying the platform of
• 47:44
  YouTube. So I would tell any filmmaker, your film is great. You
• 47:51
  know, maybe you're writing your script right now. That's awesome. But what
• 47:53
  you should really be doing while you're in film school, it is starting out
• 47:57
  a YouTube account or a blog and studying more important than starting that account,
• 48:01
  of studying other successful bloggers and YouTubers and really breaking down why they are where
• 48:07
  they are, looking at their my YouTube stories and their growth, studying the
• 48:13
  numbers, learning the platform, because it takes time to learn the platform.
• 48:19
  Like I can give you five tips on how to grow your channel, but
• 48:22
  that's not going to get you anywhere unless you invest the time to really figure
• 48:27
  out how it works for you and what you're trying to do on it,
• 48:30
  You see what I'm saying. So I would tell anybody like, get online
• 48:35
  and start building your audience now, right now, so that by the time
• 48:39
  you need that audience there there. Like I know, a seventeen year old
• 48:44
  he might be eighteen right now, eighty eight actually, I think he's at
• 48:46
  eighty eight thousand. He hasn't even been to film school yet. He has
• 48:52
  when he started, he was fifteen, you know. But so and he
• 48:54
  what he's doing is he's learning filmmaking as as he learned because obviously, I
• 49:00
  mean he's a young he's a young chap, you know. So he made
• 49:04
  a feature. He hasn't even made a short yet. I think he you
• 49:06
  know, he pretty much made his you know, uh childhood you know videos,
• 49:09
  but nothing put together yet, you know. So, but what he's
• 49:14
  doing is he's just taking what he's learning and he's just repackaging it and making
• 49:17
  compelling online videos sharing what he's learning. And you're like, well, yeah,
• 49:22
  he's only eighteen, how much would he know? Okay, well,
• 49:23
  yes, he's eighteen, he doesn't know that much. But think of how
• 49:28
  many people are out there who are interested in filmmaking, who don't know what
• 49:30
  he knows. They're all going to follow him. So yeah, you can
• 49:36
  know ten times what he does, but you're not online. You're not leveraging
• 49:40
  that content right now. He is, you know. And there's a couple
• 49:45
  of things I've seen where you know, he may have tripped up on certain
• 49:46
  facts or whatever, but it's like doesn't matter, doesn't matter, Like he
• 49:51
  can let it later when he learns later, but he'll be twice as big
• 49:55
  by the time you learn. You know. It's like it's all about being
• 49:58
  out there and doing it. We'll be right back after a word from our
• 50:02
  sponsor and now back to the show. And the difference with him is,
• 50:10
  even though he doesn't know it all, but he started young enough where he
• 50:15
  was learning the platform, He was learning what makes a compelling video, how
• 50:19
  to keep it short and sweet, he was learning and seeing what other YouTubers
• 50:22
  were doing. So he just got better and better and better and better.
• 50:27
  And that's I mean, you can't get better if you're not doing it right.
• 50:30
  So that's what I would tell anybody right now. You need to start
• 50:32
  it now, not only for your craftsmanship, but also just learning these platforms
• 50:38
  so you know, so it'll be there, you know the audience will be
• 50:43
  there, and not to mention. There is so much power in knowing the
• 50:46
  mechanics of branding and marketing and how to build a community yourself, so you
• 50:52
  can build it into a part of a lifestyle. Like what I'm doing is
• 50:55
  a lifestyle. This is not just Okay, I gotta movie coming out,
• 51:00
  so I need to like build a channel. I need to do this to
• 51:01
  get some follows. No, after this movie's done, I will still be
• 51:06
  doing it while I'm writing the next movie. I will still be doing it
• 51:08
  when I'm shooting the next movie. I will still be It's a lifestyle.
• 51:13
  So and the sooner you indoctrinate yourself into that concept and realize the power of
• 51:19
  it, and you learn how to work economically in that space. Hey,
• 51:22
  when I do this, I cut thirty minutes off my production time. Hey,
• 51:24
  when I do this, I cut this much time, and I streamlined
• 51:28
  my process. And now I know how to use Twitter, and I know
• 51:30
  how to you know, kind of log my tweets and all ahead of time.
• 51:32
  So when I need to tweet something, I have a log of it.
• 51:36
  I'm not sitting there searching the web looking for tweetable stuff. You know,
• 51:38
  so when you learn how to economize your time and become effective, the
• 51:45
  sky is the limit. It's literally the limit. I mean, it's a
• 51:49
  well oiled machine because you're you're always marketing at that point. You're always marketing,
• 51:53
  you're always building your brand at that point. Right, So I'll tell
• 51:59
  them, you know, learn as soon as you can start doing it now,
• 52:01
  right now, Because there's a fifteen year old you know, he started
• 52:07
  fifteen years before he's twenty one. He's gonna be good, like way good.
• 52:14
  He'll probably be seven hundred thousand, maybe close to a million subscribers,
• 52:20
  maybe more by the time he's twenty one. He probably would not have even
• 52:24
  shot a feature yet. He doesn't really need to go to film school or
• 52:28
  anything. People won't need festivals like like yeah, So it's like there's no
• 52:34
  reason why, you know, you don't have to be the guru, you
• 52:37
  don't have to be an authority in what you are. You can be somebody
• 52:39
  learning. All you need to know is just how to create good content as
• 52:45
  you're learning it, and you can be honest with people. He's completely honest.
• 52:49
  I'm just learning as I'm going I'm sharing it, and you don't have
• 52:51
  to You don't have to put on a front like you know everything. People
• 52:53
  will see right through that. You know, they'll see right through that.
• 52:57
  But the idea is that if you're the one sharing the knowledge, even if
• 53:01
  you're just learning it, but if you're the one doing it, they'll follow
• 53:06
  you. Right. So yeah, that's definitely. I mean, you've talked
• 53:09
  about so many important topics just in that, you know, last thing.
• 53:15
  You know, it is important that you know, people choose who they want
• 53:17
  to learn from, so they're going to come back to you over and over
• 53:22
  again. It's like there might be a million different videos about what cameras to
• 53:24
  choose, but they want to learn from that person. They want to see
• 53:29
  what their perspective is because they kind of develop that relationship. And that's that's
• 53:32
  a huge thing, you know. So it's not even about being the biggest
• 53:36
  expert, you know, it's about saying, oh, well, I'm just
• 53:38
  like you and I can you know, this is what i've found. You
• 53:43
  know, I've done some investigation or whatever, and these are the things that
• 53:45
  I like and this is what I've learned, you know. Oh yeah,
• 53:49
  and then building that that second component, you know, working on that relational
• 53:53
  connection as well, because all of those numbers, they're people. It's not
• 53:59
  some you know clip boy, like, they're people, you know what I
• 54:02
  mean. So it's like, if you want somebody to invest in you as
• 54:07
  a creative and you want them to care about what you're doing, well,
• 54:10
  how about you care about them first? Yeah? You know, like when
• 54:15
  they look, oh man, how about you respond to the company? You
• 54:16
  know, It's like it seems so simple, It really seems so simple,
• 54:21
  but yet people don't get it. You know, even with Twitter. You
• 54:25
  know, you make your Twitter, you make your tweet, and then a
• 54:28
  whole bunch of people tweet you back, but then you don't tweet them back.
• 54:30
  You know. It's like they're people man, you know, like you
• 54:34
  can either be that god off in the pillars, you know, pooping rainbow,
• 54:39
  or you can be a real person that they will seek out, not
• 54:44
  only on a creative level, but on a personal level. They're like,
• 54:47
  oh man, always got a PROD phone? Can't? Oh yeah, already
• 54:52
  before you even announced, got it all the way out of your mouth.
• 54:53
  I was, he's already pulling my wallet out. Because it's like a tweet.
• 54:58
  As you've answered tweets, you've answered quite you've given me so much.
• 55:01
  Yeah, you know what I mean, Like, that's the least I could
• 55:05
  do. Yeah, not to mention, people tend to evangelize you when you
• 55:09
  make yourself available. I mean I've had people follow me just because I commented
• 55:14
  back on YouTube. I can't tell you how many times you're like, oh
• 55:15
  my god, you commented me subscribe, Like I can't you actually commented back?
• 55:20
  Like wow, I have a lot of people. They'll go through my
• 55:22
  comments and see that I actually make an effort to comment back, and then
• 55:25
  they're like, wow, this is really cool, like you not only even
• 55:28
  make good content, but like you took the time to actually comment back,
• 55:32
  like simple things like that. But again, if you look at it as
• 55:37
  a giver's game model, that makes sense, right, Like why wouldn't I
• 55:40
  comment back or at least make an honest effort as much as I could to
• 55:45
  do so I'm sure if I get bigger, you know, that'll be harder
• 55:47
  and harder. But people will see the effort though, you know. So
• 55:52
  you know what's really funny though, is like we just finished our masterclass on
• 55:59
  film sales, and the thing that I see is that the newer generation has
• 56:04
  completely screwed up everything for all these uh you know, film events and film
• 56:08
  markets and stuff like that, because they're starting to shift and follow what you
• 56:15
  guys are doing, you know, and follow what the new generation is doing,
• 56:19
  and they look now for people to have YouTube channels and Facebook followers.
• 56:24
  I mean, I was talking to one guy the other day who you know,
• 56:29
  was telling me that they won't even look at a film unless it has
• 56:31
  a Facebook following of like twenty thousand people, you know, And it's become
• 56:37
  kind of backwards engineered so that you know, all these people that were at
• 56:42
  one point in charge of doing you know, putting DVDs into stores and putting
• 56:46
  stuff on video on demand and all this other stuff are now looking at this
• 56:51
  generation of YouTubers and people who are you know, have their own audience that
• 56:57
  connects directly to them, and they're starting to follow them. You know.
• 57:02
  Yeah. The funny thing about that is I still think they're behind the curve
• 57:06
  ball because so like, for instance, they say, well, we want
• 57:09
  to look at a film unless it's got a Facebook following them with twenty thousand
• 57:13
  or whatever. Right, You you learn very quickly when you start making accounts
• 57:16
  for things, and I learned this real quick like, Okay, so I'm
• 57:21
  building my brand as a creative, but I also have Unsound, which in
• 57:25
  itself is it's a film and it's it's a brand. It's offering an experience,
• 57:29
  you know what I mean. So I got a Facebook account for that
• 57:32
  too, and then I got a Twitter account for myself, and then I
• 57:36
  got a Twitter account for Unsound too. And if I do five other movies,
• 57:38
  am I gonna have Twitter accounts for five other movies and Facebook accounts for
• 57:43
  five other movies. Like you already see where it's going. Like, in
• 57:47
  order to be effective in the social media space, you need to streamline your
• 57:52
  efforts. So if you build one moniker or one name and you put everything
• 57:58
  underneath that name. For instance, Paul makes movies, Paul Osborne, all
• 58:02
  of this social media is all under one name Facebook, Paul makes movies.
• 58:07
  So whatever movie he's doing, you can go to one place and figure out
• 58:09
  what he's up to. Right. But if you've got five other accounts,
• 58:15
  like, it's tough you're juggling all the time. And not to mention,
• 58:19
  if you do a huge marketing effort behind one account, push a lot of
• 58:22
  people that out account, say you get you know, five thousand likes on
• 58:24
  that movie, right, But then when you do another movie, it's like
• 58:28
  you got to go to that account and like entice people to go to this
• 58:32
  other movie's account. Now you see what I'm saying. It's just it's so
• 58:35
  messy. There's if you just like, for me, how I handle all
• 58:38
  my stuff? It's all under D for Darius the Moniker Defer Darius, you
• 58:43
  know, just cut all the other stuff out. My Facebook is Darius J.
• 58:45
  Britt. But I can't really change that. If I could have changed
• 58:47
  that to D for Darius a while ago, I would have. But everything
• 58:52
  else is all D for Darius. So it's like, if you want to
• 58:53
  know what movie I'm up to or what I'm doing on YouTube, you can
• 58:58
  go to one place on Facebook and find that out. I don't have to
• 59:00
  be pulling people from account to account to account to do that. So if
• 59:06
  a distributor is coming and looking at me and they're saying, well, how
• 59:07
  many people follow on your movie account, well there is no movie account for
• 59:10
  that, Like this is all under a brand right now, you know,
• 59:15
  Like right now Unsound on Facebook has I could tell you the lights on it,
• 59:20
  and I stopped pushing Unsound on Facebook a long time ago, once I
• 59:24
  started realizing just how how wasteful that kind of is. It has five hundred
• 59:30
  and seventy likes on Facebook right now for the movie Unsound, but d for
• 59:36
  Darius or Darius J. Britt, which I do a lot of Unsound updates
• 59:39
  on, you know, all my vlogs that I release on Darius Britt.
• 59:45
  I have five thousand, three hundred and forty three Facebook likes right but that's
• 59:49
  under me as a brand, So that's not gonna change. You see what
• 59:53
  I'm saying, Like, whatever movie I'm working on, I'm still doing.
• 59:57
  That movie will be right back after a word from our sponsor and now back
• 1:00:06
  to the show. So I don't have to play that game. Well,
• 1:00:10
  I think, and I think they'll eventually catch onto that too. The problem
• 1:00:14
  is a lot of filmmakers, there's a lot of people. They make the
• 1:00:17
  film and then they get burned so bad they don't get another shot. So
• 1:00:20
  it's not like you have a lot of people who get to learn that lesson.
• 1:00:24
  I guess you could say it sounds very similar to uh, you know,
• 1:00:29
  it's it's kind of what John Carpenter did. Because of John Carpenter's films
• 1:00:34
  are called John Carpenter's, you know, whether it's the Thing or Halloween or
• 1:00:37
  whatever. And then m Tyler Perry does that too, you know, people
• 1:00:42
  who always put their name with the film, you know, so you you
• 1:00:45
  just consider it kind of like it's another one of this guy's movies. So
• 1:00:50
  that I think that's kind of similar in a way to what you're saying,
• 1:00:52
  though, Oh it's it's I would say, uh, And some people may
• 1:00:58
  not agree with me, and that's okay. But to me, what is
• 1:01:04
  way more important than any work that you do is your name, way more
• 1:01:07
  important. Because your movie may be great tomorrow, and then the movie after
• 1:01:14
  that may suck, and then the movie after that may be okay, then
• 1:01:16
  the movie after that may be great. But if you have a strong name,
• 1:01:21
  if you have a branded name where people know you and they seek your
• 1:01:25
  workout, your shelf life is going to be twice as long as somebody who's
• 1:01:30
  making masterpieces and then they fall off the map but nobody really knows them.
• 1:01:37
  You'll go twice as far because at least people know you. You's know what
• 1:01:40
  I'm saying. So John, I would totally do that, you know,
• 1:01:44
  I put the name first, even if it's a social awareness film. But
• 1:01:47
  I'm an artist and I have to survive. I mean, at the end
• 1:01:52
  of the day, you got to take care of you. If you're not,
• 1:01:53
  if you can't pay your bills and you can't do any look good is
• 1:01:55
  it to make all these movies? If you can't sustainably do it. You
• 1:02:00
  know, you still have to turn to a crowd and crowdfund at some point,
• 1:02:02
  you know, maybe you know, I mean that's not I'm sure eventually
• 1:02:07
  you can go beyond that, and most people can grow beyond that, but
• 1:02:09
  for a lot of us, that's the phase you have to go through.
• 1:02:13
  You know, capitalize your projects by turning to your crowd. But there's got
• 1:02:15
  to be a crowd there, so you know, well, can we talk
• 1:02:22
  about that for just a little bit. Can you give your perspective on the
• 1:02:27
  crowdfunding game as it is same thing. It's pretty much the same thing.
• 1:02:34
  You have to have a crowd to turn to, and you need to be
• 1:02:37
  if you live the marketing lifestyle and you learn to make cultivating an audience a
• 1:02:45
  part of your creative process. So whatever project you're doing, you're blogging about
• 1:02:50
  it, you're giving how to tips or you're creating. You know, maybe
• 1:02:53
  you don't want to do any how to stuff or any you know, here's
• 1:02:57
  a life of a person stuff. Maybe you just want to make entertain but
• 1:03:00
  you also need to make that affective. Whatever you choose to do, it
• 1:03:04
  needs to be effective. But if you spend the time to make that a
• 1:03:08
  part of your lifestyle so that you were always building an audience, then when
• 1:03:15
  you do need to crowd fund, they're already there. So basically all of
• 1:03:20
  these things they all orbited around the same planet. The filmmaker needs to change
• 1:03:24
  their approach of what they do. They need to embrace being a creative entrepreneur,
• 1:03:30
  not just a creative. When you live the marketing lifestyle, that's entrepreneurial
• 1:03:35
  right there. That's not put it this way. Did we learn that in
• 1:03:37
  film school? No, they had to use social media accounts. I'll be
• 1:03:44
  lucky if my teacher said Twitter once. So when you embrace the fact that
• 1:03:50
  you know, marketing is a large part of what you're doing, and if
• 1:03:52
  you make it a part of your lifestyle, guess what, it's a lot
• 1:03:54
  cheaper if you make it a part of your lifestyle. Because it's about that
• 1:03:59
  jaw, it's about nipping away at it piece by piece by piece by piece
• 1:04:02
  by piece, but at an affordable way, because I mean, it doesn't
• 1:04:06
  cost me much to generate my content online. And that's what got me all
• 1:04:11
  my followers is that, I mean, most of the videos are all free.
• 1:04:14
  It's just me doing my thing in a room, talking on with a
• 1:04:17
  camera that was free, and that's gotten me to pretty much sixty thousand subscribers.
• 1:04:23
  But my film that I had dumped a ton of money into, man,
• 1:04:27
  it's like moving a rock uphill had it not had it not been for
• 1:04:30
  YouTube. Honestly, I don't know. I wouldn't be in a very different
• 1:04:34
  situation right now had it not been for YouTube and just really taking the bull
• 1:04:39
  by the horns on just building a connection with people and putting that first again,
• 1:04:44
  putting your name first, not your creative work. So if I was
• 1:04:48
  all about my creative work first, guess what I wouldn't be doing. I
• 1:04:51
  wouldn't be making how two tips on how to do lighting or how to do
• 1:04:56
  sound, or how to talk to actors. I wouldn't be doing that because
• 1:05:00
  it's all about the work that's not my movie. You see what I'm saying.
• 1:05:03
  It would all be wrapped around my movie. But since I'm putting my
• 1:05:06
  name first, that opens me up to do a million other things. I
• 1:05:11
  can talk about stuff that has nothing to do with my movie because it's about
• 1:05:15
  my name, you know what I'm saying, Like filmmaking, screenwriting, social
• 1:05:19
  media. I can get into all kinds of other avenues because it's about building
• 1:05:24
  the name. And once you build your name up, anything you're associated with
• 1:05:29
  gets brought up too. It's like it's like a tent pole, you know,
• 1:05:32
  like you need the tent before you can hold anything else up. You
• 1:05:35
  got to be up there too. So so yeah, if you if you
• 1:05:40
  live that lifestyle and you take it bit by bit, you make it a
• 1:05:43
  part of your process, then when you need to self distribute, or when
• 1:05:47
  you need to do a crowdfunding campaign, or when you need to do a
• 1:05:49
  push for you know, building up certain numbers of certain stats on different accounts,
• 1:05:56
  it's all there for you because you've been working at it the whole time.
• 1:06:00
  So whereas you know, if you don't do that, then you're stuck
• 1:06:04
  doing the old way, which has throw a lot of money at it.
• 1:06:08
  Now, all let's do run a whole bunch of Facebook ads or YouTube badge,
• 1:06:11
  which are horribly ineffective. I would never probably spend money. You're pretty
• 1:06:15
  much you're hurting yourself by doing YouTube baggs. Actually same same with Facebook ads
• 1:06:20
  to a certain extent, depending on what you're trying to market, you could
• 1:06:25
  definitely hurt your numbers. Like I've probably never run Facebook ads to increase likes
• 1:06:30
  on any of my film stuff because you end up a lot of basically glorified
• 1:06:34
  click farm situations would shirt the algorithm in in the metrics, so they're like,
• 1:06:41
  okay, well, the more likes you get because it's pretty much you
• 1:06:43
  paid for them, but then you're not getting engagement on any of your posts.
• 1:06:46
  So Facebook's like, oh, well, this guy's content is not doing
• 1:06:49
  so hot, so we're not going to put them out there. So that
• 1:06:53
  ends up hurting you. So so yeah, in the online space, like
• 1:06:59
  it's really about making that micro content work and getting yourself out there, and
• 1:07:02
  it's way cheaper ands filmmakers. Guess what, we don't have a lot of
• 1:07:06
  We don't have a lot of money, right, or at least we don't
• 1:07:11
  have We don't have that, so so it'd be who's you to learn how
• 1:07:15
  to do it? For free and for cheap, which is basically building it
• 1:07:18
  slowly but surely but consistently is the big thing. And also whatever medium you
• 1:07:25
  choose, you need to pick, you need to do it sustainably. This
• 1:07:28
  is another big mistake I see a lot of people make. So Joe Blow
• 1:07:33
  wants to start a YouTube channel, and he wants it to be based on
• 1:07:36
  short films. So he wants to crank out a short film every month or
• 1:07:41
  every couple of weeks or every week with skits or whatever. You know how
• 1:07:47
  tough it is to work other people's schedules out and get everybody in the same
• 1:07:50
  room or in the same location to shoot anything. Not to mention how long
• 1:07:55
  it takes to do after effects stuff. If you're gonna do that, it's
• 1:07:59
  such your resource intensive thing to make short films that it's a it's not a
• 1:08:04
  good idea to base your channel on that because the second schedules fall through and
• 1:08:12
  now, oh man, we're well, this short was supposed to be done,
• 1:08:14
  but like we're running three weeks behind. Well, guess what, you're
• 1:08:15
  not consistent now, So when people check in on you, stuff's not coming
• 1:08:18
  out, they're not following you. You know, you can't keep that constant
• 1:08:23
  contact going. Not to mention, that's that's resource intensive. So you're always
• 1:08:27
  spending money to do it, and you're always orchestrating schedules to do it.
• 1:08:30
  That's exhausting. That's not sustainable, you know, whereas if you need to
• 1:08:36
  build a model that is sustainable for you. So for me, there's a
• 1:08:40
  reason why when you go on my YouTube channel, most of the videos are
• 1:08:43
  me in a room talking. Yeah. I could go out and shoot short
• 1:08:45
  films if I wanted to, but guess what, I got jobs, I
• 1:08:47
  gotta make money. I got other gigs, you know what I mean.
• 1:08:50
  It's like, that's not sustainable for me. Now. Maybe later on down
• 1:08:55
  the road, once I'm able to parlay everything into a solid effort and I'm
• 1:08:58
  making enough money to do just this, than sure, yeah, maybe I'll
• 1:09:01
  crank out more short films more often in between features or whatever. But right
• 1:09:04
  now, real life, real life taste precedents. So yeah, So I
• 1:09:12
  built the model for my channel around reducing as much dependence on other factors as
• 1:09:19
  possible. So I don't need to go get actors. I just need me.
• 1:09:23
  I just write my script out, you know, me in a room
• 1:09:27
  in a camera. That's it. So if I'm running behind, well,
• 1:09:30
  I only got three factors, right, I mean, unless my brain is
• 1:09:32
  cooked and I can't write a script, I mean, more than likely I
• 1:09:35
  can write a script. But there are less points of failure for me.
• 1:09:39
  So I can stay consistent because it's sustainable. And I would say that for
• 1:09:44
  anybody who's trying to get a content strategy for leverageing Michael, you need to
• 1:09:47
  think about sustainability. Too many people try to do too much and then they
• 1:09:51
  can't keep the effort out. We'll be right back after a word from our
• 1:09:57
  sponsor and now back to the show. So yeah, and I still am
• 1:10:08
  looking for ways to make it even more streamline all the time, like what
• 1:10:11
  else, what other format can I use to make it even simpler for me?
• 1:10:14
  Because you know, I get little hiccup moments where I have a lot
• 1:10:17
  of other gigs going on and it's hard to find time to get in the
• 1:10:20
  YouTube space and do it, you know. And I've been fortunate enough where
• 1:10:24
  I can stay on top of it for the most part. I mean,
• 1:10:26
  I stay on top of it pretty pretty thoroughly. But but it had I
• 1:10:30
  not been thinking of that ahead of time, I could have really you know,
• 1:10:35
  mess myself up, because the thing you don't want to do is place
• 1:10:39
  an expectation in your audience's mind of a certain level of video and then go
• 1:10:44
  below that. See what I'm saying, Like if I prime you for Hollywood
• 1:10:49
  after effects videos or whatever, and then I can't do that, So then
• 1:10:54
  I start releasing these talk to talk to the camera videos, They're gonna be
• 1:10:58
  like wtf, man, Like get back to you know, the shorts,
• 1:11:01
  Like this is not why I subscribe. You know, I was looking for
• 1:11:03
  this. You know. So that's that's what you don't want to do.
• 1:11:08
  You'd right, It's way better than be in a situation where you prime them
• 1:11:12
  to expect something a little more streamline and sustainable for you, and then when
• 1:11:16
  you do do the bigger projects then it's a bonus. Then oh cool,
• 1:11:20
  we're getting to see this. And then you said it's a bonus, it
• 1:11:24
  only adds to you then, so yeah, that that that's a huge one.
• 1:11:30
  I was talking to so on the other day. They wanted to do
• 1:11:32
  a YouTube channel, and uh, you know, they started off trying to
• 1:11:36
  do this big production to raise all this money and shoot fourteen episodes. It
• 1:11:40
  was like three hundred thousand dollars or whatever, and I was like, all
• 1:11:43
  right, look, first off, like consistency should be number one. You
• 1:11:48
  need to find a way to do what you're doing consistently too. You need
• 1:11:53
  to cut all these other resources out in streamlining, because you're gonna be beholding
• 1:11:58
  to all of these other facts. And if you can't keep that up,
• 1:12:00
  guess what else goes down the toilet? You're online presence. You don't want
• 1:12:04
  to set people up to expect something that you can't sustainably carry through on.
• 1:12:08
  So now that's gone. But if you set it up where all you all
• 1:12:11
  you need is you and a camera, you're good. So even if other
• 1:12:15
  things fall through, well you can still just hop in front of that camera
• 1:12:19
  and crank out content, you know. I mean, I can do this
• 1:12:23
  till the cows come home. That's like like there is no shelf life for
• 1:12:28
  that for me. I can't age out of this. I can pivot,
• 1:12:31
  you know, but I'm not going to age out of this. So twenty
• 1:12:35
  years from now, I can still do this. I don't need to go
• 1:12:38
  to a producer or I don't need to find money to do what I'm doing.
• 1:12:43
  And that's the beauty of it, you know, Like I don't know,
• 1:12:46
  I'm just really excited about it, I think, to be honest,
• 1:12:48
  like that, that's the writing on the wall. And it's not even new,
• 1:12:54
  it's here. It's here right now. YouTubers are doing it right now.
• 1:13:00
  It's just you're not hearing about all the successes they're having because they don't
• 1:13:03
  need to rely on print media to get the word out. They're selling movies
• 1:13:09
  right now. They're making money right now, making feature films and selling them
• 1:13:13
  directly to their audience and making money and placing on iTunes right now. But
• 1:13:18
  we're not hearing about that because who are the people that you would say,
• 1:13:24
  who are the people like when you say that, who who do you have
• 1:13:27
  in mind with? Like things that Hannah Heart, Grace Helbig, They did
• 1:13:31
  a collaboration shot a movie, released it their YouTuber's monetizing short films, believe
• 1:13:36
  it or not, video packages being monetized. There's a couple of movies.
• 1:13:43
  I can't remember the other there's like two other movies that were a feature film
• 1:13:46
  that they made and just sold directly to their audience and they're doing fine.
• 1:13:50
  And then and here's the other kicker about it, So the problem with the
• 1:13:58
  old model of marketing is it costs money, right, and you know with
• 1:14:01
  outside of the money, if you don't have the money, you're done.
• 1:14:04
  But when you have a blog or a YouTube channel, you can point your
• 1:14:10
  audience in the direction of the products you make in perpetuity. When I release
• 1:14:15
  in sound and I'm selling you know, DVD's Blue Raiser or whatever, I
• 1:14:19
  can continually point people to that movie. Five years from now, as I
• 1:14:26
  get bigger, I can still point. I can still mention it because I
• 1:14:29
  have the eyeballs. I don't have to go through anybody else to get the
• 1:14:33
  eyeballs, you see what I'm saying. So and more people are still gonna
• 1:14:39
  find me. So even if I don't make that house nutback or whatever right
• 1:14:44
  off the top, eventually you're gonna make it back because you're still generating eyeballs.
• 1:14:50
  So you know, ten years from now, I can still be selling
• 1:14:54
  that movie, you know what I'm saying. Like, whereas the old model
• 1:14:57
  it's like, you know, once you're out of money, it's like,
• 1:14:59
  oh man, okay, well and it's time to just move on to something
• 1:15:00
  else. And once you don't, and on top of that, you have
• 1:15:03
  no other way of reaching your fans or audience for that matter. So it's
• 1:15:08
  like you can move on to another project and that's it. You have no
• 1:15:11
  way of still selling your old project because you have no micro content strategy to
• 1:15:15
  reach people. It's just your projects and that's it. In your new project,
• 1:15:20
  you can't sell your old project with your new project. Hopefully, you
• 1:15:24
  know, maybe you make a big splash and people google you and then they're
• 1:15:27
  like, oh well, let me check this old movie out. Let me
• 1:15:29
  try that. But most of the time, I mean that's not I mean,
• 1:15:31
  that's not something you want to rely on. You want to have a
• 1:15:33
  way to push that you know you'll get ten times further if you can literally
• 1:15:38
  say, hey, by the way, you can check this out, here's
• 1:15:40
  a teacher. You know, you want to be able to tell them directly.
• 1:15:43
  And if you have a micro content strategy where you can build your audience
• 1:15:46
  and your community, that power comes with it. You can point people anywhere
• 1:15:54
  you know, or if you're doing consulting, same thing, you can point
• 1:15:56
  it right out. Hey, by the way, if you're looking for certain
• 1:15:59
  like you can sell, you can sell when you have a micro content strategy,
• 1:16:04
  When you have a branding strategy. So when you have followers, so
• 1:16:12
  so yeah, that's another that's another huge thing. So you know, when
• 1:16:16
  you build a body of work. I feel like if you have a branding
• 1:16:23
  strategy and a marketing strategy and you have a micro content clothing line to hang
• 1:16:31
  all of your projects on, if you have a backbone of you know,
• 1:16:39
  basically a brand with a strong, solid content strategy, that's sustainable. Man,
• 1:16:45
  It's like just thinking about the possibilities to just boggle in my mind.
• 1:16:48
  It's like like, as a creative, that's so much power. That is
• 1:16:55
  a lot of power, man, you know what I mean. It's like
• 1:16:59
  you can pretty much become your own little studio. People are doing product placement
• 1:17:03
  deals, getting money for short films from companies. That's a studio right there.
• 1:17:11
  You know. I go go down the street to a mom and pop.
• 1:17:14
  Cha, Hey, if you give me this much money, I'll feature
• 1:17:15
  your chips and the short film will take care of you. You know what
• 1:17:18
  I mean. I can I can guarantee you this many views. You can
• 1:17:21
  look at my numbers. I'm not selling you on a wish. I got
• 1:17:25
  stats. Baby. You know that's a studio right there. Yeah, people,
• 1:17:31
  I mean people like numbers, you know, they love numbers. They
• 1:17:34
  find you when you have numbers. Believe they reach out because they're like,
• 1:17:39
  oh man, some I'm smelling good over here. Man, let's talk.
• 1:17:42
  You know, you don't got a coaching through nothing. You know, it's
• 1:17:46
  like we can see he's got it going on or she or she whoever,
• 1:17:49
  Like we can see it. We don't have to guess nothing. You know,
• 1:17:53
  they don't mind throwing a little money your way when it seems like you
• 1:17:56
  know how to generate it without the money on top of that. So um
• 1:18:00
  so yeah, like that that's not a far off prospect either, you know,
• 1:18:05
  becoming your own little studio and working product placement, especially with a strong
• 1:18:10
  brand. You know, I mean every everything is easier with a brand,
• 1:18:15
  basically everything. In my opinion, everything is easier with a brand. So
• 1:18:20
  artists need to really be focusing on and I know some of them me they
• 1:18:25
  hate the term brand. You know, Oh my god, this is mark.
• 1:18:28
  Okay, build your name. You want to sell a painting, make
• 1:18:31
  sure people know your name if you want to look at it that way.
• 1:18:34
  You know, but everything is easier when you have a name. Yeah,
• 1:18:39
  I think when you tell people about branding. Their first thought is like kind
• 1:18:43
  of used car salesman, and then you say, you know, Salvador Dolli
• 1:18:46
  is a brand, Ernest Hemingway is a brand. It's like you you think
• 1:18:51
  about them in that or Steven Spielberg or whoever you know, those are all
• 1:18:57
  you know brands. Yeah, they're personal brands creating other brands exactly. And
• 1:19:01
  there's a I think people get marketing and branding can confused too, So there's
• 1:19:06
  there's sort of a difference between marketing and branding. So branding is an umbrella.
• 1:19:13
  It includes a lot of stuff. Branding you can do when you don't
• 1:19:16
  have something to sell, whereas marketing you have to have something to sell.
• 1:19:20
  I think the easiest way to look at it is when you market something,
• 1:19:26
  you're selling something, you know, whether it's discounts or whatever, whatever you
• 1:19:29
  need to do to get somebody to buy something. That's marketing. But branding
• 1:19:32
  happens before you have something to sell. It happens while you're selling it,
• 1:19:36
  and branding is what's left over after you sold it. So if that used
• 1:19:41
  car salesman, you go and you buy a car, but the car is
• 1:19:44
  a Lemon, well guess what his brand is going down the toilet because I'm
• 1:19:47
  not going to buy a car from him again. His marketing worked, but
• 1:19:50
  his branding did not. You see what I'm saying, So what's left over
• 1:19:55
  after I bought it is a bad taste in my mouth and a lemon car.
• 1:19:58
  I don't want nothing to do with that guy. Now we'll be right
• 1:20:01
  back after a word from our sponsor, and now back to the show.
• 1:20:10
  But if he but then he could salvage his brand though after he sold me
• 1:20:15
  that car. So if I were to content and say, yeah, the
• 1:20:15
  car's a limit, he screwed me over. But then he's like, okay,
• 1:20:18
  well you know what I'll do. I'll do this, I'll do that.
• 1:20:20
  I'm sorry to hear that. We'll take care of you. We'll guess
• 1:20:23
  what now' his brand's a lot stronger. He made a mistake, but he
• 1:20:26
  rectified it. So now now my rapport with him is good. He didn't
• 1:20:30
  make any additional money off me, now right. He didn't sell me anything
• 1:20:32
  else beyond that, So that move he made after he already made his cash,
• 1:20:38
  that was a branding move. The way his relationship with me is that's
• 1:20:42
  branding. So now I can go and evangelize his name because it's like,
• 1:20:45
  man, I bought a car. I thought I was done. I told
• 1:20:46
  him and he fixed it. He took care of me. Now his brand
• 1:20:50
  is strong, you know. So with artists, I think they really need
• 1:20:55
  to embrace the fact that when you talk branding, that is a lifestyle that
• 1:21:00
  should always be going on because you can be building your brand even when you
• 1:21:03
  have nothing to sell. Like what I'm doing on YouTube, I'm building my
• 1:21:10
  brand, but I'm not selling anything. Well, if anything, I'm just
• 1:21:12
  selling myself, I guess and sharing information. But I'm not like pushing anything
• 1:21:17
  to an audience for a transaction. But that is branding, you see what
• 1:21:21
  I'm saying. That's not you're marketing yourself. Yeah, but that's branding.
• 1:21:27
  I'm giving them an experience. I'm giving them value and it's not related to
• 1:21:32
  selling anything. But when I have the movie to push or whatever, and
• 1:21:36
  now we're getting into like pretty much straightforward marketing. So I think when people
• 1:21:42
  kind of realize there's a distinction there, and branding can be very personal.
• 1:21:47
  When you build your personal brand, that can be a very personal thing.
• 1:21:51
  It doesn't have to be like, oh I always have to like push my
• 1:21:55
  products on them. No, that's marketing. If you look at branding,
• 1:21:58
  it can be just sharing a tweet that has nothing to do with anything,
• 1:22:00
  you know, just hey, maybe this will pick your day. That's branding.
• 1:22:03
  When I scrolled through my Twitter feed and Paul makes Movies talks about when
• 1:22:09
  he went to Italy with his son and they did this, that's branding.
• 1:22:12
  Even though he's being relational and he's just talking about what he's doing in life.
• 1:22:15
  But that's branding. Because now I get to know Paul a little bit
• 1:22:16
  better. Right, he's not selling me anything, but that is a branding
• 1:22:21
  move there. He's giving me a certain expectation of a certain experience from him.
• 1:22:27
  I can expect movies, but I can also expect him to just be
• 1:22:29
  a human being, you know, a guy who's like I could get a
• 1:22:32
  beer with, right, so um, So yeah, I think I hope
• 1:22:38
  that made sense, that that wasn't confusing the way I explained it. I
• 1:22:42
  hope that, well, it's I mean, it's a confusing topic, you
• 1:22:45
  know, So I think you're you're, you're you're only helping, you know,
• 1:22:48
  make it more clear. But I mean, when you think about the
• 1:22:50
  brands that you know, you know, I Typically we think of I think
• 1:22:55
  logos and you know, like Nike and Starbucks and all these other brands that
• 1:23:00
  are all around us. But if you if you dig a little bit deeper,
• 1:23:02
  it's like, what do those things? You know? The Nike swoosh
• 1:23:05
  doesn't mean anything, but we associate it with a lot of things, you
• 1:23:09
  know, And that's the branding is like the connection we have with certain things,
• 1:23:14
  and it can be anything, you know. Yeah, And it's almost
• 1:23:15
  like a theme in a movie too, if you think about it, Like
• 1:23:19
  a movie can be you know, the plotting and everything that you see,
• 1:23:24
  but the theme is more about what the movie represents, and that's more universal.
• 1:23:28
  And when you talk about a brand, that's a lot to do with
• 1:23:31
  a brand is what is the universal thing that you represent? In me,
• 1:23:35
  as a YouTuber and as a filmmaker, I represent empowerment. I want to
• 1:23:40
  empower other filmmakers and I also want to show them that you can do it
• 1:23:43
  too. And also as an African American filmmaker, I want to show other
• 1:23:46
  minorities, Hey, you can do it too. I want to be an
• 1:23:48
  inspiration for you too. Now, even though I'm not saying that directly,
• 1:23:53
  in every one of my videos. But the value that I'm giving makes that
• 1:23:57
  obvious. So you can say that's a thing for my content strategy, even
• 1:24:02
  though when you look at my content, I'm not saying any of that,
• 1:24:06
  but the theme is there. I represent. You can do it too,
• 1:24:11
  We can all do it to fresh out of film school, dropped a lot
• 1:24:14
  of money on a movie here, I am, you know, like,
• 1:24:17
  let's do this together, you know. But um so, But it's clear
• 1:24:24
  what I represent right now, you know. And that's the same for any
• 1:24:29
  other creative out there is. I think that that's also getting in terms of
• 1:24:34
  like basically, what value are you offering people? It's kind of that question,
• 1:24:42
  you know, when you're talking about your brand it's or your branding strategy.
• 1:24:45
  It's not just reaching out to people, but it's like reaching out for
• 1:24:51
  what what are you giving them? Why should they follow you? What experience
• 1:24:55
  are you giving them? You know, are you just gonna retweet a million
• 1:24:59
  other people's tweet to not generate any content of your own or are you going
• 1:25:01
  to generate your own content that they can't find anywhere else? And what is
• 1:25:08
  that content? What's the message behind it? There are some people out there
• 1:25:11
  that they have a you know, they've got a brand, but it's a
• 1:25:14
  very negative brand. Like there's some people all they do is rant on YouTube,
• 1:25:15
  but guess what they bring back a lot of negativity too. So it's
• 1:25:18
  like branding is not just building your name, but for what? For who?
• 1:25:23
  What's the value? What's the experience you're giving, what's your reputation?
• 1:25:27
  You know, apples, Apple's kind of associated with quality, whereas you know,
• 1:25:34
  like a used car salesman who's a schmuck, while his reputation is going
• 1:25:38
  to be he'll sell you anything to get your money. He'll sell you know,
• 1:25:42
  snow to an Eskimo. He's just after the money. You know.
• 1:25:45
  Well, okay, well that's his value. That's what he's offering me.
• 1:25:47
  I don't want anything to do with that though. But you know what's funny
• 1:25:51
  to me is like all these different um YouTube channels who that have sprung up
• 1:25:57
  that are people like, for example, it'll be a guy just watching a
• 1:26:02
  trailer and that's the whole thing and experiencing that and how we've kind of changed
• 1:26:09
  as a culture that that's like people are connecting to things by watching other people
• 1:26:14
  experience something like that. You know, and now you've seen all these other
• 1:26:16
  people start having videos of people just watching like the Star Wars you know,
• 1:26:21
  trailer and stuff like that. So there's a huge value and there now you
• 1:26:26
  get kind of into the X factor of YouTube, which I think is pretty
• 1:26:29
  much the X factor of anything, and that's if somebody has a watchability to
• 1:26:32
  them. When you talk about YouTube, you're talking about a platform that was
• 1:26:38
  literally founded on a guy who could turn his camera on when he goes to
• 1:26:42
  the grocery store and just talks about whatever he's doing. It was founded on
• 1:26:46
  amateur vlogging pretty much, Hey, here's a platform. Or you could just
• 1:26:50
  make a video and upload it about what. I don't know, I mean,
• 1:26:54
  but you can do it. So you have a whole sea of people
• 1:26:56
  who are just like, Okay, cool, I'll just turn this camera on
• 1:26:59
  and just do whatever I feel like doing. So the relational connection that people
• 1:27:04
  make is very much. Hey, I like you, You're cool to watch.
• 1:27:12
  I just like listening to you talk about stuff. You know, it's
• 1:27:15
  just that X factor. Are you watchable? Are you somebody who I could
• 1:27:18
  just spend five minutes watch talk about nothing you know or what bothers you or
• 1:27:24
  what annoyed you today? On your way to the store. You know.
• 1:27:27
  Like so when you see examples like that with people who watch trailers and all
• 1:27:31
  that, for every one person you see who can pull that off, there
• 1:27:33
  are thousands of people who could not pull that at all. So I always
• 1:27:39
  feel bad when there's like the guy who's got you know, who's doing the
• 1:27:43
  same thing as the guy in the video above them, and the one guy
• 1:27:45
  has like a million views and the other guy's got like three views, and
• 1:27:47
  I'm like, oh, you know, your video, there's some other writing
• 1:27:51
  on the wall that you you don't see too, And that's the guy who
• 1:27:56
  pulls all those views, who seems to be doing very easy things. But
• 1:28:00
  most of the time, these YouTubers who are raking in the big numbers and
• 1:28:05
  all that, they are combing and studying the platform. So if you look
• 1:28:13
  at their channa and you try to do what they're doing, you see the
• 1:28:15
  writing on the wall like, oh wow, like what they're doing is very
• 1:28:17
  smart, Like they're not They're not just cranking videos. There's a strategy there.
• 1:28:23
  You know. Some of these YouTubers, especially the fashion you know,
• 1:28:26
  industry ones in the movie, like they have a timetable, you know,
• 1:28:30
  they have to be the first person to put out a review or whatever on
• 1:28:33
  it before anybody else does. They gotta be able to crank it out,
• 1:28:36
  and it's got to be quality, and like there's a lot of stress there.
• 1:28:41
  Whereas people who don't understand how the platform works, they might just be
• 1:28:44
  like, oh, this person just made a makeup review on this thing,
• 1:28:46
  so I could just do that, and they see the upload date and it's
• 1:28:48
  just some arbitrary upload date. They don't know that, well, that makeup
• 1:28:53
  thing was released two days ago or a day ago, and then their video
• 1:28:58
  came out the next day. That's what you don't see. So they raked
• 1:29:02
  in on all of those views because they were the first person to be talking
• 1:29:05
  about it the second people were looking for it. So there's things like that
• 1:29:10
  that, you know, if you're not looking for how the platform works and
• 1:29:15
  studying it, you're not going to see that. So to you, it's
• 1:29:17
  like, oh, they could just talk about nothing and then look at all
• 1:29:19
  the views they got. Yeah, you're not seeing the strategy. You're not
• 1:29:23
  seeing the knowledge of you know, understanding how to make these things work for
• 1:29:28
  you. So you see what I'm saying, Like, there's more to it
• 1:29:31
  than just cranking out. You know. It's the same thing for the filmmaking
• 1:29:35
  tips thing, like I learned the hard way. You need to build a
• 1:29:39
  foundation of entry level videos for people to access you. Then you can branch
• 1:29:44
  off into the more complex, complicated topics once you have the entry level foundation
• 1:29:49
  made and laid first, so then they can find you, and then you
• 1:29:55
  can lead them off into other places they did not even know they want to
• 1:30:00
  go. But you can't do that if they can't find you. We'll be
• 1:30:04
  right back after a word from our sponsor, and now back to the show.
• 1:30:14
  So um, you know, there's a lot of things like that that
• 1:30:17
  need to be understood. And again harkens back to that conversation with the filmmaker.
• 1:30:21
  It's like, Hey, if you're in film school, what you need
• 1:30:25
  to be spending a lot of your time on is learning how to be an
• 1:30:29
  effective blogger, you know, or learn how to be an effective YouTuber.
• 1:30:32
  You need to spend a lot of time on that because it's very empowering and
• 1:30:40
  in terms of you know, marketing and branding, like there's nothing more powerful
• 1:30:43
  than that right now, to be honest with you, this short of just
• 1:30:45
  having billions of dollars to just plaster your name everywhere. Maybe maybe that's more
• 1:30:49
  powerful. I don't know, but the way, yeah, in terms of
• 1:30:56
  not having any money, which is everybody's problem, you know what I mean?
• 1:30:59
  Like that that needs to be first and foremost because then all your little
• 1:31:05
  short films you make, all the little projects you do, you can be
• 1:31:08
  building your audience the whole time. Going to sleep, I go to sleep,
• 1:31:15
  I wake up. I got fifty more subscribers. Like once you get
• 1:31:17
  that machine working for you, it's like interest on money, you know,
• 1:31:21
  Like once you get that money put away and you've built it up and you
• 1:31:26
  get that snowball rolling, after a while, it rolls itself almost, it
• 1:31:30
  just gets bigger and bigger and bigger. And it's the same thing for having
• 1:31:32
  an online presence. You gotta build up a content catalog. You gotta build
• 1:31:38
  up your name, You got to build up your strategy. You gotta build
• 1:31:41
  up your own workflow so that you can be efficient at it and make it
• 1:31:44
  easier on yourself. But that's something you gotta work at, you know,
• 1:31:46
  and get better at. There is no press up button. I just gotta
• 1:31:49
  make this one video and it goes viral. Don't even get me started on
• 1:31:53
  viral. I kind of want to get you. I want to get you
• 1:31:57
  a little started on viral, so just give me. Viral is not a
• 1:32:01
  strategy you cannot build. You can't build a model around viral. You know.
• 1:32:06
  Now, you can build a model around solid content and understanding how to
• 1:32:10
  get yourself found and then should a semi viral video come out of that.
• 1:32:14
  Great, But you can't plan on viral. And there's way too many people
• 1:32:19
  who just think they have a viral web series concept or a viral video idea
• 1:32:24
  or whatever, and she's gonna get them out there. That's erroneous. Is
• 1:32:27
  all hell? And another big thing about it is, yeah, if you
• 1:32:30
  did have a viral video, awesome, But guess what. People don't subscribe
• 1:32:34
  to viral. They subscribe to a catalog of content. So if you had
• 1:32:41
  one viral video and two other videos that got like twelve years, they're not
• 1:32:45
  gonna subscribe to you. They're gonna be like, this one thing you made
• 1:32:47
  was great, but all the other stuff and I'll passed. There's nothing else
• 1:32:50
  to watch. There's no reason to subscribe. I already saw what you had
• 1:32:55
  to offer. That's it. But if you have a semi vio viral video
• 1:33:00
  or a viral video if you just get you know, out of this world
• 1:33:03
  lucky later on, but you have a catalog of content to hook them where
• 1:33:09
  they saw that one video and then they go down the rabbit hole and you
• 1:33:11
  got like forty other videos and they just get lost watching you for like two
• 1:33:15
  days. That that's a strategy. So yeah, viral viral is not a
• 1:33:23
  strategy. And I see way too many people trying to bank bank on viral.
• 1:33:27
  Like, you can't make a living on viral, even if you're relying
• 1:33:30
  on absence or something like, you can't. You can't make a living off
• 1:33:33
  of viral, you know, nor can you reproduce it. That's like saying
• 1:33:36
  every film I make is gonna get in a sundance. I mean, how
• 1:33:40
  unpredictable, Like, you know, I can't bank on sun Oh I'm gonna
• 1:33:43
  make this movie and it's gonna get into sundance. And guess how many people's
• 1:33:46
  dreams have been crushed operating on that model, right, not to mention trying
• 1:33:50
  to reproduce that. It's just unrealistic, completely unrealistic. Yeah, and that's
• 1:33:56
  a very direct that's a direct parallel. That's like trying to just I can
• 1:34:00
  move again into Sundance. Okay, right, like you have a better You
• 1:34:04
  honestly have a better chance of winning a lottery than getting into Sundance. If
• 1:34:08
  you have no names, you'd pretty much have a better chance of winning a
• 1:34:12
  lottery when you when you really look at the numbers. I did a video.
• 1:34:15
  It's just breaking down like the numbers and what you're actually competing with.
• 1:34:20
  It's I don't know how I honestly don't know how I even considered that.
• 1:34:30
  Yeah, yeah, I didn't even look at that. It's like a possibility,
• 1:34:34
  you know, when I'm when I'm going through like the marketing plan for
• 1:34:39
  a film, it's just so completely remote, especially now you know, yeah,
• 1:34:45
  well there's way more to it than There's way more to it than Sundance
• 1:34:50
  is a marketplace. Those top tier fest their marketplaces with brands to protect.
• 1:34:55
  So everybody moans about, oh, they cover Paris Hilton when she walked down
• 1:34:59
  the street, but yet there's this little foul playing there. They didn't get
• 1:35:01
  no press, okay, but they need buzz, period. That's what it's
• 1:35:08
  about. Like buzz launches careers, not films. You need a good film
• 1:35:15
  to get the buzz. Yes, but there are a lot of great films
• 1:35:18
  that don't get buzz, so they're not they're not mutually you know, synonymous,
• 1:35:25
  and there are bad films that get buzz and careers get launched. So
• 1:35:30
  it's the buzz that launches you. Tarantino, what launched him was the buzz.
• 1:35:34
  Yes, he's very talented, but reservoir dogs and you know, like
• 1:35:39
  that could have came out and not garnered to talk that it had you see
• 1:35:44
  what I'm saying, Like, it's it's the buzz and the people talking that
• 1:35:47
  gets you launched. You know. Yeah, I'm not I'm not discrediting a
• 1:35:54
  good movie you have you, Yes, make the best movie you can,
• 1:35:57
  like, but it's not the movie that's going to get you there. Like
• 1:36:00
  there are droves of great films out there right now that did not get buzz.
• 1:36:06
  But you'd be like, man, this is a really good film,
• 1:36:09
  Like how come, Like what happened? Like they played Sundance but then they
• 1:36:12
  just fell off the met like nothing happened. Yeah, Well because they didn't
• 1:36:15
  get any buzz, you know, like you know, you're you see that
• 1:36:17
  a lot. I've actually talked with some filmmakers and they you know, I
• 1:36:23
  watched their films and I was like, wow, you know, this was
• 1:36:26
  really good. I don't know why, why didn't I ever hear about it?
• 1:36:29
  You know, I just happened to click on it on Netflix or something
• 1:36:30
  and I got in touch with them to do interviews, and I'm like,
• 1:36:35
  wow, you know, I'm surprised that this isn't on like everybody's top ten
• 1:36:39
  list for last year, because this was an amazing movie and they just like
• 1:36:43
  the marketing just never kicked in. I guess what happens with a lot of
• 1:36:45
  these films is they you know, they sell them to well. I mean,
• 1:36:49
  in the first place, a lot of these films aren't made by the
• 1:36:51
  director. They're made by a producer and a production company and they don't you
• 1:36:56
  know, they don't really have anything to do with it. But you know,
• 1:36:59
  it just amazes me how, you know, these movies just like disappear,
• 1:37:03
  and there's all these horrible movies that are like well, you know,
• 1:37:06
  marketed, and people know about them and everything, and just like you know,
• 1:37:11
  hundreds of movies go under the map all you know, every single year.
• 1:37:15
  It's about that. It's about that buzz manu it's important and that kind
• 1:37:20
  of goes back to that big question of what nowadays in order to survive and
• 1:37:30
  to thrive as a creative, you can't just be a creative anymore. You
• 1:37:36
  have to be a creative entrepreneur to thrive. Yes, there will be those
• 1:37:41
  rare cases where some people punch through using the old model. Yeah, that'll
• 1:37:45
  always be around. But guess what, you cannot rely on that, or
• 1:37:49
  else you'll just end up in the sea of people who are not making it
• 1:37:54
  and not thriving. For every one person who makes it during using the old
• 1:37:59
  model, for it's like hundreds of thousands of people who didn't get anywhere trying
• 1:38:02
  to do that. So you can't bank on that. But what you can
• 1:38:05
  bank on is taking the keys to the car and driving yourself around, you
• 1:38:12
  know, like you can bank on building up your foundation of knowledge on how
• 1:38:17
  to market yourself, how to brand yourself, how to use micro content,
• 1:38:23
  how to leverage micro content online to get yourself found. You can bank on
• 1:38:27
  that. As much time as you spend learning that, it will repay you
• 1:38:31
  back in spades. I mean, it's not that hard to It's really not
• 1:38:35
  that hard to figure out. I'm not gonna sit here and tell you like,
• 1:38:38
  oh, took me so many years to do this, and oh man,
• 1:38:41
  yeah, I really cracked that one. Good luck finding it because I
• 1:38:44
  found it. I'm not sharing it, oh I'll share everything because it's not
• 1:38:46
  that hard to figure it out. The hard part is doing it and being
• 1:38:51
  consistent, you know. But once you see the rewards, that's even easy.
• 1:38:56
  You're like, oh man, like, man, I want to do
• 1:38:57
  this more, you know what I mean, Like, wow, Like I'm
• 1:38:59
  reaching people who I've never met before. But but you can bank on that.
• 1:39:04
  That's a skill set that you can bank on, you know, And
• 1:39:10
  once you have that skill set, it's only a matter of time before you
• 1:39:14
  punch through. It's only a matter of time, even if it's a slow
• 1:39:17
  start, you know, like my first first year on YouTube, it took
• 1:39:20
  a year to get five thousand, and then the next year my second year
• 1:39:24
  of mark, I was at fifty. But like, once you roll that
• 1:39:28
  snowman, you know, once you roll that snowball and get it working for
• 1:39:30
  you and you get better at it too, you're always learning. You know
• 1:39:35
  that you can bank on. You can bet the farm on that, because
• 1:39:40
  even if it takes you a while to find out what works for you,
• 1:39:43
  specifically, you know, because not everybody's different. Everybody's gonna have their own
• 1:39:46
  model and things they like to do and not like to do. And there's
• 1:39:48
  a lot of experimentation with it too. You know, I'm always experimenting on
• 1:39:51
  my platforms. We're gonna hate I haven't tried this tweet out, or I
• 1:39:55
  haven't tried this, or maybe if I release quotes at this. You know,
• 1:39:57
  you're always experimenting, but you get better at it the more that you
• 1:40:00
  do. It will be right back after a word from our sponsor and now
• 1:40:10
  back to the show. But you know, once you do it, it's
• 1:40:15
  so empowering because you don't have to rely on anybody else man, and time
• 1:40:20
  is on your side at that point, because as time goes on, you're
• 1:40:24
  only gonna get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. Whereas with the old
• 1:40:27
  model, time is against you. As soon as you're hot, you gotta
• 1:40:30
  have something else going on, or else you fall off the map, or
• 1:40:32
  if you're away for too long, you fall off the map. Time's working
• 1:40:35
  against you there because you're not prolific. You know, you come out for
• 1:40:41
  a little while with this big project and then you go away. So you
• 1:40:44
  got to come out real soon or else you cool down and people forget about
• 1:40:46
  you. But when you live the marketing lifestyle and you understand how to leverage
• 1:40:51
  micro content and you spend time doing that and you build that foundation for yourself
• 1:40:57
  and for your creative efforts, time is on your side then, because as
• 1:41:00
  time goes, you're only gonna be making more content. You're staying prolific,
• 1:41:04
  even if it's not these big projects back to back or whatever. But the
• 1:41:09
  micro projects are gonna get you just as far, if not further, because
• 1:41:14
  there's a strategy behind you. Remember, it's like, okay, if I'm
• 1:41:16
  to make this here and I know that I can get this traffic, I
• 1:41:18
  make this, I can get this traff. You're planting seeds all the time.
• 1:41:24
  So time is on your side. You know you're only gonna get bigger
• 1:41:26
  and bigger and bigger. Um. So so yeah, that's way more bankable.
• 1:41:31
  And that's something. Uh it's free, you know what I mean.
• 1:41:39
  Yeah, that's the the other part. It's it's free, you know.
• 1:41:43
  So yeah, let me let me ask you. You know, we're um
• 1:41:48
  coming up on an hour and forty, so I want to respect your time.
• 1:41:53
  Um, even though I probably haven't. Um what is your current like
• 1:41:59
  knowing what you know now? What is the current status of unsound? What
• 1:42:03
  are you doing with that now? I'm still figuring out the best way to
• 1:42:08
  release it right now, and it's been this way for a while. I
• 1:42:15
  am more inclined to release it for free on YouTube on my channel, where
• 1:42:19
  it's under my control and I can use it as a branding effort to build
• 1:42:26
  and foster more community for filmmaking, because to be honest, if I were
• 1:42:31
  to throw up a paywall, yeah, I probably make some cash, you
• 1:42:34
  know, but I don't think I would recoup everything we've spent on it,
• 1:42:41
  and I think it would be a horrible oversight in terms of branding, because
• 1:42:45
  remember, your name is way more important than your creative works. What I
• 1:42:51
  do now has got to foster and lay the groundwork for the next projects in
• 1:42:57
  the next projects, So if releasing something for free is gonna put me in
• 1:43:00
  a way better position later on down the line, I'm way more apt to
• 1:43:05
  do that because it's doing free stuff that's caught me where I am right now.
• 1:43:10
  So that's not to say I'm not going to monetize on sound. I
• 1:43:12
  am, but right now This strategy is to release it on YouTube for free,
• 1:43:17
  do a huge campaign behind it, and I would probably do Facebook ads
• 1:43:21
  on that because I'm not trying to ask people to like the page. I'm
• 1:43:25
  just trying to guide them to see the movie for free, and I'll probably
• 1:43:28
  get ahold of every mental health community across America over other countries. Spend a
• 1:43:32
  lot of time pushing it literally because I can push it for free, I
• 1:43:35
  can't push it if there's a paywall in the way that I want to push
• 1:43:39
  it, you know, and try to get a huge grassroots movement behind it
• 1:43:45
  and collect that viewership, and we're still going to sell like blue rays and
• 1:43:50
  maybe other insular products. I'm still going to probably set other price points,
• 1:43:55
  you know, maybe you can talk to the filmmakers for this amount of money
• 1:43:58
  or whatever, you know, because you do need to cover those bases.
• 1:44:00
  But if I get a huge viewership with no paywall, the conversion is still
• 1:44:09
  the same. I'm still getting the one to three percent conversion as far as
• 1:44:14
  transactions are concerned. So if I get ten million people to see Unsound over
• 1:44:17
  the course of three three years, that one for two percent conversion is still
• 1:44:23
  there. Where's if I got the paywall up. You see what I'm saying,
• 1:44:26
  And I'm only able to really reach so many people because I've got that
• 1:44:30
  paywall up and I'm only getting I'd rather get one to two percent of you
• 1:44:35
  know, transactions off four or five million impressions of seeing a free movie and
• 1:44:43
  getting hooked up for one seeing a free, free movie. That's good,
• 1:44:45
  you know what I mean. I would rather bank on that than throwing up
• 1:44:49
  a paywall and only getting like, you know, like seven hundred transactions.
• 1:44:58
  Yeah, you know. And Plus in terms of of branding and building your
• 1:45:00
  name and community and all of that, I can go way further if it's
• 1:45:04
  free because I can engage my audience, you know, I can answer comments,
• 1:45:10
  I can do all of that, build that personal connection with him,
• 1:45:14
  that relational connection with him. I can't do that if it's free. I
• 1:45:17
  can't do that with paywalls as well. And Plus, if you were to
• 1:45:21
  see it and you like it, guess what you could do. You could
• 1:45:23
  just email your brother or link boom. Hey, I saw this movie.
• 1:45:26
  It's great. It's about what we go through. Oh man, you gotta
• 1:45:28
  see this. Boom Now he can see it in Texas. Everybody can see
• 1:45:30
  it all at the same time, you know. So it's just there's way
• 1:45:33
  more way, more flexibility, way more power, and the conversion may still
• 1:45:38
  say not to mention if I throw the paywall up right and then you know,
• 1:45:43
  people get it. Guess what's gonna happen anyway torrents. It's gonna happen
• 1:45:45
  anyway. It's a thing like you can't fight it. Like it's going to
• 1:45:49
  happen. People tell me now, they're like, oh, I saw the
• 1:45:51
  trailer. I'll be honest. I looked and tried to see if I can
• 1:45:55
  find a torrent Like there's no way. There's no way that they tell you.
• 1:45:59
  I can't tell you. People say, oh yeah, I'll be honest.
• 1:46:00
  I look for a time. I couldn't find it. When's it come
• 1:46:02
  out? You know. So it's like I'm gonna get it for free anyway.
• 1:46:06
  Man, They're gonna get it anyway. So I would rather make the
• 1:46:11
  play to build the connection with them so that if they buy into me as
• 1:46:15
  a creative, they will want to give just to support me. At that
• 1:46:20
  point. That's kind of like falling into the Louis c. K model.
• 1:46:24
  Now, it's like people want to support good work, and people that they
• 1:46:29
  are vested in. So if I spend more time working on that relationship with
• 1:46:34
  my audience as opposed to the transactional benefit of them, then the transactional will
• 1:46:42
  come anyways, because people will don't it just because they want to support you
• 1:46:46
  at that point, you know what I mean. So so to me,
• 1:46:50
  that's a much better play. And of course I have the advantage that I've
• 1:46:54
  kind of built what I've built so far, so it gives me that option.
• 1:46:58
  But even if I hadn't done looking long term, having it up there
• 1:47:03
  for free is still gonna be with because it's still going to garner more views
• 1:47:06
  and views be get more views. Right, So it's like the more views
• 1:47:12
  it gets, the more views it's got, like it will become you know,
• 1:47:17
  it will get its own place where where people will know about it.
• 1:47:23
  I'll just put it that way. And it's very niche too with the mental
• 1:47:25
  health community. And I know that we hit that pretty hard. I mean,
• 1:47:28
  blood, sweat and tears to make sure we cross every tea and dotted
• 1:47:30
  every eye. So I am may sure that it's good, you know,
• 1:47:36
  I know that it's good. Right, So now it's just about getting it
• 1:47:42
  to where it needs to be getting it to the audience that it serves,
• 1:47:45
  and I want it to be I want it to become a bedrock of the
• 1:47:48
  mental health community. And if I release it for free, I can do
• 1:47:53
  that where it's like we can show it everywhere. They'll still want to buy
• 1:47:56
  a DVD of Blue Ray just to own it and have a quality version of
• 1:47:59
  it. Like the communities would still buy it. When you're talking to organizations
• 1:48:03
  and stuff, they'd still want to buy it, you know. So I
• 1:48:06
  don't think I'm sacrificing, you know, my stake as as far as sustainability.
• 1:48:12
  If anything, I'm bolstering it because it's a long term play that we're
• 1:48:15
  making. It's not the short term. And also we're selling other things at
• 1:48:20
  other price points probably when we do it, so behind the stands and stuff
• 1:48:26
  like that, oh yeah, probably behind the scenes where are they now all
• 1:48:29
  that stuff? And then the other things that I'm going to be advertising with
• 1:48:34
  it are myself as a brand, you know, like by then I'm probably
• 1:48:38
  gonna have the consulting up. So that's something else kind of like what Scott
• 1:48:44
  was talking about, where we have to change the way we view our films,
• 1:48:49
  and this is not the first time I've I've heard about it from a
• 1:48:51
  number of other people sim in the music community too, or they were saying,
• 1:48:56
  you know, the smart people they make music to sell stuff. They
• 1:49:00
  don't make music to make music. They make music to generate business because with
• 1:49:04
  the business they can afford to make more music. And it's the same with
• 1:49:09
  filmmaking. It's like, if you look at your films as a way to
• 1:49:14
  generate business, then you can afford to make more films. You can be
• 1:49:18
  sustainable. But if you don't think of it in those terms, you don't
• 1:49:21
  think of it as an entrepreneurial venture where you need to make income, then
• 1:49:30
  you're not going to make any income be know what I mean. It's like,
• 1:49:32
  oh, that's it. I mean, it was just been a good
• 1:49:34
  run, guys, you know, had fun. We'll be paying this debt
• 1:49:40
  back for the next you know what I mean? Like, if you're not
• 1:49:42
  thinking of how to monetize what you're doing, or at least how to build
• 1:49:45
  a better position in terms of branding where you can at least monetize your brand,
• 1:49:49
  because even after Unsound is out and you know, we're still monetizing what
• 1:49:55
  we can for that because it will be monetized. Even though we're releasing it
• 1:49:58
  for free. It will be monetize though. We'll be right back after a
• 1:50:02
  word from our sponsor and now back to the show, just not the initial
• 1:50:13
  free seeing of it. But I can monetize myself as they creative because if
• 1:50:16
  it does well, and I'm saying, hey, I'm offering script consultation for
• 1:50:20
  feature film scripts. I've already vetted myself online as far as understanding that stuff,
• 1:50:26
  you know what I mean. But to have a body of work that
• 1:50:28
  supports that, I know what I'm talking about. Aside from the vlogs with
• 1:50:30
  film festivals, people would pay for that. So because of that, I
• 1:50:34
  can monetize other things that are not directly the movie two. You see what
• 1:50:41
  I'm saying. So I think as artists we need to realize that, I
• 1:50:45
  mean, Hollywood's doing it. It's no secret, you know, the totals
• 1:50:49
  they're selling all that, It's not a secret, like, yeah, the
• 1:50:51
  movies at that level there, Yes, their movies make money, but they
• 1:50:56
  make ten times more on everything else and all the license of mergency. That's
• 1:51:00
  where they really make the money. You know. So uh yeah, as
• 1:51:04
  creatives, I think we've really got to start looking at it in those terms
• 1:51:11
  selling ebooks, anything. But seriously, like, you can make a lot
• 1:51:15
  of money if you if you think outside the box in view your film as
• 1:51:21
  a way to open the door to the store. You know, like your
• 1:51:29
  film is not the store. It opens the door to the store. Like
• 1:51:32
  you've got to have other stuff to sell, you know, or else.
• 1:51:39
  It's just not sustainable. I mean, once you sell the film and that's
• 1:51:42
  all you're selling, well, after that's done selling, I mean, that's
• 1:51:44
  it. You've got no other transactional power. There's nothing else you're offering.
• 1:51:48
  But if you've got other things at other price points, and you have a
• 1:51:50
  brand and you're monetizing that brand, and you're you know, now that's sustainable.
• 1:51:56
  Now you've got some transactional power, you've got volume. Now you know,
• 1:51:59
  there's other things that you're moving aside from just a film. So,
• 1:52:04
  yeah, that's one of the really amazing things I got out of Scott.
• 1:52:09
  We did an interview for the masterclass we did, and you know, Scott
• 1:52:14
  and I were talking and he's he's got a really good presentation on marketing and
• 1:52:19
  film marketing, and there was a point in the conversation where he just kind
• 1:52:25
  of blew my mind. And it was one of these Ted Talk moments,
• 1:52:30
  and the basic idea was, you know, he was talking about how a
• 1:52:33
  cup of coffee costs like, you know, four bucks, and people have
• 1:52:39
  the expect and you know how much money went into creating a cup of coffee.
• 1:52:43
  You know, probably a couple cents, or like a shoe or something,
• 1:52:46
  you know, and then you look at a movie and you have the
• 1:52:48
  same price point expectation of what a movie's supposed to cost. And now it's
• 1:52:53
  gotten to the point where, oh, a movie costs about four bucks,
• 1:52:56
  maybe more or less whatever, nine bucks, and how much money went into
• 1:52:59
  make that movie and we're talking thousands and thousands, maybe millions of dollars.
• 1:53:03
  And he kind of talked about the concept of saying, stop thinking about the
• 1:53:08
  movie as the end product and start thinking of it as a advertisement for a
• 1:53:13
  product that costs one hundred dollars. Oh yeah, soo look into the film,
• 1:53:17
  is like, the film isn't the end product. The film is basically
• 1:53:21
  whether it's a there's something that the film, there's there's something beyond the film
• 1:53:27
  that you're selling. I guess Star Wars is the best example of that.
• 1:53:30
  It's like you've got one hundred different products that are being sold based on the
• 1:53:33
  characters and the movies and everything, you know, and Star Wars makes so
• 1:53:38
  much more, you know, billions of dollars off of the toys and everything,
• 1:53:42
  and there's just different levels of that. Yeah, that's very true.
• 1:53:45
  And also also that cup of coffee, you know, that coffee shop.
• 1:53:49
  They can keep selling that cup of coffee for now until the cows come along,
• 1:53:53
  but the film has has a shelf life, Like, yes, there
• 1:53:57
  will always be a bottom line figure, you know, so like after the
• 1:54:01
  theatrical, after everything's all done, after the hypes all died away, and
• 1:54:05
  then maybe four or five years past that, Yes, there's still if you're
• 1:54:10
  lucky, still gonna be on an independent level anyway, there's still gonna be
• 1:54:13
  some kind of like base number of transactions that you can bank on, you
• 1:54:16
  know, even though it'll be small, but was coffee at a coffee shop.
• 1:54:19
  They can still keep that volume of transactions going. And definitely because they're
• 1:54:25
  generating a product that doesn't have a shelf life. You know, there is
• 1:54:28
  no one cup of coffee that's popular now and then for three years from now.
• 1:54:31
  No one ever wants that coffee again, you know what I mean,
• 1:54:33
  It's like, oh, I had that coffee already, seen it. You
• 1:54:36
  know, that doesn't exist for coffee, like shelf life for that, like
• 1:54:41
  coffee I had the yesterday. Yeah, there's definitely a shelf life before it's
• 1:54:46
  like, Okay, what's your next film? You know what I mean,
• 1:54:47
  Like I've seen that one already. I don't need to see that same film
• 1:54:50
  one hundred times. So that's another aspect of it too, which I think
• 1:54:55
  when the doors to the store are open, you need to have a lot
• 1:54:58
  of other stuff to sell them, monetize as much as you can, so
• 1:55:01
  that way, when that shelf life fades, you've gotten enough out of it
• 1:55:05
  to keep what you're doing sustainable and move on to the next project. Not
• 1:55:09
  to mention, if you're thinking about branding, which as a creative everybody should
• 1:55:14
  be thinking about, you can monetize your brand. It doesn't always have to
• 1:55:17
  be the film, you know what I mean. Like, there's a lot
• 1:55:19
  of people I know they make money just doing guest talks, doing tours on
• 1:55:23
  guest talks, you know, writing ebooks about themselves, consulting, and those
• 1:55:27
  are mainly craft related. But I think, you know, if you build
• 1:55:30
  a strong enough brand, you can monetize public appearances. I mean, just
• 1:55:32
  look at reality TV stars. Man, they're getting they make money just to
• 1:55:35
  show up to clubs, you know, like it, we'll pay the club.
• 1:55:40
  I mean that's a different space, that's a different social space, but
• 1:55:43
  they're monetizing their brands in other ways. You know. It's like once you
• 1:55:46
  and I think that's another reason why it's important to build your brand too,
• 1:55:49
  because that is something you can monetize as well. So when you're in between
• 1:55:55
  movies and you're still you know, getting what you can out of the last
• 1:55:59
  movie in terms of knowing that sustainability, there's something else you can be monetizing
• 1:56:02
  on your way into the next one. So if you can't do that,
• 1:56:04
  if you're not thinking in those terms, you're just thinking of, Okay,
• 1:56:08
  I have this one product. Got to sell this product. You know,
• 1:56:12
  let me make one hundred Facebook posts on this product, you know, you
• 1:56:15
  know, let me bug all my friends and family, you know, like
• 1:56:17
  everybody come by the movie, tell all your friends, and it's like okay,
• 1:56:21
  you know, but once that's done, man, you're back to square
• 1:56:25
  one. So what would you do if you like, looking back at Unsound,
• 1:56:29
  what are there any mistakes that you feel like you made or is there,
• 1:56:32
  I mean, aside from thinking about Sundance and things like that, were
• 1:56:35
  there any big kind of lessons that came from that that was your first feature?
• 1:56:39
  Right? Yeah? Were there any kind of lessons that you learned that
• 1:56:43
  you would maybe not do on the second film in terms of like craft and
• 1:56:46
  storytelling. I think I learned so much making Unsound that I wouldn't be where
• 1:56:51
  I am today had it not been for that. So I don't think there
• 1:56:55
  are mistakes I wouldn't have made. But if you're talking like the I mean
• 1:56:59
  the things of the business side of it, Yeah, I mean whatever I
• 1:57:02
  think going into the next film, I'm more prone to look at the marketing
• 1:57:08
  side of it and what I could sell in terms of ancillary first before going
• 1:57:13
  into the film, and if I can do product placement or something. I'm
• 1:57:16
  gonna look at the business of what I can generate with the film first,
• 1:57:21
  and I'm not gonna probably not gonna do with genre or a drama next.
• 1:57:25
  I'm gonna do something that is easier to sell, even on the online space.
• 1:57:29
  I feel like genre films do better, but Again, that's looking at
• 1:57:32
  the business first, you know, and once I kind of work that foundation
• 1:57:38
  out and that strategy out, then I let the creative guy out and say,
• 1:57:42
  okay, here's your framework. Let's make something out of that. So
• 1:57:45
  that way, when you do all the creative stuff and that's over and you
• 1:57:49
  made the movie and it's done well, now the business side of it has
• 1:57:53
  already been worked out. You already had a strategy for that, you know,
• 1:57:56
  and hopefully you've been marketing and making micro cont along the way, so
• 1:58:00
  you're still building your audience. I plan to keep doing that as well.
• 1:58:02
  But yeah, like for instance, to give you an example, like I've
• 1:58:04
  had an idea where have a character. I'm not giving the bare bones of
• 1:58:09
  the story or anything, just the marketing side of it, but I would
• 1:58:12
  pay attention to what the character's wearing and see if there's a thing I can
• 1:58:15
  work out where I can get custom glasses made or something that the character wears,
• 1:58:19
  so that way, if it hits, that's something I can monetize.
• 1:58:26
  That's really interesting. I mean I never thought about that. That's all they
• 1:58:30
  do with all the other movie that's all they do, you know, like
• 1:58:31
  get a jackets something emblematic that when you see it, oh, I know
• 1:58:36
  what that's from, so that you can monetize that. I'd pay way more
• 1:58:41
  attention to what the characters are wearing. Locations. Even if I can get
• 1:58:44
  a location that I can control, then you know, I've had thoughts of
• 1:58:47
  like, Okay, what if I could set it up where I could,
• 1:58:50
  if it's a property or something, keep that property and set it up almost
• 1:58:55
  like a museum so people can if you're in town, you can drop by
• 1:59:00
  the location this movie was filmed in. You know, like that's a little
• 1:59:02
  further down the road because that takes some capital to secure. But I mean
• 1:59:06
  these are things that's like the ideas don't come unless you're thinking of how can
• 1:59:11
  I what can I sell? I need to build my ideas around things I
• 1:59:15
  can sell. You know. I'd probably keep a lot of track of like
• 1:59:18
  the production and how it went, so I can make an ebook about it
• 1:59:21
  day by day, make a diary ebook about it, make a ton of
• 1:59:26
  behind the scenes content so I can sell it in packages. Probably do a
• 1:59:30
  tour and just rent the theaters out out right. If I'm at that level,
• 1:59:32
  just do the tour and rent it out out right. Don't even worry
• 1:59:35
  about going through anybody else's anything, because we'd have enough of a poll on
• 1:59:40
  social media to probably warrant that. And then do a touring model kind of
• 1:59:45
  like what bands do because they make all the money on t shirts and stuff.
• 1:59:47
  Anyway, just bring ton of merch, you know, and charge like
• 1:59:51
  the ticket prices on the heads will have to be a lot more because we're
• 1:59:56
  buying it out right. We'll be right back after word from our sponsor.
• 2:00:03
  And now back to the show. But if you're if you're doing a tour
• 2:00:10
  and you are showing the film and you have somewhat of a brand already,
• 2:00:14
  people would pay money to see you in person, you know what I mean,
• 2:00:16
  Like, you can make a vent out of it. It's like,
• 2:00:17
  no, you're not just going to a theater. We're going because he's there
• 2:00:20
  and the cast is there, you know, set up red carpet deals and
• 2:00:25
  pictures and have a whole Instagram session. You can take pictures with us.
• 2:00:28
  But again, I'm I'm in a little bit of a different boat because I've
• 2:00:30
  got a little snowball already and by the time I even get to that point,
• 2:00:34
  it's gonna be a lot bigger but I don't see why any anybody else
• 2:00:40
  can do what I'm doing and I'm not doing anything special, but that's what
• 2:00:43
  I would be looking at. How can I monetize everything else but the movie?
• 2:00:46
  Like because literally, like you gotta what else can you sell other than
• 2:00:51
  the movie? The movie's great, but I mean, you know, you
• 2:00:54
  you'll never make everything back off that price point, you know. And on
• 2:00:58
  top of that, if you do hit and you do get that little phenomenon,
• 2:01:01
  you know, the semi viral whatever whatever, Man, if you had
• 2:01:04
  your ducks in a road to monetize that, look out you like, because
• 2:01:10
  then that'll be hugely. Now you've got steam, you got marketing because if
• 2:01:14
  you've been branding yourself and doing all that, so now you've got numbers because
• 2:01:15
  you know, the numbers go up when you get something that hits and you
• 2:01:18
  got money in your pocket. You know, it's like you got you got
• 2:01:21
  options now, whereas if all you're thinking about is a movie and you know,
• 2:01:25
  I mean, I don't know, it's just very confining. On top
• 2:01:27
  of that, you're not even thinking about your personal branding, you know,
• 2:01:30
  and building your own name up and microcontent. So it's like without if you
• 2:01:32
  took the personal branding off the table as far as your online presence in microcontent,
• 2:01:38
  and you took the entrepreneurial you know, you need to sell things at
• 2:01:42
  different price points other than the movie, and literally all you had was the
• 2:01:45
  movie. You're dead in the water, completely dead in the water. There
• 2:01:47
  is no sustainability in just a movie, just like the music industry, there's
• 2:01:51
  no sustainability in just making songs. The only difference with them is they can
• 2:01:55
  tour like they have a tour model. There is a whole community built around
• 2:02:00
  that where it's somewhat sustainable, where people can bring you to their city because
• 2:02:03
  they've heard about you. That that doesn't exist in film. There are there
• 2:02:06
  is no culture built around the film circuit. It's literally you going out and
• 2:02:11
  doing everything. But with touring you got promoters and all of that who are
• 2:02:14
  like, hey, now we make this much money, I'll split this with
• 2:02:16
  you. But they they it's in their benefit to have their ear to the
• 2:02:19
  street to see who's doing well on the circuit because then they can bring them
• 2:02:24
  into town that doesn't exist in film. So, you know, so they
• 2:02:28
  have a little bit of a leg up there because they can just monetize their
• 2:02:31
  personal performance. Worst they do all the time, you know, especially when
• 2:02:34
  they get higher up there and they charge ten grand for a show here,
• 2:02:39
  five grand whatever. You know, but you build your way up, but
• 2:02:42
  you can't bootleg a live show. I mean, like yeah, and you
• 2:02:45
  see that more lately because music has become so much cheaper and people aren't buying
• 2:02:49
  you know, CDs like they used to. It's like people, really they
• 2:02:53
  have to tour. That's the main way they're making money now. Yeah,
• 2:02:56
  exactly. So yeah, that's what I would be, you know, going
• 2:02:59
  into the next project. You know, what I would be mainly thinking about
• 2:03:02
  is thinking more of a store model. The film only opens the doors to
• 2:03:06
  the store. You gotta have stuff on the shelf to sell. If you
• 2:03:10
  got nothing else to sell, you're dead in the water, you know.
• 2:03:14
  And just thinking of it in terms of creating an experience for your audience too.
• 2:03:17
  Like sometimes I think people there's this bad connotation that comes with artists making
• 2:03:23
  money, you know, which I really don't. I really don't appreciate it
• 2:03:26
  because it's like, oh, you're an artist, but you're thinking about making
• 2:03:29
  money first. Okay, Yes I am, Yes, I am. Like
• 2:03:34
  surgeons can afford not to think about that, because they just make enough money
• 2:03:39
  inherently in what they do. Artists, unless you're thinking about sustainability, you're
• 2:03:45
  not going to make a dime. And guess what if you can't pay your
• 2:03:47
  bills, you can't afford to be an artist. Everything costs money. I
• 2:03:53
  can't tell. I can't tell the electric man, well, I didn't sell
• 2:03:55
  a fount today, So can we just hold off on that bill till next
• 2:03:58
  month? No? You know, you need you need a camera to go
• 2:04:00
  shoot to be a filmmaker, Well, Cannon's getting paid. You gotta similar
• 2:04:04
  film festivals to get the film screen film festivals are getting paid. You got
• 2:04:09
  it. You need screenwriting software, so you go buy final draft. Final
• 2:04:12
  draft is get everybody else is getting paid. But you yeah, right.
• 2:04:15
  You know it's strange that that kind of like because I've I've been around that
• 2:04:19
  mentality. But filmmaking is so based on money. You know, there's so
• 2:04:25
  much out there, you know, even talking about like box office. You
• 2:04:28
  don't have anything any other industry where you know exactly how much movies are making,
• 2:04:32
  you know, and there's so much emphasis on oh well it costs this
• 2:04:35
  mini million to make, and it made this mini million and da da da
• 2:04:39
  da, And yet indie filmmakers kind of consider it kind of uncool to like
• 2:04:43
  talk about, oh, well, I'm trying to make a profit off of
• 2:04:45
  my film or whatever. You know. The ones who think it's uncool are
• 2:04:48
  the ones who don't get to keep doing it, because if you don't want
• 2:04:53
  to think about it, man, you're not gonna make it, you know.
• 2:04:57
  Or worse yet, if you hand the car keys to somebody else,
• 2:04:59
  guess what they're thinking about. They're thinking about how to monetize. And that's
• 2:05:02
  why usually when you do it, you don't see a dime. It goes
• 2:05:05
  to them first. And now you're getting into all the ethical stuff too,
• 2:05:08
  you know. But it's like, you know, if you're not thinking about
• 2:05:11
  how to make money with what you're doing, you're not gonna make money.
• 2:05:14
  And this is not just true of films. This is true across the board.
• 2:05:16
  It's true with music, it's true with painting and fine art, is
• 2:05:19
  true with YouTube. There's a sea of YouTubers. I mean, there are
• 2:05:23
  only so many people on YouTube who get the volume to live off of AdSense
• 2:05:28
  and live well off of AdSense. There aren't that. I mean, that's
• 2:05:32
  not a very big pool. Now, if AdSense is only a small piece
• 2:05:38
  of the bigger engine, than yeah, it's a substantial amount if it's a
• 2:05:43
  part of another way of making income. Sure, but most of the people
• 2:05:48
  who build a business model around their YouTube they do well. They do just
• 2:05:55
  fine because they're generating business with their videos. The videos are only opening the
• 2:06:03
  door to the store, So they do fine. It's all the people who
• 2:06:10
  are like, oh, I'm not making enough views to make money. All
• 2:06:12
  YouTube sucks. This is this is I'm making Why should Google make Well,
• 2:06:15
  They're they're making money. They're doing this to make money. You know,
• 2:06:20
  if you're in it just to be creative and you're not thinking about how to
• 2:06:25
  monetize your own stuff, that's your fault. Yeah, I mean, like
• 2:06:30
  that's on you. I mean there's a ton of ways to monetize what you're
• 2:06:33
  doing. You're just choosing not to look at them. So, um,
• 2:06:41
  yeah, I think that's that's a harsh lesson kind of too. You know,
• 2:06:44
  like you really got to think about how to to do what you're doing,
• 2:06:49
  and you got to think long term, like because let's face it,
• 2:06:53
  man, like life happens, Emergencies happen, you know, cars break down.
• 2:06:58
  Laptops die if you don't have if you're not generating income. Man,
• 2:07:02
  Like, that's where it stops. Yeah, it stops right there. Yeah.
• 2:07:09
  I think it's you know, but the next generation. It's funny because
• 2:07:13
  my you know, I have a seven year old son and he doesn't care
• 2:07:16
  about TV and doesn't care about movies. What he cares about is YouTube and
• 2:07:21
  he sits there all day, well not all day, I'm not a terrible
• 2:07:25
  parent, but he watches like Minecraft videos and it's just these guys, you
• 2:07:30
  know, sitting there playing Minecraft all day and you know, they have like
• 2:07:34
  three or four million views. And that's the new generation. You know,
• 2:07:38
  that's that's what he's gonna grow up with. He's gonna tell his son.
• 2:07:42
  You know, that's what we used to do when we were kids, as
• 2:07:44
  we would sit there and watch YouTube videos all the time. So, you
• 2:07:47
  know, a lot of us that are the older generation are just rushing to
• 2:07:50
  try and figure out kind of how things are working now, you know,
• 2:07:54
  because and I think that happens with every generation. Is just you know,
• 2:07:57
  something you know, for the generation in front of mine, and they didn't
• 2:08:00
  know what the internet was, and then people started using it and doing things
• 2:08:03
  with it they never even thought of. You know, I think this is
• 2:08:07
  a this is a change that needed, Like the whole landscape is changing,
• 2:08:13
  but I think it's for the better. There's a ton of growing pains.
• 2:08:16
  But I think the old system was broken anyway, Like it wasn't. It
• 2:08:22
  wasn't the business wasn't structured in a way where it was democratized, Like it
• 2:08:28
  was very much based on appeasing someone who had money and resources and connections,
• 2:08:31
  you know, like the classic Hollywood It's like in order to be a star,
• 2:08:35
  they had to just like you and pick you. You had no control
• 2:08:39
  over getting yourself out there anything, and they molded you into what you wanted.
• 2:08:41
  You know, back in the old days when Marilyn Monroe and all them,
• 2:08:45
  you were just a puppet. So if fame and fortune came to you,
• 2:08:48
  well you literally were just lucky, literally, you know. And then
• 2:08:52
  you know, when you migrate into guess the nineties, you know, like
• 2:08:58
  it was becoming democratized, but there was still a lot of aspects of it
• 2:09:05
  that were locked away, like communication. You in order to get publicity,
• 2:09:09
  you have to pay and use the pr machine, and if you don't have
• 2:09:13
  that money, you can't play that game. There was no way to efficiently
• 2:09:16
  spread word about anything economically on a level that we can all do because,
• 2:09:20
  let's face it, most people don't have trust funds, and we don't have
• 2:09:22
  money sitting in a bank. We don't have rich parents, we don't you
• 2:09:26
  know, we don't have that. So, and not to mention, the
• 2:09:28
  distribution avenues were locked away as well, you know, like so basically you
• 2:09:33
  had to go through gatekeepers for everything, even though you could if you had
• 2:09:37
  money, you could make a film, you know, but there was still
• 2:09:41
  so many gatekeepers. But now we're at a time where because of technology and
• 2:09:46
  prosumer tech, you can do anything. Literally. You can self distribute,
• 2:09:52
  you can self publicize, you can monetize. We'll be right back after a
• 2:10:00
  word from our sponsor, and now back to the show. You can generate
• 2:10:09
  your own content, and it's all at a killer price point. I mean,
• 2:10:13
  you can get aerial shots they couldn't even dream of in the sixties,
• 2:10:18
  you know, like the barrier to production is as low as it's ever been
• 2:10:24
  and it's only getting lower, you see what I'm saying. So it's like
• 2:10:28
  you can literally do everything. You can become your own studio for crying out
• 2:10:35
  loud. All that is is connection based, you know. And if you
• 2:10:39
  build a rapport with companies, because YouTubers are essentially doing that now with all
• 2:10:43
  the product placement and all the sponsorships that they're doing, that's essentially the same
• 2:10:48
  thing, you know. So so we've entered into this age where you can
• 2:10:54
  do it. But I think the problem is the mindset of the creative has
• 2:10:58
  not changed over yet. So all the tools are there for someone to really
• 2:11:03
  do their own thing, and you don't have to be in La or New
• 2:11:05
  York or any of those places to do it anymore. You could do it.
• 2:11:07
  I mean, I'm in I'm in Tucson, Man, you know what
• 2:11:11
  I mean. You can be anywhere. And like a huge part of my
• 2:11:18
  fan base is from India. I have a lot of Indian fans. Oh
• 2:11:24
  yeah, a lot of the comments and most of the comments are from India.
• 2:11:28
  So like, you know what I mean. Like, but you can
• 2:11:31
  be everywhere in anywhere, Like you can sell it, Like everything is there
• 2:11:37
  for you to do your own thing. You can. The whole machine is
• 2:11:41
  there. You just have to pick up the tools and learn how to turn
• 2:11:46
  it on. But people don't see that they're still relying on finding somebody who's
• 2:11:50
  gonna make it all happen for them, and they don't realize that, yes,
• 2:11:56
  you have to wear a lot more hats, Yes you'd have to learn
• 2:12:00
  more skill sets, but there is way more power in that. You can
• 2:12:05
  become a powerhouse and not really need to rely on anybody, you know.
• 2:12:13
  So, but the mindset, the general mindset hasn't changed, and I think
• 2:12:16
  it's changing. There's a lot of thought leaders like Scott I consider myself talking
• 2:12:22
  that, but I'm not a thought leader on that because my channel is more
• 2:12:24
  geared towards giving tips on people for how to do this filmmaking thing. You
• 2:12:30
  know. I haven't touched the marketing side like Sherry Candor and you know some
• 2:12:35
  of those other heads, you know, like where they're really frontlining it,
• 2:12:37
  you know. But I think the more of the thought leaders come up,
• 2:12:41
  and the more successes we see coming out of that, I think people will
• 2:12:45
  eventually realize, Hey, I want to do what this person's doing. Hey,
• 2:12:48
  what their sound, they're what they're saying at that actually makes sense,
• 2:12:52
  Like eventually that's going to change over And when that happens, pretty much all
• 2:12:56
  of the old structures are all gonna come crumbling. They're already fall but they're
• 2:13:00
  pretty much it'll be rubble because people are gonna be there. Like why do
• 2:13:03
  we need you? Yeah, Like we build our own audiences just to go
• 2:13:07
  to you, and you monetize them and you get first money and then screw
• 2:13:11
  me. Yeah, I don't need you. I know how to build them
• 2:13:15
  on my own. I'm just gonna sell direct off my website before I go
• 2:13:18
  through you. You know, you're doing nothing but throwing thirty page documents at
• 2:13:22
  me and robbing me. Yep, you're playing middleman. You're not doing anything.
• 2:13:28
  Oh and they're notorious for not spending any of their own money for marketing.
• 2:13:31
  So it's like, I mean, literally, what are you doing nothing?
• 2:13:33
  You're literally doing nothing. So yeah, And I don't mean to think
• 2:13:41
  like a negative you know, viewpoint the old way. I don't really want
• 2:13:45
  to be negative about it, you know what I mean? But I just
• 2:13:48
  think what comes with the democratization of communication and of tech, because those are
• 2:13:56
  the two biggest things that have opened the doors for everything. I could not
• 2:14:01
  do what I'm doing right now and build a following had it not been for
• 2:14:03
  YouTube and Twitter and Facebook. Had it not been for my ability to self
• 2:14:07
  publicize, I wouldn't be here. So I couldn't do this pretty much in
• 2:14:11
  the nineties, this would not have been an option, yep. And when
• 2:14:16
  I do self distribute, I wouldn't be able to do that in the nineties.
• 2:14:18
  Like all of the things that I'm about to do were not here not
• 2:14:24
  that long ago. So so the tools are there. We just need to
• 2:14:28
  change. We just need to change our outlook, our our view, and
• 2:14:33
  we need to embrace being creative entrepreneurs now and not just creatives. I don't
• 2:14:39
  think it ever worked for anybody, to be honest with you, There was
• 2:14:41
  just a lot of people who got lucky. But you know when I see
• 2:14:46
  when I see it, I've gotten into a couple of meeting rooms since all
• 2:14:50
  of this, and you know what I what I honestly see is you know,
• 2:14:56
  some of the people we look up to and we're like, wow,
• 2:14:58
  yeah, you made it. If you sit down and you talk with them,
• 2:15:01
  you realize the perception of success makes it seem like they made it,
• 2:15:09
  but they are still begging and pleading for money for the next project all the
• 2:15:13
  time. Yeah, all the time. Spike Lee does it all the time.
• 2:15:18
  It's like pleading and all that, and they don't have direct connections with
• 2:15:22
  their audience. Yes, their name could command funds, Yes that is true,
• 2:15:26
  they did a crowdfund or whatever. But had they been building their brand
• 2:15:31
  on the new models now, they would be ten times as big and ten
• 2:15:35
  times as influential as they are because they would have had all of that time
• 2:15:39
  to build strong connections with their fans, not just the guy on a pillar
• 2:15:45
  poop and rainbows and unicorns. You know, they would be ten times stronger.
• 2:15:50
  And plus they haven't embraced the models of self distribution to the extent that
• 2:15:54
  they had. They're still relying on the machine. They don't know how to
• 2:15:58
  do anything else else side of that. So I don't really want to be
• 2:16:01
  a part of that model anymore. I thought I did until I saw it,
• 2:16:05
  you know, and got in a couple of rooms, and I'm like,
• 2:16:07
  man, I don't want to be a part of that at all.
• 2:16:09
  Like what did you see in those rooms that scared that you didn't like?
• 2:16:13
  It's just a lot of a lot of fear based decisions. There's a lot
• 2:16:16
  of model next you got to go through. You know, if I come
• 2:16:20
  to you with Okay, I got to come to you with five ideas.
• 2:16:22
  I pitched five ideas. Maybe you like one of them, but then you
• 2:16:26
  got to take that idea and go to a studio or a mini major or
• 2:16:30
  whatever, and you got to pitch to them. I mean, how many
• 2:16:33
  points of failure is that? All? Just that alone? How many points
• 2:16:37
  of failure is that? So I'm sitting here spending all my time generating ideas
• 2:16:41
  for you so that you can go to them, you know, because they
• 2:16:45
  can give the funds and you've got everything else, the distribution to do whatever,
• 2:16:48
  you know, or you got deals with them. But like by the
• 2:16:52
  time we get an idea that everybody likes, man, that could be years.
• 2:16:56
  It's no wonder. You hear stories of people going all these meeting rooms
• 2:17:00
  and then it's like, well nothing ever came out. So I just went
• 2:17:01
  and made my own film again, because like there's too many cooks in that
• 2:17:05
  kitchen, man, you know, Like I would rather focus on my efforts
• 2:17:11
  on making one idea, think about all the marketing. I mean, I
• 2:17:15
  understand what people want to see just off YouTube half the time, you know
• 2:17:18
  what I mean. So I'd rather do that, invest my time, raise
• 2:17:22
  my own money, make it at a super cheap price point as far as
• 2:17:24
  investments concerned, and then just do the whole ball all the way down the
• 2:17:28
  line and build up my own brand. Then to spend two years talking these
• 2:17:33
  ideas to the middleman of the middleman of the middleman, and the studio gets
• 2:17:37
  it, you know, say they like one idea, but how many films
• 2:17:41
  have fallen apart in the pre process of casting, or if noel name gets
• 2:17:45
  attached, it doesn't go anywhere, or if a name gets attached but then
• 2:17:48
  nobody, the funding doesn't go all the way through, or if the executives
• 2:17:52
  get fired and new executives come in and then they scrap all the old projects
• 2:17:56
  and your project was one of the old way like, there's so many points
• 2:17:58
  of failure, it's ridiculous, it is ridiculous. Or the greenlight, it's
• 2:18:03
  it all the way green lit, but then they pull the plug at the
• 2:18:05
  last minute because they just decided, oh wait, we found out another studio
• 2:18:09
  is making a movie just like this one, and there further you know,
• 2:18:11
  it's just too much, too many points of failure, way too many points
• 2:18:18
  of failure, And I'm not going to spend all of my creative juice and
• 2:18:20
  energy knocking on that door. When I can spend half that energy just making
• 2:18:24
  YouTube videos and connecting with people, building relationships, building virtual relationships, you
• 2:18:31
  know, building my brand and do my own thing, then I don't need
• 2:18:37
  you sell direct. I don't need to have billboards all over the place.
• 2:18:39
  I got a direct connection to them. I put out a video, they
• 2:18:43
  see it, I tweet, they see it. Yeah. I may not
• 2:18:46
  be getting those super impressive million box office numbers now or whatever, or maybe
• 2:18:50
  not for a while, but I don't need it as long as it's sustainable,
• 2:18:56
  you know, like it. That's the name of the game is sustainability,
• 2:18:58
  right, So I don't need to be the next freaking, you know,
• 2:19:03
  inception. But I may be small and maybe off the radar, but
• 2:19:07
  I got a well oiled machine that's only getting bigger and it's sustainable and I
• 2:19:11
  can afford to do what I'm doing. So I'm only gonna get bigger and
• 2:19:13
  bigger and bigger. And if you ever do reach that status, I don't
• 2:19:18
  think an indie can ever reach like Hollywood Hollywood status, because you know they've
• 2:19:20
  got I mean, that's like big money they're messing with. But if you
• 2:19:26
  can reach an indie cult status where which I think is more than attainable,
• 2:19:31
  where your viewership, your fan base is very loyal, and you're a well
• 2:19:35
  oiled machine, you know, selling all your own stuff. I mean,
• 2:19:39
  I would take that over directing the next freaking blockbuster any day, any day,
• 2:19:46
  because I do what the hell I want to do. The really important
• 2:19:48
  thing that you're saying, you know, is that people need to start right
• 2:19:52
  now making making a connection with an audience, and you know, empower themselves
• 2:19:58
  instead of just waiting for stuff to happen. We'll be right back after a
• 2:20:01
  word from our sponsor, and now back to the show. Yeah. Well,
• 2:20:09
  marketing is the biggest, the biggest thing, because you can do everything
• 2:20:13
  else and the price points are low enough where it's manageable. Right, Yeah,
• 2:20:18
  But the only thing that everybody has a problem with is marketing. That's
• 2:20:24
  the biggest problem everyone has literally. So if you place most of your effort
• 2:20:31
  in that and start working that machine and getting it refined, well, once
• 2:20:37
  you tackle that animal, everything else is your oyster. Like, there is
• 2:20:41
  no other bigger problem than that. You can raise money easier, You can
• 2:20:45
  capitalize your products with craft money. You can find investors easier, people are
• 2:20:48
  willing to listen to you. You can do product placement deals, you can
• 2:20:52
  talk to companies, you can get sponsorships, you can get donations for clear
• 2:20:56
  like all kinds of stuff. Everything else is easy once you get that brand
• 2:21:01
  down. Whereas before it was money and it was connections, but now that's
• 2:21:05
  not the case. It's marketing because the money it connections that stuff comes when
• 2:21:09
  you get that name down. But you need to get that name down,
• 2:21:13
  you know, So that's the biggest that And then you know understanding that you
• 2:21:18
  need to take the entrepreneurial spirit. If you want to make money and make
• 2:21:22
  this sustainable, well you need to think about it. You can't let somebody
• 2:21:24
  else think about that for you, because they're probably gonna screw you. So
• 2:21:30
  you need to think about it and take the bull by the horns and you
• 2:21:35
  should be should be all right. And I think, you know, it's
• 2:21:39
  gonna take a certain type of person to do all of that, So I
• 2:21:43
  think, because it's more intensive now and we have to do more, that
• 2:21:50
  kind of narrows down the character type, you know, the person who inherently
• 2:21:54
  has the qualities to be into all of that. Because let's face it,
• 2:22:00
  if you hate marketing and you're reclusing, you got your hair covering your face
• 2:22:03
  half the time, and you know what I mean, it's gonna be real
• 2:22:05
  tough for you to get yourself out there, you know. So whereas me,
• 2:22:09
  I'm fortunate enough where I direct right and all. But I enjoy acting
• 2:22:11
  too, and I enjoy just talking. I'm an extrovert, so that's helped
• 2:22:16
  me a lot in the online space because that comes easy for me, right,
• 2:22:20
  so I can. Yeah, that's that's why. That's why I do
• 2:22:22
  a podcast, because I hate being on camera, so I you know,
• 2:22:26
  I struggle with that. I've done a couple of videos talking about screenwriting.
• 2:22:30
  You know. I was like, oh, I'm gonna start a series,
• 2:22:31
  and it was like I did one and I just felt so uncomfortable being on
• 2:22:35
  camera. I was like, okay, podcast, Yeah, And I've seen
• 2:22:37
  people pull it off without doing my approach, like every frame of painting.
• 2:22:41
  He's a prime example. You never see his face, nobody knows his name,
• 2:22:43
  well, no, they know his name, Tony, Tony Yang his
• 2:22:46
  last name. But but he's to me an example of somebody who's the anti
• 2:22:52
  defer Darius. As far as our models, of doing it are completely different,
• 2:22:54
  you know, like very his voice is very calming. He just his
• 2:23:00
  videos are incredible though too. They're just yeah, right on point. So
• 2:23:03
  you don't have to you don't have to be me to do it, you
• 2:23:05
  know what I mean. It's like if you're that type of person who you're
• 2:23:07
  like, well, I don't really want to be you know, on people's
• 2:23:09
  face. I don't want to do that. Yeah, there's a lot of
• 2:23:11
  ways to skin a cat, but the end of the day, you need
• 2:23:15
  to be skinning the cat, you know what I mean. Something's got to
• 2:23:18
  get skin you know. Like, so however way you figure out to do
• 2:23:22
  it, just make it happen. But again, like it takes time for
• 2:23:26
  people to figure out what works for them. I think that's the big point.
• 2:23:31
  If you don't get in there and start swimming, nothing's gonna happen.
• 2:23:35
  The thing about YouTube is it evolves too as a platform. So it's just
• 2:23:41
  like film, Sometimes things are in and then things kind of fade. It's
• 2:23:43
  the same on the online space. At first, when YouTube was a little
• 2:23:46
  younger, unboxings were popular, like that was the thing to do is review
• 2:23:52
  everything on box. Now that has faded, so there was a point when
• 2:23:56
  people built whole channels on that. And though those channels are still around because
• 2:24:01
  they built when it was fresh, so people still look to them for the
• 2:24:05
  newest, latest, greatest stuff. But for all the people who were late
• 2:24:09
  to that game, trying to do the unboxing thing and all that, and
• 2:24:13
  then like they just weren't the killing numbers. I'm like, man, you
• 2:24:16
  know, like the people who were first to do it and then the people
• 2:24:18
  just beneath them, they're fine. But all the people who saw and looked
• 2:24:22
  up to them and then they all tried to jump in there and do it
• 2:24:24
  too, they're the ones who just didn't get anywhere and ended up washing out.
• 2:24:26
  Because it's like, well, everybody's already getting their fix on all the
• 2:24:31
  big unboxed ers. They're already getting the fix on them, you know.
• 2:24:35
  And not to mention, I think the platform as a whole just kind of
• 2:24:39
  moved away from that as it matured, you know, because that was still
• 2:24:43
  very much a vlogger type thing. Oh look, I just got this thing
• 2:24:46
  at the point. The camera is what it does, is and isn't that.
• 2:24:48
  But as people go on to YouTube for more and more things, and
• 2:24:52
  it's becoming more of a staple in our culture. Pretty much is a staple.
• 2:24:56
  But as that process happens, the expectation of what to look for on
• 2:25:01
  their changes as well. Now everybody knows there's not just cat videos on YouTube.
• 2:25:05
  Now everybody knows, like, hey, my kid watches it all day
• 2:25:09
  and they watched this guy and that guy and this guy and that guy,
• 2:25:11
  and yeah, I list off, like five celebrities I know of, they
• 2:25:15
  don't know them, and they tell me five celebrities I've never heard of.
• 2:25:18
  Like we're in two different worlds almost, like it's it's a whole other ecosystem.
• 2:25:22
  You know. Before I got into YouTube, I couldn't tell you anybody's
• 2:25:26
  name. And then as soon as I got in, I was like,
• 2:25:28
  holy crap, how did I not know about these people? Yeah? You
• 2:25:31
  know so, but you know, and as the content value quality changes,
• 2:25:37
  like like Freddy Freddy Wong and them, you know, they were doing just
• 2:25:41
  cheap special effects videos when they first started out, you know, and they
• 2:25:45
  got a ton of subscribers because they were just having fun and the platform was
• 2:25:48
  young then, so the expectation of all this high quality stuff wasn't there.
• 2:25:54
  And then as the platform got older, they got better and now they start
• 2:25:58
  being the frontliest for all the high quality stuff, but they've also raised the
• 2:26:01
  bar on the expectation as well. So I think it's the same for the
• 2:26:05
  unboxing stuff. It's like as the platform grew and as the people who became
• 2:26:09
  known for doing unboxings, their channels grew and they became more put together and
• 2:26:15
  sponsors and all this stuff, well, the expectation of what to see out
• 2:26:18
  of that change too. So if you're going to try and compete with them,
• 2:26:20
  man, like, you got to really have some kind of other angle,
• 2:26:24
  because there's no other craftsmanship aside from talking about what you like about it
• 2:26:28
  that's going to set you apart from them. And they're already killing that big
• 2:26:31
  rifle of stuff you probably don't even know about because they could talk to the
• 2:26:33
  manufacturers. So so that's a hard thing to stand out in whereas with mine,
• 2:26:39
  and it's like, yeah, there's a lot of people given filmmaking tips,
• 2:26:41
  but and the market is somewhat saturated, but there's a lot of room
• 2:26:45
  for you know, story there there's a lot of things that have not been
• 2:26:48
  talked about yet still and there are not so many people doing it that like
• 2:26:54
  there's still a ton of room in that space. The niche is not exploited
• 2:26:58
  fully yet. And it's the same for a lot of other niches too.
• 2:27:03
  So so yeah, that the review, the review video stuff. All that
• 2:27:07
  is to say, I probably never do that, and just for two,
• 2:27:11
  I'm not into that. Like maybe I would do it enough vlog, you
• 2:27:15
  know, if I got it in a vlog and I talk about it,
• 2:27:16
  but just creatively and technically, I'm not into that. You know, I'm
• 2:27:20
  not really into all the tech stuff, to be honest with you, I'm
• 2:27:22
  not into that. I don't want to talk about the red camera. I
• 2:27:24
  don't want to talk about you know, the specs of the new freaking black
• 2:27:31
  Magic whatever. Like if you look at my video some of the video,
• 2:27:35
  like the truths about filmmaking, man, I shot that on GoPros and sixty
• 2:27:37
  D. Like I'm just into getting the content out there and the story out
• 2:27:41
  there. I could care less what camera it was shot on like that.
• 2:27:45
  I don't That doesn't get me, But story gets me. You know.
• 2:27:48
  That's why you see breakdowns and stuff because I'm into that. Like learning how
• 2:27:52
  to take movies apart and understand why they work. I'm into that I'll talk
• 2:27:54
  about that all day long. But you know, if you set a red
• 2:27:58
  camera in front of me and started they tell me about the specs, let's
• 2:28:00
  just talk about specs. Like, I'm not into that, man, unless
• 2:28:03
  I'm shooting with and I am really into it, you know, Like I
• 2:28:07
  mean, that doesn't do nothing, you know, I mean, yeah,
• 2:28:09
  and there is a lot of camera or gear porn out there that people are
• 2:28:13
  already getting into. That's actually something. You know, maybe we can do
• 2:28:16
  another podcast episode and talk about screenwriting because that's kind of my main thing,
• 2:28:22
  is talking about structure and story and all the you know, one of the
• 2:28:26
  things that I really love about your channel is that you also talk about things
• 2:28:30
  like and I don't want to go into this too much because I want to
• 2:28:33
  kind of wrap it up, but I haven't really seen that many people talking
• 2:28:37
  about brainstorming and creek coming up. How do you come up with creative ideas
• 2:28:41
  and how you do a lot of the things that most, you know,
• 2:28:43
  people don't really talk about that much. And you know that that's kind of
• 2:28:46
  what I'm in. You know, I write a lot, and one of
• 2:28:50
  the main things that I do is I have to figure out how to kind
• 2:28:54
  of jump start my creative mind. You know, I have to put myself
• 2:28:56
  in situations and do things. And I had never seen anybody dedicate a video
• 2:29:01
  to how to get your creative thoughts out there? How to you know what
• 2:29:05
  you do? And a lot of the things you mentioned are things that I
• 2:29:09
  do. I kind of thought I had invented them, you know, because
• 2:29:13
  like, oh, you mentioned that on your video, but like you know,
• 2:29:16
  and I was talking to uh Rob Edwards, who you know, is
• 2:29:20
  that one of the screenwriters for Disney, and we were talking about that and
• 2:29:22
  that that's actually my last episode, was talking to him, and he was
• 2:29:26
  talking about all these things that he does to kind of jump start his creative
• 2:29:30
  mind, you know, in terms of he wrote The Princess and the Frog
• 2:29:33
  and Treasure Planet, and you know, he said that like watching other movies
• 2:29:37
  and getting the when you were saying, I watch a movie and I say,
• 2:29:39
  you know, you say to yourself, oh, well, if I
• 2:29:43
  was making this, I would have done it like that. And that's how
• 2:29:45
  you generate creative ideas. That's exactly one of the things we were kind of
• 2:29:48
  talking about, you know, And I think that's really important, especially for
• 2:29:50
  writer directors, to understand is that whole creative aspect of things. Especially with
• 2:29:56
  creativity, it's like you have to you can't create some thing from nothing.
• 2:30:01
  We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor and now back to the
• 2:30:09
  show. Like you have to have the raw materials. That's the reason.
• 2:30:13
  That's one of the big reasons why I think people reach these creative droughts in
• 2:30:16
  their careers, especially writers, when they're stuck in the writer's room for so
• 2:30:20
  long. Work work, work, work, work, and you stop living
• 2:30:22
  and experiencing well, when they write all of their experiences into their work and
• 2:30:26
  then they run out of those experiences. You got nothing else. I mean,
• 2:30:31
  you can't write about being a writer, you know what I mean.
• 2:30:33
  I mean you can, but I mean, you know what it's like,
• 2:30:35
  you have to keep living and you have to keep ingesting raw material and other
• 2:30:39
  creative works that all falls under raw material because it goes into your brain and
• 2:30:46
  it does that little magic where you just kind of ponder on things and oh,
• 2:30:48
  I like this, and I don't like that, and I like this,
• 2:30:50
  and you frankenstein concepts together and you just start piece mailing and then you
• 2:30:54
  poop out, you know, a masterpiece. But there is no masterpiece that
• 2:30:58
  is not Frankenstein from pieces of life, experience or other creative works that you're
• 2:31:05
  inspired by, or taking the meat from this other idea and leaving the bone
• 2:31:09
  that you thought didn't work. It's like, oh, I can do that
• 2:31:11
  concept better. This is what I would, you know, like, but
• 2:31:13
  you still have to ingest that work to do what your version would be.
• 2:31:18
  Either way, you're still consuming. Yeah, I think that's a large part
• 2:31:20
  of it. Even when I make YouTube videos, I do the same process,
• 2:31:24
  same exact process. I see what other people talking about on the subject.
• 2:31:26
  Oh, I don't really agree with that. I agree with this,
• 2:31:28
  So I like the way the word of that. I don't like the way
• 2:31:30
  the word of this read. A couple of articles on it. Think about
• 2:31:33
  my experiences on it, sprinkle in that, you know, or wrap it
• 2:31:37
  in a nice engaging package at a little humor. Sprinkle humor in there.
• 2:31:39
  Boom, you got a video, you know. But I'm not just like
• 2:31:43
  sitting here in a vacuum, you know, Like you know, when I
• 2:31:46
  come out with a video, I like putting my feelers out and I see
• 2:31:48
  what it's out, you know. So when I talk about YouTube, same
• 2:31:50
  thing when I make a video about YouTube, same thing. You know.
• 2:31:54
  It's like I bounce what I feel about a topic and what other people feel
• 2:31:56
  about it, and it just gets the juices going. And I find it's
• 2:32:01
  just easier to create when you allow that as a part of the process as
• 2:32:05
  opposed to fighting it. You know, if I'm starting to get aunty and
• 2:32:07
  I start wandering off into Facebook, while I'll direct that into just looking up
• 2:32:11
  something related to what I'm doing, so that way, I'm still ingesting.
• 2:32:13
  But yeah, all right, man, Well, I you know, I've
• 2:32:18
  taken up a lot of your time today, and I'm hoping that maybe we
• 2:32:20
  can go back and talk about the more. You know, this has been
• 2:32:24
  primarily marketing. Maybe at some point we can talk about the more creative aspects
• 2:32:26
  of filmmaking. But I really appreciate you coming on the show man. Thanks
• 2:32:30
  for thanks for reaching out. All right, that's gonna do it for today.
• 2:32:33
  I want to thank my guests. Darius Britt aka D for Darius.
• 2:32:35
  You can find him on YouTube. Just put in D for Darius when you
• 2:32:39
  go to YouTube and you should find him. Thanks for listening to us,
• 2:32:41
  and we'll see you on the next show. I want to thank Jason so
• 2:32:46
  much for doing such an amazing job with this episode. If you want to
• 2:32:48
  get links to anything we spoke about in this episode, head over to the
• 2:32:52
  show notes at any filmascle dot com Forward slash six ninety seven. If you
• 2:32:56
  have it already, please head over to Filmmaking podcast dot com, subscribe and
• 2:33:01
  leave a good review for the show. It really helps us out a lot,
• 2:33:05
  guys. Thank you again so much for listening to guys as always,
• 2:33:07
  keep that hustle going, keep that dream alive, Stay safe out there,
• 2:33:11
  and I'll talk too soon. Thanks for listening to the Indie Film Hustle podcast
• 2:33:15
  at Indie Film Hustle dot com. That's I N D I E F I
• 2:33:18
  L M h ustl dot com.