A guest post by Joseph Friedlander
- The special effects need to look professional. You can have high quality effects done to bad art direction and they can look bad.
- The special effects aren’t enough. You need a movie connecting them. Even if the whole movie is animated, there has to be a story, a situation, compelling characters and compelling situations along a satisfying story arc.
- Even if you have a good story professionally told and the genre right you can tick off the fan base if you get the feeling wrong.
- You have to give the fans what they want, and then you have a business, not until.
- Even you can raise the money you will need to decide if it is a small focus or big focus movie.
- To keep costs down a small focus movie is cheaper. (Definition of small focus for this purpose, few cast members, not many sets and locations) But then the movie has to be all the better to capture an audience. And the team has to be flawless if not gifted.
An analogy from jewelry: If a single stone is the focus of your setting, that stone better be flaw free (or at least the side on display.
- If you go big focus (many cast members, sets locations) then you need to be able to manage it all and make it work together.
In either case you need a good script optimized for small or big focus. A sufficiently prepared team would have a script optimized for each in case reality changes .
- You can compare the process of making the movie to buying a first lottery ticket whose prize is a second lottery ticket whose prize is a third lottery ticket whose prize is a fourth lottery ticket whose prize is a fifth lottery ticket.
- If you win the first lottery ticket you are funded (crowdfunded).
- If you win the second lottery ticket you assemble a competent team on a low but adequate budget and get a time slot in which the work can happen. So much is assumed here, including a good script, reliable people and a shared vision that compels them to work like fanatics.
- If you win the third lottery ticket your team actually pulls it off and produces good material which is then competently post-produced into a watchable movie–and after all that you still have a small financial reserve left.
- If you win the fourth lottery ticket your team now can spare the time and effort to promote and pre-market the movie and you win major distribution (not literally always major studio distribution, but you get buzz and access to markets.
- The fifth lottery ticket is how the movie actually does. The prize– variable, from an honorable and respected line on a resume to incalculable wealth. Note that even here you can have a fantastic hit movie and due to ‘Hollywood accounting’ some people haven’t collected much at all. (In brief, a lot of studio overhead is added to the movie so on paper a hugely profitable movie kind of drips profit out at the end of the pipe, and the person with a share of the movie gets a drop or two in his cup.)
- A lot of people confuse buying the first ticket with automatically collecting the fifth ticket’s highest prize.
- Not all of these people are happy.
And this rule probably holds true for crowdfunding large scale tech as well: Getting the money just lets you get to the field with an equipped team. How well you play is not predictable in advance.
Joseph Friedlander is a thinker in the pattern of Herman Kahn or David South, who takes a theoretical construct and reduces it to detailed scenarios for action, with an emphasis on the immediately achievable and the practical that can be settled for in the very near term as a foundation for greater achievements later on.
Joseph has a degree in business, certificates in computer aided design, tool and die work, information science, and other technical areas and wide background familiarity with astrophysics and chemistry.
His reading is wide-ranging (some would say encyclopedic). Among his favorite authors are those who concentrate on the links between industry, government and military, society and prosperity, in particular Jane Jacobs, Seymour Melman, Herman Kahn, and Kevin A. Carson.
Joseph is an inventor and consultant who writes and speaks often on space industrialization and settlement as well as future industrial possibilities on Earth and the ways these things could change our lives. He is a member of the World Economics Association.
He authored In Praise of Large Payloads for Space, Joseph Friedlander’s Thoughts Inspired By Alexander Bolonkin’s Writings On How To Catalyze Innovation And Technical Progress, Hyperwealth and Alternative Futures, Tyler Cowen’s “Great Stagnation” — Joseph Friedlander Perspective and Thoughts on Related Subjects, What was the best way to use the Saturn V to reach the Moon — in retrospect?, A summary of Dr. Bruce Cordell’s 21stCenturyWaves.com Maslow Window Model, and The Friedlander Cold Crown — A Cold Trap For The Lunar Poles — Solid Oxygen For Lunar Capture And Export.
Read his LinkedIn profile.