Orlando Film Festival!

For the tagline of my blog being called, “The Life Of A Quadriplegic Filmmaker…,” over these past years, I really have not written too many posts on the subject of “filmmaking.”  I mean from my count I would put the number of posts that deal with that topic at a total of six (6).  Looking at it from my perspective I guess you could say there really are two (2) main reasons for it being that way: 1, I was never able to get a job in the industry post college, and 2, I really do not want to pursue that career anymore as my interests have changed.

That being said, ironically, this blog post is going to fall in that category of me being a “quadriplegic filmmaker.”  It has taken me four years, but I a little over seven months ago I completed my first feature film with a group of friends I graduated college with.  The film is a feature documentary on WWII bearing the name Angels Of The Sky.

Creating the documentary Angels Of The Sky was not a film I ever thought I was going to make…it just happened.  The summer of 2011, was coming to a conclusion, therefore, before I was going to start on a new adventure by attending Chapman University’s Masters in Business Administration (MBA) program, I wanted to have one last hurrah.  The hurrah I chose may sound boring to some of you, but it was a living history museum on WWII.  That museum was the Lyon Air Museum attached to John Wayne Airport in Santa Ana, California.

Upon entering the Lyon Air Museum and looking at the exhibits one by one, a docent came up to me and began talking about the B-17, I was standing in front of.  At the time little did I know that all the docents were veterans from WWII.  This docent was Edward Stapleton, a pilot, who flew P-38s and B-17s.  As Mr. Stapleton began talking and explaining all the ins and outs of the airplane, he began to tell his life story of what caused him to join the service and how he became a POW in German territory during WWII.  Well, 45 minutes later, his story was over…and my response was, “That needs to be a movie.”

Since I decided to pursue telling Mr. Stapleton’s life story, I wanted to get it on film as soon as possible.  I setup a day and time, to meet Mr. Stapleton at the Lyon Air Museum, but unfortunately, he did not show up due to a medical emergency.  Therefore, in order to try and make something out of nothing, the staff of the museum told me I should look into interviewing a couple of other docents that were there.

To make a long story short, there were multiple WWII veterans who all had amazing stories of how they had become POWs in German territory.  Therefore, with the museum’s help, I began contacting each docent one after another uncovering priceless stories of WWII veterans.

With our film Angels Of The Sky finished, I began sending it to film festivals around the world in hopes of getting it a little exposure.  Well, after getting rejection, after rejection, after rejection, after rejection (which comes in the territory of Hollywood), we finally got accepted into the Orlando Film Festival.  The Orlando Film Festival officially, openings today, and runs for five (5) days closing Sunday night.  Our film is scheduled to be shown at the festival on Sunday, at 1:40 PM EST, making it our world premiere, so if you might be in the area, please stop by to check it out.

Overall, making this film has been a tremendous learning experience, and I am thrilled that this film presented itself to me as I was fortunate to capture priceless stories of people’s motivation, empowerment and the will of the human spirit.  Today, 750 veterans from the WWII era die every day.  If we do not take the time to try and uncover them, they will be lost forever…

Below is the trailer of the film and links to our social media pages.

Angels Of The Sky – Facebook

Angels Of The Sky – Twitter

“Back To The Future,” Is No Longer The Future…

On July 3, 1985, the first film of a three-part trilogy was released in theaters nationwide; that film was Back To The Future.  Back To The Future starred Michael J. Fox as Marty McFly and Christopher Lloyd as Dr. Emmett Brown aka Doc.  Doc was a scientist/inventor who created a time machine out of the coolest car ever, a DeLorean.  MARTY: “Wait a minute. Wait a minute, Doc. Ah…Are you telling me that you built a time machine…out of a DeLorean?”  DOC: “The way I see it, if you’re gonna build a time machine into a car, why not do it with some style?”

With the release of the first Back To The Future, it was hailed as an instant classic.  In each film, both Marty and Doc visit a different time period as they continuously keep screwing up their own lives.  Back To The Future: Part I (1955), Back To The Future: Part II (2015), and Back To The Future: Part III (1885).  The significance of these three films have withstood their time of aging as they are just as good today, despite their respected release dates being 1985, 1989 and 1990.

In the previous paragraph, I am not sure if you caught what date I wrote so take a minute and look back at Back To The Future: Part !I.  That is right, Back To The Future: Part II took place in 2015, specifically today, October 21, 2015.  With today, being October 21, 2015, the day Marty and Doc go to the future, people have been buzzing about this day all year long.  However, to say the least, the future (or now our present) is nothing like the film predicted it would be like.  Back To The Future: Part II predicted we would have flying cars, self-tying shoes, and most notably hoverboards.  None of these things predicted, in the 1989 film are remotely close to happening, but one company is bringing their product to market, and that is Pepsi,

In Back To The Future: Part II Marty walks into Cafe 80’s (a futuristic diner) and orders a Pepsi from a virtual waiter on a moving TV.  After doing so, a unique bottle is delivered through a tube in the counter, bearing the name Pepsi Perfect.  With Pepsi getting behind all the excitement for October 21, 2015, they released 6,500 bottles of the futuristic Pepsi Perfect bottle from Amazon.com for a price of $20.15, which is kind of crazy and clever.

I tried to get a bottle last night as the clock struck 12:00 AM EST, but I was unsuccessful in obtaining a Pepsi Perfect bottle as the communication from Pepsi was pretty terrible.  All anyone could find about the release information on the “Perfect” bottle was from their twitter page:

From what information I can gather online, Amazon and Pepsi ended up releasing the Pepsi Perfect bottle before midnight EST, not making it October 21, 2015.  So, I guess the Pepsi PR stunt was not “Perfect.”

Even though Pepsi had a small part in Back To The Future: Part II and they tried to bring the excitement of their product to life, today, October 21, 2015, marked a perfect day for movie theaters to celebrate by showing all three films.  Where I live all our theaters are AMC, and they are only showing each film once; therefore I bought my tickets two weeks ago as I did not want to miss this once in a lifetime opportunity.  The showings for the three films are staggered one after another with the times being 4:29 PM, 7:00 PM, and 9:30 PM.  I have never done a movie marathon like this in a theater before, so it will definitely be a memorable experience.

So, like other films from the past, time eventually caught up with Back To The Future: Part II, just like it did with the 1968 film, 2001: A Spacey Odyssey.  Both films predicted a drastically different world than what the present brought us, but at least it is fun to imagine what the future will bring.

***UPDATED NOVEMBER 3, 2015***

After all the backlash from Back To The Future fans on Pepsi’s failed release of the Pepsi Perfect bottle, Pepsi announced late on October 21st, that they would release an additional 6,500 bottles through their website today, November 3, 2015.

With all the backlash in the previous debacle of an attempt by Pepsi to release Pepsi Perfect smoothly, you would think Pepsi would do their best to make sure the second time would be much better; however that did not happen.  When I heard Pepsi was going to do an additional release of the Pepsi Perfect bottle I made sure to have my clock set, so I had plenty of time before the hands struck 9 AM EST or 6 AM PST (my time).

I set my clock for 5 AM, as I wanted to be on Pepsi’s website in case they released the bottle early like they did on October 21st.  Therefore, from the time I woke up, to the time the clock struck 6:00 AM, I refreshed the page every 2 seconds for an hour.  However, trying to be prepared and waking up early ended up being a complete waste of time as Pepsi’s website crashed.

As the clock ticked, right around 5:58 AM, I hit refresh, and Pepsi’s page refused to open giving me only a blank white screen.  I continued to hit refresh in hopes that the white screen meant that Pepsi was updating their website and preparing to launch the Pepsi Perfect bottle for consumers, but that was not the case.  The clock continued to click every time I refreshed the page, but it refused to open.  Since Pepsi’s website was not working I checked their Twitter page looking for updates until 6:05 AM when the following message on Pepsi’s Twitter page was released:

After I hit refresh and saw the message above, the timer indicating its posted time said, 2 seconds ago.  However, by the time I clicked the Amazon link and the preorder button, all the Pepsi Perfect bottles had been sold.  It is crazy to think that Pepsi a big company that wanted to celebrate Back To Future by releasing a unique product in order to create a good PR campaign to boost business, would be terrible at doing so.  I mean Pepsi’s PR stunt did not fail once, but twice, Pepsi really should call it Pepsi Imperfect.  It does not make sense that Pepsi would only release 13,000 Pepsi Perfect bottles with the demand there is.  If I were the CEO of Coca-Cola, I would capitalize on Pepsi’s mistakes and release 1 million bottles of “Coke Perfect” as millions of people are now mad at Pepsi.

I Don’t Get Hollywood?!?!

Today, the fantasy adventure film Pan opens in theaters nationwide.  The film Pan is a prequel to J.M. Berrie’s book Peter Pan, in how it tells the story of how Peter got to Neverland.  Pan, which is financed by Berlanti Productions and RatPac-Dune Entertainment may be in for a disaster of a weekend, due to its enormous budget.

Pan’s production budget came in at a whopping $150 million, which I think is absolutely crazy.  I heard this film was heading into production a couple of years ago and to say the least, I was quite shocked Hollywood would roll the dice on another incarnation of J.M. Berrie’s Peter Pan after a not so stellar box office performance of the 2003 film Peter Pan directed by P.J. Hogan.

The 2003, film Peter Pan took a different look at the original Peter Pan story as well, but it under performed significantly.  In 2003, Peter Pan opened on Christmas day and debuted in seventh place with a total earnings of just over $11 million according to Box Office Mojo.  This was less than expected and disastrous as the original budget for the film was $100 million, but ended being north of $130 million.  After the dismal return of the first week in theaters the studios that financed the film had little hopes of regaining their initial investment.

When it comes to films being released looking at the budgets and what I have written so far is not actually telling the whole story. The other part has to do with marketing.  When it comes to films being released, it does not matter if you have the greatest film ever made; you somehow need to get the word out.  This is marketing and when it comes to big budget films and their nationwide/global release, marketing the film can be anywhere from 25% – 100% in addition to the original budget of the film.

That being said, Warner Bros. Entertainment is the distribution company behind the film Pan, and when it comes to their films, they market the hell out of them.  With Warner Bros. Entertainment behind the distribution, Hollywood insiders are speculating that the budget and marketing of Pan combined is in excess of $300 million.  Ultimately, with a budget and marketing expenses this high, the break even point for this film is believed to be somewhere in the $500 – $600 million range.

I talked briefly about how Hollywood studios like to put all their eggs in one basket for a single film in order to make their year-end earnings profitable in my blog post Spielberg And I Think Alike.

In the past, there have been successful films that revolved around the Peter Pan story, but they have been more drama oriented.  The most successful film I can recall that dealt with the Peter Pan story was the 2004, film Finding Neverland.  Finding Neverland starred Johnny Depp and was very different in how it was a live-action drama instead of trying to focus on the extensive use of computer generated imagery (CGI); which both Peter Pan and Pan are doing.

The 2004, film Finding Neverland had a production budget of $25 million, and as of today, Box Office Mojo has the film’s worldwide gross at just under $117 million.  In terms of the worldwide gross as of today the 2003, film Peter Pan, according to Box Office Mojo comes to just under $122 million.  So, when it comes to films that revolve around J.M. Berrie’s book Peter Pan, I think it is possible to make a successful film, but I think Hollywood is going about it in a wrong way in how they are trying to follow/create a new comic book type genre.

With the release of Pan nationwide today, it will be interesting to see the box office report Monday morning.

***UPDATED RESULTS***

Box Office Mojo announced the weekend results for Pan, and it came in 3rd place with a terrible opening weekend of just over $15 million.  The two films that beat it were Hotel Transylvania 2 ($20 million) and The Martian ($37 million).  This is not good news for Pan as the two films that beat it have been out for some time: Hotel Transylvania 2, (3 weeks) and The Martian, (2 weeks).

Advertisements Are Taking Over The World!!!

I was watching an episode of Chasing Classic Cars on Velocity the other day, and in terms of advertising, I saw one of the most disturbing things I have ever seen.

Chasing Classic Cars is a reality show that follows Wayne Carini who sells very high-end classic cars.  On the last episode, which aired Tuesday, May 7, 2013, Wayne brought a couple of cars to the Amelia Island RM Auction.  Before the cars Wayne brings go on the auction block, he always tours the facilities showing the other cars for sale and schmoozes with individuals he knows.  On this passed episode what I found so disturbing was in the middle of the show there was a blatant advertisement for Hagerty Insurance.

This may sound trivial, but what I find disturbing about this is television advertisements have always been during breaks from the show in terms of commercials.  Instead, this advertisement occurred during the show.  The advertisement occurred when Wayne was looking at a Tucker 48.  Wayne pulled out his phone and looked up the estimated price the car will sell for on Hagerty’s website giving them major props to how accurate and easy it is to find out how much a car is worth.

This is the second time I have seen this occur.  The first time I saw this ”new” form of advertising was back in October of 2012, on the hit Fox show New Girl, episode “Model.”  In this episode, the main character Jess (Zooey Deschanel) walks around stumbling in high heels trying to model the 2013, Ford Fusion.  This segment lasted for more than two minutes, and it was narrated by a spokes person talking about all the features the car had.

As a filmmaker myself, I find this appalling because the show and network are sacrificing airtime in order to squeeze more money in advertising revenue.  I began thinking about why this is happening, and I believe the reason has to do with DVRs and younger individuals like myself watching shows on the Internet.

As DVRs are becoming more readily available and fewer people are watching television shows live, networks are having to try and find other ways to make a profit.  I for one do not watch any shows live, I either record it on my DVR or watch it on the Internet.  A great example of networks fearing the direction the television industry is moving occurred a couple of months ago.

In January of every year, a trade show called CES (Consumer Electronics Show) occurs that shows off all the latest and upcoming electronics that will be hitting the market soon or years to come.  At the end of the show, awards are given out to the best products and this year Dish Network won best in show with their DVR “The Hopper.”  “The Hopper” DVR allows individuals to jump blocks of commercials with the press of a button.  As a result, when “The Hopper” was released networks like FOX, NBC and CBS sued Dish Network in fear that they would not be able to charge for ads threatening their business.

Although the two examples of advertising mentioned above do not occur all the time, product placement has been occurring in film and television for years.  In terms of film James Bond has been advertising cars and Morgan Spurlock created an entire film fully funded through advertising.  I keep wondering what the future is going to look like as more individuals continue to move away from watching standard television?  Are scripted ads going to increase during shows or is it going to be like VH1’s former Pop Up Video?  As of right now, I am not really sure, but I can say I do not like it.

The next time you go out just look at how often we are bombarded with advertisements trying to get us to buy things.  It is virtually impossible to avoid seeing any form of advertising.  Ads are literally everywhere cars, the internet, radio, billboards, gas stations, license plate brackets, and even people’s bodies in terms of tattoos.  What is next, ads in our dreams?

The following hyperlink is an article written by Entertainment Weekly showing more examples of product placement in TV shows.