Shooting Good iPhone Video

Tuesday I shot a bunch of interviews on a Sony EX1 for a promotional video for the game I'm working on. Not all the interviews turned out to be what we wanted, so, not wanting to spend $300 to rent it for another day, I wound up shooting more interviews today on my iPhone.

The picture quality on the iPhone is pretty good. I had two issues with it. One is that its has an omnidirectional microphone that picks up the person talking and every air conditioner and truck backing up for miles around. The other is that it constantly adjusts its virtual iris to light conditions, so that if you pan past a bright window, it will reduce its light sensitivity over the whole frame ("stopping down"), which makes everything go dark except the window.

There are theoretically external microphones for the iPhone. I'm considering buying the Owle Bubo. This is an aluminum frame for holding the phone or attaching it to a tripod; a wide-angle lens; and an external microphone. I have no idea how you switch inputs so that you're not using the internal microphone.

Somewhere out there, maybe there is an app that records video but allows you to manually adjust the virtual iris and lock it down. At any rate, there ought to be one. Anyone know of one? Anyone want to program one?

Incidentally, two lessons about promotional videos. They can eat up days of your time. They also eat up quite a lot of the rest of the team's time; you wind up pulling people off their jobs so they can pretend to be working somewhere else in the frame that works better in the shot.

But the upside is they force to think about what you're delivering. It's easy during the creatie process to forget what you're selling to the audience. Shooting a promotional video focuses you on your main selling points. Then as you go back into your creative work, you may be able to spend more time on delivering on your main selling points, and less time on the frills.

Facebook Ads and Kindle

I got a $50 coupon from Facebook for Facebook Ads, and I put together a little Facebook campaign for my novel THE CIRCLE CAST: THE LOST YEARS OF MORGAN LE FAY. One of the nice things about Facebook Ads is that you can target very specific demographics and groups. So I was able to target girls 13-18 in the US, UK and Canada who are interested in King Arthur, Wicca, historical fantasy, or any of the other books about Morgan le Fay.

A Facebook ad with my book cover did nothing for sales, but then we fooled with the tagline, and went back to my original homemade mockup cover, of a 16-year-old girl looking out at you, and that made a dent. Paperback sales perked up, and Kindle sales increased by a factor of 7.

You can pay Facebook per impression -- the number of times the ad showed up on someone's Facebook page. Or you can pay per click-through. Click-throughs are expensive. Facebook charges on the order of 75 cents for a click-through. However, someone who clicks through is a motivated consumer. They are intrigued by your ad and they want to know more.

And if you have a Kindle book, they can have the book right now.

It's interesting that I can see all these metrics from my desktop. I know every time someone clicks on my ad. And I know every time someone buys my book on Amazon.

(I'm assuming that's 99% of the business the ad is doing. Theoretically I imagine someone could see the ad, click through to the Amazon page, and then go buy a paper copy in a store. I guess people still sometimes do that.)

This gets me to thinking about how people are concerned that Facebook knows all about them. There are also advantages to Facebook knowing all about you. If Facebook can tell you about books that you would probably like, that's a win, isn't it? I'm a consumer. I like to buy good stuff. I just don't want to hear about stuff I don't care about. If I can get more ads about stuff that I might actually like or need, and get fewer solicitations for Viagra, that's a win for me.

(And anyway, I don't put anything on Facebook that would truly embarrass me if it got out. I gave up a long time ago on running for President.)

Contact Directly

As a screenwriting blogger, I get a whack of offers to review books from publishers and marketing people. As a book author, I've sent them out.

I've noticed I get much, much better results when I'm the one sending out my own publicity ("please help me get the word out") than when Lisa's sending it out as my publicist. (She actually is a former publicist.)

I also just noticed my own reaction when someone asked me to read their book. I liked the idea, and maybe I would have read it even if the email had come from a publisher. But I liked being emailed by the author more than I like being emailed by a publicist or a publisher.

So there you go.

Everything Old is New Again

There's been some talk lately about how Hollywood hates new ideas these days. There sure are a lot of sequels and movies based on games and toys, including, notoriously, a movie in development based on the Magic 8 Ball.

I think this criticism is off base. Movie adaptations are rarely faithful to their original material. The Pirates of the Caribbean ride didn't have a story, and Elliot & Rossio came up with a really fun one, with outlandish characters and a mythology. And the recent, lovely HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON, while based on a children's book, created a brand new story. (In the original book, the Vikings are already training dragons. In the movie, they start out trying to kill them.)

Developing a movie based on the Magic 8 Ball sounds like a dumb idea, not because you can't get a good story out of it, but because no one has them any more.

Producers can also use a "property" where there's a prejudice against a certain territory. Pirate movies were dead until PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN. And probably the only way to get a movie project going involving battleships would be to sell a movie based on BATTLESHIP™.

In a way, adaptations can be freeing. In fact the less story is attached to a product, the more room the writer has to come up with original characters and wild situation. The writers of THOR had to be faithful to the well-known Marvel comic hero and the sagas from which he sprang. But the writers of MAGIC 8 BALL can take it wherever they want.

Facebook

I understand there is this thing called Facebook? And books have their own pages on it?

Anyway, there is now a Crafty Screenwriting Facebook page and a Crafty TV Writing Facebook page. You can like them, if you like.

A Reader Writes In About His Orientation...

Not sexual, mind you. It's just that I find my ideas for scripts, and the scripts I've written, to be not necessarily un-commercial, just a little too unusual. For instance, [snip].

I've been told that the writing is good (if too long), but that it's hard to 'market,' or sell to a producer, etc. Concepts that are unwieldy. They say originality is an asset --- but I suppose there's a balance to be struck?

Certainly. It's a truism that producers are looking for something that is just exactly like this year's hit, but slightly different. And Lord knows there are enough TV shows about a person with an ability and a cop sidekick, solving crimes.

In cable TV, and in indie features, it's less true. But all TV channels have a certain kind of thing they're looking for. For a while, HBO was all about dysfunctional families.

And there are certain kinds of stories that work in features. The medium itself has requirements. Movies generally like one central character (or in a rom com, two), and a story that would make sense to an intelligent ten-year-old. (They don't have to be a story you would necessarily want to tell a ten year old, but a ten-year-old ought to be able to understand it.)

So not everything works.

So what do you do if you find that your stories are offbeat?

Certainly you want to focus on those stories that tickle your muse that are also in the ballpark of other movies or TV shows that have got produced. If you want to make an indie movie, watch an inordinate number of indie movies. You'll get a sense of what similarities they share, even if they seem at first blush to be all different.

If you want to make blockbuster movies, watch a ridiculous number of blockbuster movies, preferably in a row. That will give you a sense of what's being bought.

A family friend of mine was a bit of a struggling book writer. His books sold, but not really enough to support him. So one day he went into his agent and said, "I want to write a bestseller. What do I do?"

Agent said: "Read every book in the New York Times fiction bestseller list." So our friend sat down and read ten bestselling novels front to back, in a row. (It's important to do it all at once, so the similarities stand out.) Then he went and wrote a novel about killer bees attacking the US.

Bestseller. Movie deal.

Maybe your concepts are off base instead of offbeat. Have you tried pitching your hook to friends? To civilian friends who might be the audience for that kind of a movie? You should. You should be telling your waitress, your postman, the kid cutting your neighbor's grass, about the hook of your movie. If you really pay attention to how they react to your story -- if you listen to yourself pitching it -- your concept will streamline pretty damn fast.

However. As always, beware the feedback you're getting. You have to interpret it.

Note that the feedback is coming back "good (if too long)". Maybe the problem isn't actually that your ideas are too offbeat. Maybe the execution is too unwieldy. Have you tried pitching your story to an intelligent ten-year-old? No? Well go and do that then.

Remember when I told you in my books to pitch, not just your hook, but your whole story to civilian friends, out loud, without notes, over and over, until you can tell the whole story without forgetting anything? You didn't do that, did you? If you did that, your story wouldn't be too long, I practically guarantee it.

Also, movies are characters times story. You might have a perfectly valid popcorn movie, but the main character is uncompelling. Or there's no relationship at the core of it. DIE HARD wasn't a hit because of its concept. It was a hit because it had a good concept and a compelling character propelled by a relationship. Yippee kai yay.

Are you writing what you know? And I don't mean write about your high school experience; I mean write about what's in your bones. I know Morgan le Fay, at least my version of her. I care about Lucifer, or my version of him. But if you're writing about characters you don't really know or care about, we're not going to care, either.

In other words, maybe the concept isn't bad, but you need to step up your writing in general.

In general, as you go forward, you get a sense of what the market wants from you. But there are still projects I write that I think are ridiculously commercial which I can't sell, and projects I wrote in spite of the market that have found a home. That's why you should only write what you love. Ask yourself, not, "would someone pay $15 to see this?" but, "is a producer going to want to spend two or three years of her life trying to get this made?" Because that's what it will take.

TMI, almost

The New York Times has an infographic containing Netflix's data for 100 movies over a dozen cities, neighborhood by neighborhood. Which neighborhoods rented RACHEL GETTING MARRIED? Which rented YES, MAN? (Hint: one's a downtown movie. One's a suburban movie.) What's the relationship between high critic ratings and high rentals? Have fun playing with the maps!

Product Placement

Filmmortal is trying to set itself up as a sort of auction / brokerage house to put filmmakers together with advertisers who want their products placed in films.

Remind me to call them when I, God willing, get something going. I really want a MacBook Air!

De Callithricis

Studio Reader Stan takes a potshot at marketing people in his latest comic strip.

C'mon. Taking potshots at marketing people is shooting fish in a barrel. All creatives have instinctive disrespect for the people who tell them broad truths about the audience, taken out of context ("Everybody likes monkeys!") and draws lame conclusions from them ("We want Seinfeld! But with a monkey!)

The truth is, though, that we creatives work in a relative vacuum. Most of our friends are creative people who work irregular jobs. I can take a wild guess at what the guy who works in the auto plant in Mahwah (at least till last month) likes to watch on TV, but only because of the numbers. Apparently he likes to watch comfort food TV -- crime dramas where the heroes are heroes and the villains are vile and the heroes always get the villains by the end of the hour. I like to watch MAD MEN, where if you get up to go to the fridge in the middle, you'll miss something important.

Which is where marketing people come in. And focus groups. And testers. If focus groups didn't work at all, networks wouldn't use them. Granted, they can become insulation for network execs ("How was I supposed to know it would tank? The testing was through the roof!") But sometimes creatives need to be reminded that if the show is all over the place, changing genre in mid-episode, writers may think it's cool, but watchers will think it's confusing. (Cf FIREFLY.)

Marketing feedback is like all feedback. You can't take it literally; you have to interpret it. But all feedback is useful, if you figure out how to use it.