The Calm After The Storm

I promised that if I got comments to my rhetorical post I would stick around, a promise is a promise, so, ready or not, here I go.

The comments that followed my not so subtle whine, raised some points that I’ll address here without necessarily quoting them.

One point raised was our funding page. We’re in the process of setting it up. IndieGoGo had a 90 day option to raise the funds to fulfill the goal. That’s no longer the case, they have a 60 day option only, which we will take. It means that in those 60 days we either reach our goal or we take what we raised, whatever that is.

That means that we better have a great pitch video, a convincing argument why should people donate to the project, what they will get as perks and many of those big and small details that are part of the campaign. Lots of brain storming for that.

Jac was going to leave for the US in September, for a couple of weeks, maybe three, so he was in a rush to launch the campaign in July, with the intention of having the funds coming in by the time he was in the US. That’s no longer the case. There’s time to prepare a good campaign and launch it when it’s good and ready. He’s not working on it alone, he has Amy and Erix working with him.

Once the campaign is ready to go, it will be launched, sometime between the end of this month or beginning of September. That will give us until November to raise the cash.

That brings up another point, the TIMELINE.

To make a movie properly we need Time and Money.

The Time.

The film will be shot in Bolivia, where our cast and crew are. If everything is ready, we could, in theory, begin shooting in December.

In December we have the rainy season, most of the film is outdoors and that could be a problem, but, we shot Justine in December and we had one day when we had to stop the shooting because it rained on our outdoors location which was scheduled for that day, we had to wait for the rain to subside.

In other words, we’re looking into shooting Seditiosa in December and part of January, most likely.

WIth that timeline in mind, we are scheduling the pre production work for the next couple of months.

We need to look for locations, build the props, make the costumes and much more. All that takes time… and money, that’s why we came up with the idea of the Patreon page to raise some money as we go on with the work.

But, for that to be of any benefit we need a good number of patrons, so we can count with a few hundred bucks every month for the purpose of getting the project moving. We normally use money from our income for that purpose as well, but if things are slow, then we have a problem.

Patreon is a new thing to us. We are looking into how it works, and one thing we learned is that they keep the money for a while, as a matter of fact, they consider the becoming a patron a ‘pledge‘, which they charge at the beginning of the month and we have access to it a few days later. That means that the extremely few patrons we have so far have not been charged yet and when and IF they are charged on the 1st of September, we will have that cash, minus the fees, sometime after the 5th. We’ll be less than 150 richer that day. Unless, of course, there’s a surge of new patrons before the end of the month.

Patreon is a learning curve for us and that is one reason why we don’t appear to be very active in that front. We are, but we’re still figuring out the system. We’ll be updating the progress of the project at least twice a month, with videos, pictures and so on. We expect to be making some progress during September and October.

We don’t have promo vids of Seditiosa, other than what we are doing for the pitch, because… we are not shooting the film yet!

We don’t have the costumes, we don’t have the props, we don’t have the locations. If we wanted to have a picture of the leading ladies carrying their crosses to show what it will look like, we would need the patibulums, the garments, the locations, the cast, obviously … and to go to get those pictures we would need a crew, transportation, all the equipment, to do it properly and use one day to do it.

With all that effort and expense we might as well shoot the scenes, right?

Jac plans to shoot the crucifixion scene in three days. But the big expense for either one day or three days is not much different.

My whining about the drop in sales is based on hard data. We’ve been doing this for over twenty years, we keep a good track of how things move, when, how and why and we can predict how things will go.

There are good days, bad days, excellent days, horrible days… there are ups and downs, and there are days when nothing sells. But the average is constant through the years. Regardless. However, when our average goes down and keeps going down, there are reasons for that drop that are beyond our calculations. Nothing to do with new films, or trailers, or promos, or discussions. No, it has to do with the tendencies in the market. We thought things will go down during the pandemic, they didn’t, but now, with the planetary inflation, the situation is unusual.

Another point raised was, for some reason, the making of 69 as if that was a bad thing.

We are making that film now, we’re preparing everything to start shooting soon, we have the locations, like two clubs we are going to use for some scenes and which, as a matter of fact, we don’t have to pay, and we can get some sponsors to support the project, like a bank, or the best rum distributor so they can have product placement, which we can’t have in Seditiosa. We can’t have a wine company sponsor a last super scene, or a bank to sponsor the kicking of the money lenders scene… if we had those scenes in the movie.

We have the costumes, nice, sexy, hippie, goth, metal, elderly, and so on.

We have the cast.

We have the crew.

And the main set is almost ready.

And not to mention a 120 page fascinating script.

We’re ready to go with that one.

I’ll have more to say but I want this to go out RIGHT NOW!

We are having a SALE!

20% OFF if you buy two or more of our amazing films!

And for those who want to join us in making Seditiosa possible you can start by becoming a supporter for as little as 5 bucks!:

Join Patreon Here:
https://www.patreon.com/rfpix?fan_landing=true
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