We’re moving.
We opened to roaring applause at the Blue Note in Columbia. We met filmmakers from all over the world in LA. We had a great show in Houston. We brought it home to St. Louis for a free show in the theater where Randy, Emily, and Jake once performed To Kill a Mockingbird.
Loss For Words will begin the new year in Oklahoma at the Trail Dance Film Festival, and we’re looking into shows in Kansas City, New York, and Chicago.
Diaspora
We saw this coming. As we got bogged down in real life while editing Loss For Words, our audience slowly spread across the country, and we knew we’d never have the big 150-200 person shows that Salad Daze and American Gothic enjoyed.
This has its ups and downs.
The applause are quieter, but there’s something cool about taking the movie from place to place to introduce it to new people. We’ve focused on festivals, smaller venues, places with history instead of prestige. As our longtime followers tell a few friends in each city, as of today Loss For Words has been seen by more people than Salad Daze ever was, and we’re not even halfway done.
The downside of it all: it’s a lot more work.
More with Less
In the past, we could throw all our resources into one show. Money, time, effort... everyone lived in the same city. We could scout venues, print posters, pursue press, and reach out to everyone we knew who might have a genuine interest in coming to the show.
These days, Randy and Jake live in New York, Emily is in Chicago, Gary is in LA, I’m in Kansas City, and we're all very all busy before we even start talking about hosting a premiere.
To make matters worse, the technical landscape keeps changing. When we started doing this in 2007, if you invited people to an event on Facebook, they’d actually look at it and respond. You’d get a few “attendings” who never show and a couple people would bring a friend - all in all, it evened out.
But these days, Facebook is a Noise Machine™. We’re the icing on the self-promoting-whore cake which was baked by every marketing graduate who decided to brand themselves as a social media expert. The logical consequence of this: most people barely even notice if they get invited to a show.
This means more phone calls, text messages, and follow ups to those people who’ve been asking for six months about the premiere. And all this stuff takes time.
But you have to evolve
There’s no point in sitting around reminiscing about how people used to peruse record stores, buy newspapers, live in the same city and look at their Facebook invites with more than a blank stare. We’re not stuck in the environment were in - after all, it’s always changing - but that means we need to do things accordingly.
As a result, we’re always on the lookout for the next way to reach new people, whether its redesigning our website to play nice with smartphones, toying with the idea of trying Fandor, dreaming up an app to keep people posted without relying on Facebook - more on that later - but never losing sight on what we really do: make movies.
As I’m writing this Randy is meticulously plowing his way through the script for our next short film. It’s something special - something new, and of course, I intend to raise the bar.
We call it Joy.
And everything else about it is a well-kept secret.
