I functionally quit my job as a substitute teacher in mid-April. There were a lot of reasons but at the time it felt like every day that month I had to read newspaper articles telling me why my job sucked and it got harder for me to hide how much I disliked it.
I don't want to do the thing where I complain out the door though it is cathartic whenever I decide to break my own rules.
I spent pretty much most April and May knocked out. One of the reasons why I disliked my job is that I had to wake up early,about 5:00 to get ready to go and be available to take the call, but didn't know if I was coming in or not and it would mess with my sleep schedule and it was getting to the point where I could feel it.
So for two months I would just randomly fall asleep. It pissed me off then and it pisses me off now but in retrospect, I needed the sleep because right around June I started getting ideas.
Actually getting enough sleep made me smarter. So that's why we do that thing where we waste a third of our day unconscious. Who knew?
Not only was I coming up with ideas but I was dusting off old ones.
I was more or less in the same place I was last year when I said I want to make my blog more professional.
I have mixed feelings about that. On the whole, I think I've only done about 2/3 of what I said I wanted to do but I'm still proud of what I think I've accomplished.
In contrast to what I was doing at my job my blog represents the sort of stuff I would like to do with my life so to a point anyway I'm fine with setbacks as long as it's clear that I'm making progress. Compared to what I was doing this time last year it's night and day.
But my great fear is that I am running out of resources in more ways than one. I do not want to stall out.
It's not a perfect solution as I don't think I have the numbers to really sustain what I want to do nor myself if I really set this out to be a life for myself. But for a long while, I've wanted to at least try Patreon and I get hung up on one thing.
The video.
Back in June, I started filling out Patreon goals and more and more it started to feel like the "business plan" I had laid out the previous year. I started to feel like instead of goals what I was doing was trying to justify to myself why this or that item would make what I wanted to do easier if only I could afford it.
A bigger sd card would let me shoot longer without having to upload things onto a computer.
A skype premium and a skype number would let me take calls from my computer better enabling audio interviews
And (at the time) not having an external hard drive that I solely devoted to blog stuff was a pain in the ass.
But all the same, putting words to all that stuff made me want to do it more. But I kept getting hung up on one thing that I've been putting off for about a month.
The video.
I saw this and it made me want to get ambitious.
....
....
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I DO NOT HAVE THE TIME OR MONEY TO GET AMBITIOUS ON THE CROWDFUNDING VIDEO!!!!!!!
She basically wants the pitch to be a trailer.
And for about a month. I thought I could do that.
Until it slowly dawned on me that it would take so much time, money and energy that I couldn't do anything else that I do for the blog which defeats the purpose. Especially considering that to get that type of editing I would need a new more powerful computer which ain't happening on my already stretched budget.
Watch some of the behind the scenes stuff for the more production heavyYoutube videos. Putting together stuff like that is a feat unto itself.
The overriding theme of the rest of Film Courage is
It's going to be hard.
You will have to take your lumps.
But at the end of the day you're either going to do it or you ain't, and you know you want to do it so get off your ass and fuckin' move!
Getting hung up on the crowdfunding video seems to fit it the ain't box.
And the more I think about it the more I realize this isn't exactly a "new" problem.
How much time and effort should filmmakers put into marketing their films?
It's a complicated question which depends on a lot of factors. How early you are in development, what is the strength of the work that's already been done, And in my case can those dollars be spent actually making the finished project better.
Look if you're in the big leagues dealing with hundreds of thousands or even a couple million dollars yeah that's a pretty stupid way to market a project.
(Oh this is a whole other contention) But that's mostly not what Kickstarter or Patreon for that matter are.
I'm not going to pretend that not having good marketing materials won't help fund or sell stuff and all that may make for a better realization of vision. But that can't come at the expense of the actual finished "product."
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