Motive and Perspective

by Damon Chang

As the only participant to make it to the final round in 2002 and 2003, Damon Chang has moved onto a young and successful producing career in Los Angeles.  Notable credits include a 1st runner up finish out of 279 teams in the 2003 NYC Midnight Movie Making Madness competition as well as short projects on 35mm (Frailty), HD (20^th Century FOX’s Except For Danny), and CGI (The Ride of Lucky and The Navigator for LA post house Digital Domain). Damon and his projects have also been covered by NBC (KXAN), FOX (FOX-7), The New York Daily, Wired Magazine, and Moviemaker Magazine. His email address is damon@genesisfilms.us

I guess I should start my reflections on the NYCMMM competition with two elements: motive and perspective. Motive as in what will motivate other people to work for me for my project as well as in motive as in what are our final goals as filmmakers for each particular project. That second part is important as you cross into promoting and distribution. Perspective is an overall assessment of what is necessary, what is desired, and what can be achieved at each particular budget level; because one of the biggest oversights for Indie filmmakers is realization that every project has a point where you do not have the sufficient money and/or resources to enter production. That being said, here’s my hopefully entertaining story:

When I entered into this competition two years it was out of sheer luck. I was surfing the internet one day and I came across this brand new competition on a message board at Indiewire.com talking about the 2002 New York City Midnight Movie Making Madness. I passed it along to my roommate and three months later we were staring at the prompt:

A comedy about an artist addicted to sniffing paint.

We ended making a parody about an actor (performing artist) who played a martial artist who, in that particular scene on that particular day, was being tortured by the evil nemesis to sniff spray paint in return for not revealing the location of the secret nuclear missile site. I think I got off easy. I was directing and producing that year; and I remember reading first draft that my “writing team” handed me which had the same concept but with Indians getting shot and Romans killing each other in the Coliseum, all the while using the theme of performance artists sniffing some sort of paint-like substance. Ultimately, the only crazy brained idea that stayed was a one minute mockumentary spoof at the beginning of our entry that had “an artist addicted to smelling taint” (please look it up if you don’t know) because the filmmakers (us) had  read the prompt from NY wrong. That got a few chuckles out of our audiences through the years.

So next thing we know, we’re headed to NY as official “winners” of the first round! Yay! That first year in NY was a memorable one. A group of filmmakers in NY associated with the competition saw our first round film and they liked it so much that they (or he as in the great Stuart Entner he) called me up and asked if we could be miked and taped during our shoot that weekend. I said sure! Why not? Great exposure right?...Doh!  

You see, that year we had brought up our secret weapon…a portable laptop editing machine. As a team not from NY, we reasoned that the only way we could compete against NY teams with their equipment and crew members was bring a portable laptop and edit on the fly on location. It was going to be our glory moment. Well, without going into too much detail in this particular story we basically ran into technical complications that would accompany ANY production happening in 24 hours; mainly we chipped off our laptop’s firewire input device. After a night of writing about:

A fairy tale about a pathological liar

we were stuck at 9:00 AM in NY without any sort of editing suite. Running around the city frantically, we could not find or convince anyone to service our Dell IBM PC on a Saturday in the city -

Until that is, we came across Apple. That’s right, the brand new Apple store in swanky SoHo. We went in and pitched a sad sob story about how we were a group of ragtag filmmakers from Texas (I wore a big ten gallon cowboy hat) here in city for this stupid competition and our freakin’ IBM laptop which we thought was so great broke on us. So here we are. Stuck.

And here you are, Apple, with a golden opportunity. I remember our words memorably. “24 hours from now, we will be telling this story to the remaining teams in the competition and telling them how we got stuck in the biggest of binds and we went to Apple to convince them to let us use their in store Final Cut Pro to edit our movie (which we had only filmed a third at this point). This is the ULTIMATE switch campaign. And 24 hours from now, you guys will finish this sentence for us…Apple definitely __________ our lives.”

And they bought it. We hastily shot some remaining scenes and threw together a final product on their FCP and turned it in. We knew we had no shot at winning unless everyone else turned in crap but we wanted to finish so we could tell the Apple story. Oh, and it made for great footage for that documentary team that was still following us around all weekend. Stuart Entner loves me.

Anyway, that year we did turn in a completed film in 24 hours, we did not win, and we, as a team, vowed never to try and make a movie in 24 hours again. In fact, one of my crew members made the astute suggestion in her rant that any team outside NY was at a huge disadvantage because of resources; and that we shouldn’t have even brought up a team from Texas but instead should’ve just shot the movie from Austin and tried to stream the movie up to NY within that 24 hours. “Yeah!” we cried. “NY sucks!” “Boo! Hiss!” and “$*@# you too!” And we left NY with our broken laptop.

Fast forward ten months later. Craig and Charlie up their grand prize from $2,400 to $10,000 for the 2003 competition. Fine. Be that way.

I started creating another team.

Motive, perspective. This time, I remembered those ingenious words from my team member. This time, I had a plan. Even though we couldn’t do any “pre-production” I actually prepped for the competition two months ahead of time. I approached the best Independent filmmakers in Austin and pitched them a wild idea of how to split this $10,000 without them ever needing to go to NY. I told them about how I could spin this competition as “Austin Indie filmmaking beats NY teams in a global competition”…how I could gather 85 crew members, two TV stations, local papers, and fifteen restaurants to promote our team. This time, we would make it again to that second round and then shoot our movie in Austin and stream it to NY where I would be the only crew member present to hand it in.

And it worked to a charm. I was able to attract perhaps Austin’s most talented “up and coming director” Jeffrey Travis. Jeffrey had at the time spent an entire year as the #1 filmmaker on Kevin Spacey’s worldwide Triggerstreet site. On top of that, because of our captivating approach of town unity and “Austin versus NY”, we eventually planned a “Write, Shoot, Edit, and PREMIERE your movie in front of 250 people at a premiere party with two bands and local news stations while the producer is on a live feed from NY in 24 hours” Event / Promo. On top of that we had a documentary team following my production team around in Austin during those 24 hours and that documentary team aired its footage on local access TV that very day, which then was shown in 15 local restaurants promoting and inviting all their patrons out for this big premiere party that night. Whew.

And everybody dug it…because it was a good idea and because generally most people will support you if you have a good idea. That’s the only way Indie film producers can separate one project from another in the eyes of the public: how you promote your movie. Shooting an independent movie is very similar across the board: free labor, beg – borrow – steal resources, and simple, talking heads stories. But how you promote your shoot is the best way you can make a mark in your community. Charlie and Craig gave me a golden opportunity in approaching the Austin film community and the talented pool of Austin filmmakers to combine forces (if only for a weekend) and make something special. Along the way, all of us got fantastic exposure from FOX, NBC, NY Daily News, Wired Magazine, MovieMaker Magazine, and our first round movie has actually played at a few festivals around the country.

Motive. Perspective. As a producer, I couldn’t have asked for anything more. Charlie and Craig gave me the opportunity and I spun this thing dry until there was nothing left to spin. For filmmakers, I gave Jeffrey the opportunity to crew up twice with the best in Austin and in the end everyone had not one but two great movies that they’re proud of. BTW – our final round movie shot in 24 hours was prepped and shot as a period piece set in the late 1880s on a ranch in Texas complete with animals and children. We wanted nothing to do with NY. =)

In conclusion, I want to thank these guys for this wonderful opportunity. What started out as a meaningless click on an internet web board has now launched my producing career and has taught me the lessons of motive and perspective towards any project.  I wish the best of luck to all the competitors this year.