How will people be able to watch the movie when it's finished?

This is an excellent question. Considering Hell is not a Steven Spielberg movie starring George Clooney, how exactly are we going to get it in front of people when it’s finished? Distributors are not currently on the phone asking if they can open it on three thousand screens at Christmas, though I guess that could just be because they don’t have my phone number. 

While the first, second, and third goals of working on Hell are to make the funniest, most entertaining movie we can, we obviously want as many people as possible to see it once it’s finished. How? Are we going to sell it online? Send it to festivals? What? 

We could obviously distribute the movie online (and we will), but not many people are going to watch it if not many people know about it. 

We could submit the movie to festivals (and we will), but comedies like this aren’t usually the kind of fare people watch at Cannes. There just aren’t enough quiet scenes of characters staring off into space while contemplating their purpose for wealthy festival donors to feel like they’ve encountered art. 

We could try to find a distributor for the movie (something we're looking into), but that’s no guarantee of anything. Even distributed independent films may not be seen by many people. 

So what’s the plan then? 

As it stands, our plan is to tour and promote the film in small theaters in various parts of the US and Canada (and maybe even the UK) for anywhere from around five to nine months. We want to make these screenings into events, where the musicians from the movie might play or comedians might perform sets or there’s a Q&A with the filmmakers before / after the show. 

The goal here is to build at least a small following (and mailing list) before we put the movie online, before it’s distributed by a vendor, before it’s been submitted to many festivals. That way we have an audience of people who will know about it and tell others about it before we try to sell it for download and present it on a larger stage. We’ll start with premieres in SF and LA, then tour the Bay Area and Southern California, go to New England and New York, and on from there. 

What Camera Do You Use?

“You know, it was all on a lark. I wasn’t taking myself seriously as a photographer. I borrowed a camera, they wanted to give me a light meter and I wouldn’t take it. Here is my photo education: when you’re outside in bright light you put the thing on 16 and you put it on 250 or 500 or something, when you’re outside and it’s cloudy you put the thing on 16 and you put it on 60, and when you’re inside, you go by the window and you put the thing on 2.8 and the other thing on 30. That’s what I did and all my exposures were perfect. That was my total education in photography.”

— Duane Michals

Since I've made some short films (one of which was shortlisted for cinematography at several festivals) and take pictures of things, people often ask me what camera they should buy. I always provide some vague, general answer because I have no idea what they should buy and they’d probably get better advice from a distracted teenager in the camera department at Best Buy. A lot of photographers, videographers, and cinematographers are gear heads, they love their cameras almost as much as what they produce with them. That's not me. I know what equipment I need to get the images I want, but that’s the extent of how much I care about the technical side of things.  

This certainly doesn’t make me better than all those people who are obsessed with their equipment, I'm sure in plenty of ways that it makes me worse, but it definitely makes me not very knowledgeable about which GoPro will work best with the drone someone got for their birthday.

If I don't care that much about camera equipment, then how'd I choose which camera to shoot Hell with? And also, what camera am I shooting Hell with anyway? 

Hell will be shot on a Blackmagic Cinema Camera. I bought this camera a couple of years ago for several reasons: 

• It works with all the expensive Canon lenses I already owned. Lenses are just as important, and often more important, than the camera itself and I didn't want to start over with those. 
• It's fairly small and adaptable.
• It has 13 stops of dynamic range. What does that mean? Well, for example, if I'm shooting in a dark room backlit by windows, it means the camera will capture all the detail from both the room and what's outside the windows, instead of blowing out all the brighter parts of the scene. This provides a lot more flexibility in post-production. 
• It shoots a very flat, desaturated image, mostly due to all that dynamic range mentioned above. This also provides a lot more flexibility in post-production, particularly for color correction. 
• It has arguably the best combination of picture quality and price of any video camera. 

All that sounds good. But does this camera actually produce high enough quality visuals to capture footage that looks like a really real movie? Just from using the camera, I know that it does. Plus it was also used on the recent X-Files mini-series and several other "cinematic" TV shows. So even fairly deep pocketed productions are impressed enough with the BMCC to use it either instead of or alongside more expensive cameras.

See Several Stars of Hell at the Roxie Tonight in Talkies

Aviva Siegel, Land Smith-Abbinante, and Scott Vermeire are all performing sets at Talkies tonight. The show is at 10:00 in the Little Roxie. Talkies is a monthly (and hilarious) comedy show, so if you can't make it out tonight, I strongly recommend attending the next show on the first Friday of May. 

The Second Blog Post

Welcome to the second edition of Hell: The Blog Post, an informative and mildly entertaining blog series that I started last week. You remember that, yeah? If you don’t remember, it’s because you overlooked reading it, so don’t worry, you’re not slowly losing your memories or anything. Unless you did read it last week and still don’t remember, in which case you're becoming really forgetful and should consider seeing a doctor.

What do you have for us in today's post, Richard? 

Hey, thanks for asking! There are two topics that follow this sentence. 

Watch Kaseem Bentley and Scott Vermeire on Flophouse

Once, not so long ago, there was a cable channel called History Channel 2. If you were tired of watching new shows about WWII and Bigfoot on the History Channel, well then you could go on over to History Channel 2 and watch reruns of old ones. This turned out to not be financially viable, so HC2 went away and was replaced by Viceland, a channel created by the producers of Vice in what little spare time they have when they're not busy testing the theory that any inanimate object can be turned into a bong. 

One of the launch shows for this new TV channel is a great show called Flophouse, and two of the stars of Hell, Kaseem Bentley and Scott Vermeire, appear on this very show doing comedy. You should watch! Viceland is channel 276 on Comcast in SF, and the episode they're in, How Come at the Convent, can be streamed online for free via the internet right here: 

https://www.viceland.com/en_us/video/how-come-at-the-convent/56ce118cf780a10e5d75a74f

Kaseem Bentley

Scott Vermeire (the one with no shirt)

Movie Progress: Pre-Production

Last week I mentioned we're in the pre-production phase of shooting Hell. What exactly does this mean? 

It means the script, which we've been writing for two years, is pretty much finished. It means that the cast is pretty much in place. It means that we're now focusing on the prep work we need to do to actually shoot this thing. 

What does this entail?  A lot of stuff that I'll be rambling about, uh, wait, no, I mean that I'll be writing succinct, interesting posts about in the coming weeks. Stuff like: 

• Costuming 
• Storyboarding
• Scheduling
• Rehearsing
• Puppet Building
• Rehearsing Some More 
• Scouting Locations
• Production Design

I am not an auteur (it'd be ridiculous for me to claim to be one). Neither is George. Neither is anyone else who had a part in writing the script. The characters in this movie did not spring from our heads fully formed and perfect in every way. Spending months of preparation before we start shooting is the best and only way to ensure we're fully ready to go come June. 

That's all for this week! 

Hell: The Blog

Welcome to the first edition of Hell: The Blog Post, an informative and mildly entertaining once weekly guide to our progress in writing, pre-producing, filming, editing, showing, marketing, touring, and basking in the well earned success of creating a feature length comedy. We're currently in the "pre-producing" phase of this list, so there's, uh, a ways to go. 

"Richard, can I ask a question?” you say. 

“Sure thing,” I say, even though I just got started and it’s pretty rude of you to interrupt me so quickly. But I’m cool like that.  

"Why are you writing a blog? Who are you, Dog with a Blog?" 

First, no, I absolutely am not. I’d be lucky to be so talented.    

Second, I'm writing a blog because it’ll be fun to document the process and have that documentation to look back on when everything is finished, and also because several people have said they’d like to read about it.

But aren't movies only made by people in Hollywood or dipshits with rich parents who think they can buy their way into becoming one of those people in Hollywood? Often yes! But not always! It just so happens I fall into this not always group. I'm not a rich dipshit, just a standard everyday one. 

I moved to San Francisco 14 years ago to write stories and take pictures, and hey, it turns out movies are really just a combination of those two things. Many years ago I started making short films with my friend and co-director / collaborator George Sukara. Some of them are great and played at various festivals! Some of them are not as great and did not do so! I learned quite a lot from all of them, and honestly learned a lot more from the ones that did not turn out the way I wanted than the ones that did. 

I also moved to San Francisco 14 years ago with the goal of not being poor. This second goal took precedent, so outside of video projects at work, I could never treat filmmaking as more than a serious hobby. It's just not possible to make a feature film and work fifty hours a week at a normal job, at least not and have that movie turn out as good as you'd like it to be. 

But as I'm closing in on 37, and am in a pretty good place financially, this feels like the right moment to go back to what 23 year old Richard came out here to do. We have a 130 page script we've been writing for two years. Know tons of talented people who are excited to be part of the project. Have all kinds of equipment and experience we've picked up through years of both succeeding and failing with short films. If not now, then when?    

So here we are? Wait, sorry, that's the wrong punctuation and it's too late for me to turn back now that I'm writing the next sentence. Let's try that again:

So here we are! Filming officially begins on June 4th.