Moving Still Media

I recently wrote about the short film creator, Fede Alvarez, who put his four minute robot attack film on YouTube and by the following Monday had meetings lined up with Hollywood agents, and by the end of the month he had a $30m Hollywood deal for his next film.  The short film cost $300 to make, though that’s a bit deceptive – more below.

Now NPR reports that the small independent film Strictly Sexual, that has never been distributed theatrically or on TV, and has not appeared at film festivals or anywhere for that matter, is the most watched film on Hulu.com. As the director of the film explains:

“I woke up one morning and found a dozen or so messages in my Facebook inbox, saying, ‘Hey, I just saw this film, and it really touched me, and I love the way it talks about breakups and relationships.’  And I just scratched my head, saying, ‘Where’d you see my movie?’ I had no idea what Hulu was. God bless the people who had the foresight to put it up there.”

The result, according to the director, is the film bringing in $1 million from ad sharing, a 10x return on the $100,000 cost of the film.

Ferez, the Director of Panic Attack, not only landed a $30m deal for his next film, but now has one of the biggest agents in Hollywood and a powerful production house behind him. Ferez recently explained in greater detail the story of his YouTube-released passion-project opening the doors to Hollywood production deals in an interview on Director’s Notes.  He’s a very articulate guy with a clear perspective on the whole thing, I highly recommend you listen to his interview, it has a lot of insights for filmmakers of all types.

The bottom line is that this was not some thrown-together video by a newbie, this was the culmination of a massive development commitment. And while the out-of-pocket cost was a mere $300, this ignores the extensive training in CGI and special effects by the creator, or the massive time commitment he dedicated to it in his free time drawing on the resources of the special effects and post-production shops he owns.  But it was very much the result of a scrappy, entrepreneurial approach to art and business.

In other words, it took him many years of hard work to become an overnight success.  But the irony is that it was his hobby passionate-project that put him over the top while he was struggling with his serious creative and business efforts.

Play Interview

In summary, Fede shares the following thoughts…

“I’m just a guy from an unknown country, you know. A generic guy got money from Hollywood.  I think the message is if you work hard, if you really do the stuff you want to do, and if the stuff is good and people like it your gonna get a shot because these days you have YouTube and you have huge networks of people on Facebook, you’re going to publish something and somebody’s going to republish it and sooner or later it’s going to get to somebody who is related in any way to Los Angeles or the city, I mean if from Uruguay we got here, you can get here from anywhere.”

“There’s a new way to make movies, there’s a new way to find directors for Hollywood.  They’re not looking in the regular places anymore.”

“The problem I think is making those projects, you know. Panic Attack was one of those projects I had on the shelf, that project you start but never finish. My friends would tease me about it, ‘What happened about that big robot movie that you never finish?’ Everybody has that project that they start doing when they have all that strength, then they fade out and start doing other stuff, or they get very busy and they let it die. I almost did that. Two years ago I was certain I was never going to finish. And I had a voice in my head that said (in a whisper) ‘You have to finish.’  Every time I did a bad commercial or had a bad meeting with an agent, I would go back to it.  I would say to everybody who has those projects, you never know what plans those projects have for you, so you have to finish them. Thank God I finished, I was very close to abandoning it.”