KOSMOS: Making of a Micro-Budget Sci-Fi TV Show

This is the story of how we made a 5 episode sci-fi show without industry backing. With no locations a week to go before shooting, a member of the crew blackmailing us halfway through and, with trying to invent a new method of online video distribution, we faced some seriously big challenges.

But would we be able to overcome them?

In 2014, the dust settled on the final show of Third Contact – the ‘zero budget’ scifi feature film which had taken over the prevous 5 years of my life. Then, without too much rest, I soon found myself involved in another ‘filmmaking against the odds’ rollercoaster ride.

New Ideas

My quest to get my camcorder-shot movie into cinemas finally came to an end after the failure to fund a 20 city tour of USA and Canada. The scale of the project was ambitious, but I wanted to push the “cinema on demand” idea to its limits. A 20 city tour around North America using nothing but the power of the crowd would have been a spectacular achievement. But it wasn’t to be.

So, what next?

I had another feature script called Belle Epoque – a “based on a true story” family drama. But I didn’t believe I could make this on a micro budget. And that would mean returning to the industry funding game (yuk). I also worked on a couple of drafts for a new story idea (a fictional documentary investigating a social experiment gone wrong).

Anyway, it was clear to me the idea of cinema I’d grown up with was over. At least, for indie film. Streaming was going to be the future, as it has been for music. With video distribution platforms like YouTube open to all, distributing your film wasn’t the problem. The problem was how to get enough viewers to make it financially feasible.

I’d spent the last year doing nothing but crowdfunding, running over 10 campaigns. Most of which had successfully reached their targets. Was there perhaps a way to tap into the power of the crowd again, but we would replace money as the goal for something else: viewers.

Gamification

My instinct has always directed me to be different. Following others is boring. The thing is, our filmmaking heroes are all innovators and revolutionaries – yet so many of us try to emulate them by copying their working style, when the only thing we should be copying is their ability to do things differently.

The idea of going to the industry and trying to make a film the traditional way doesn’t excite me. Cinema is changing, attendances dropping (especially for the kind of films I love), so what could I do to try to find a new way forward?

What if I made a web series, but to “unlock” each episode required a target number of views of the previous episode to be reached? The show would be free to view. All the audience had to do to get the next episode was to help get more viewers. The more people shared, the faster the next episode would be released.

I pitched the idea to friends and colleagues and the reaction was positive. I had my doubts. The main one being: to make this work, I would not only have to be a filmmaker but a brilliant developer too. At first, I decided against it. But then it seemed to be such a cool idea… wasn’t it worth a try?

I believe you fail only when you don’t try. If doesn’t work, you will have learned things you wouldn’t if you’d just done nothing at all.

Mike Myshko, who had helped so much with Third Contact and the Mobile Motion Film Festival, said he could develop a basic platform to test the idea (for what turned out to be 10% of our £30,000 budget). First, I needed some scripts.

6 Screenplays. Make That 5…

For this idea to work, we needed a series of episodes, each one ending in a big cliffhanger. The audience would hopefully want to “unlock” the next episode to find out what happens next. But my 10+ years of writing was almost entirely in the feature-length format. I would have to learn some TV writer skills.

I referred to Lost, Twin Peaks and Lars von Trier’s The Kingdom to get a feel for the pacing and to see how the writers had weaved multiple plot lines together to keep people watching. I’d also just read Philip K. Dicks UBIK and Exegesis (a compilation of his rambling notes he’d written for the decade or more of his life, sometimes genius, sometimes simply insane).

So I came up with Kosmos – a story about a scientist called Philip Huyt whose wife has fallen into a mysterious coma. Her parents and the medical staff have given up hope and want to switch off her life support. The only way to find out what’s going on (and save his wife) is for Philip to plug his mind into her’s using a newly invented “neural transfer” device.

I quickly sketched out a multilayered narrative, with a wide enough scope it could be explored over many hours of TV scifi. I couldn’t afford months or years of story development – I needed to move fast to test this idea. Essentially, we were creating a TV show pilot. Like an 80 minute teaser. This means setting up a lot of story lines and deliberately not answering any of the questions presented.

I personally like mystery. I like ambiguity. I like looking up at the sky and wondering. The universe is unfathomable. It’s the ultimate mystery. So I created Kosmos with many layers of narrative, which leave the audience feeling they don’t quite understand what’s going on, the answer just out of grasp, but with a sense the truth will revealed around the next corner. I don’t know about you, but that’s my overall experience of existence.

After about a month of writing, I had 5 screenplays. Intending to write the 6th and final episode after I had assembled the cast and raised the funds, I started looking for people who might want to be involved.

Building the Team

When I made Third Contact, I was virtually a one man production unit, covering everything normally dealt with by a producer or production manager. But that film was shot over a year. Kosmos would be shot in one 3 week period and I would need help.

Jon Campling, an actor who had come to the IMAX screening, invited me to the premiere of a film he was in – Sleeping Dogs (2013) – shot for £100 and premiered at Raindance. The film was produced by Yana Georgieva, who I found on twitter and asked if she wanted to be involved in Kosmos.

Yana loved the scripts and came on board. Next I asked casting director Andrew Fawn. We’d been in contact a few years before regarding Belle Èpoque. Our strategy was to cast as many of the roles in Kosmos as possible before we launched the Kickstarter campaign, thinking it would help to have as many people tweeting and sharing as possible (I made sure to ask all the actors if they were ok with this during interviews).

While Mike set up a holding page for the website, Andrew cut down the applications to a manageable number (there was just no way I would have time to look at 4000 people). Andrew said an actor had applied for a role, notable as he had 130,000 followers on twitter (currently 366,000). I met Marc Zammit and it turned out we used the same method for acquiring twitter followers (a web app called tweepi.com). He was also perfect for the role of maverick health insurance rep, Louis Lewis.

Another applicant was Virginia Hey (Farscape, Mad Max 2). Virginia had been out of acting for a decade and wanted to make a return. I thought it would be great to have her involved in the show, and she could play the part the coma patient’s (Amy) mother, Diana. Except, as it was written, Diana was a downtrodden, bullied wife and I couldn’t see Virginia in that role. So I switched the genders of Amy’s parents and made the mother the domineering one. I thought it would benefit the story, anyway, if we reversed the bullied wife stereotype.

We were struggling to find an actor for the lead role when a twitter friend said she knew an American actor musician who had starred in a big budget film Giorgino (1994), Jeff Dahlgren. We had a Skype meeting and I thought he would make a great Philip (although it would add the price of a plane ticket from Texas to the budget).

After many more meetings, the cast was assembled. Including, an old IMAX colleague David Avery (who went on to get parts in several notable TV shows and movies) and Terry Molloy (who was once Davros in Dr Who). So, we were now ready to launch the Kickstarter…

Crowdfunding

I had become something of an expert at crowdfunding in the previous 2 years. Depending on the target, they were usually a full time job. You don’t just put up your campaign and wait for the pledges to roll in. However, there’s plenty you can do in preparation to make sure you hit the ground running.

Just setting up the campaign on Kickstarter takes days of work. Images need to be designed, text explaining the project written and rewritten and rewards worked out. The maximum I had achieved up to this point was £15,000 (my first campaign). This time we decided on £30,000, with a much bigger team involved.

Although we had to launch the campaign a bit too close to Christmas for comfort, we hit the ground running with some big early pledges. Virginia has a close relationship (online and at comic cons) with her fans, which made a big difference. But everyone chipped in, asking friends, family and fans to help. About halfway through, a backer took the £5000 reward, giving us a huge boost. The campaign ended with a day to spare – we did it!

Lost Pledges

The campaign clock ticked to zero. Kickstarter began to process the credit and debit card payments from the 546 backers. As usual, a percentage of the payments failed. Normally, it’s a small amount, most of which get cleared, eventually. But this time we had 2 big pledges fail – £5000 and £3000 – almost a third of the budget!

Over the next few days, I kept checking the campaign dashboard to see if the big pledges had cleared – they hadn’t. Of course, I contacted both backers. I met the lady who pledged £3000 and she told me it was an issue with her bank, but assured me the money would come through. The £5000 backer was not responding to emails and I had no other way of contacting him.

After 7 days, Kickstarter gives up trying to process any failed pledges. This day would fall on Christmas day. I presumed no transactions would be processed that day, so when neither payment had come through by Christmas Eve, I assumed we’d lost £8000 of our funds. But I checked and found the £5000 pledge had processed! A perfect Christmas present.

We were still £3000 down, but Yana and I decided to press ahead, choosing February the 17th for the first day of filming. Could we somehow find a way to make this show for £27,000?

Second Campaign

We went over the numbers again and again but there seemed to be no way we could make £27,000 stretch, even after deciding to drop the 6th unwritten episode. We had most things covered, except we would have to limit ourselves to a sound crew of 1 (using the bare minimum equipment I already owned to save on hire) and we had nothing for locations. Most of the show was set in a hotel and a hospital, and finding those for free would be pretty much impossible. We needed that extra £3000.

We quickly set up a 2nd Kickstarter campaign with a goal of £3000 and ran it for 48 hours. We explained why we needed to run the second campaign, messaging the backers of the first. We launched in the evening, hoping to reach 10% or 20% by the end of the night. To our surprise, backers rushed to our aid and we hit the goal in just over 90 minutes!

Locations

With the money in the bank, we could set about trying to find locations. There were 2 options for the hospital. One was a set specially created for film and TV shoots, with rooms and operating theatres set up ready for filming. But the price was £3000 per day, and they weren’t prepared to haggle. The second option was a training hospital in Tooting which hired out rooms when they weren’t being used by the students. Cheaper, but we had to work around their availability. Plus they still charged £600 for half a day.

With shooting on location looking too expensive, I turned to the idea of building a set. A friend from the IMAX was an artist and suggested the gallery space below her small studio to build it in. Another IMAX friend had left to become a set designer, so I asked her if she could build the sets we needed with the small amount of funds we had. She said she’d give it a go and started working on some ideas.

Unsound Mind

Meanwhile, Yana and I had been meeting potential sound recordists. Although they were excited about the project, none would contemplate working alone, with just a mic and pole. Even after I protested that I had recorded sound myself this way, many times.

We finally found 2 sound recordists who were prepared to work alone. I only met one of them, but decided to go for the one with most credits on IMDb. He was the only person involved who I didn’t meet and this turned out to be a terrible mistake.

Unfortunately, the gallery turned out to be unavailable and the set designer quit, saying she didn’t believe it was possible to build what we needed with the funds we had.

Crown Hotel Moran

With just a week to go, we still didn’t have a single confirmed location. The equipment (and van to drive it around in) had been paid for. The crew and cast had been hired. Everything was ready except we had nowhere to film. We would have to make something work with whatever we could find.

Yana finally managed to find us a hotel location in North West London, the Clayton Crown Hotel in Cricklewood. My artist friend offered her studio. It was really small and full of canvases and other stuff, but it was all we had. Time was running out, we had to make a decision.

So Will (originally been recruited to manage the production) and Laura (set designer we reached through a friend), were set the task of somehow transforming the studio into the main hospital room in the next few days. Could they do it in time?

The Schedule

When we set the dates for shooting, we were again ambitious. Everything closes down for Christmas in the UK (and takes a while to get up and running again moving into January), so we had only 5 weeks to prepare. Over the holidays, while everyone was away, I was busy creating the shooting schedule.

I’d never scheduled a shoot for longer than a few days (as my first feature was broken up into small shoots of a 1 or more days each). put simply, the more pages you shoot per day, the more economical your shoot. But if you try to shoot too many pages a day, you compromise the quality. So my job here was to try to strike a balance.

Over several days I created a number of schedules, each one with a different number of pages to be shot per day. I went as high as 8 pages a day and as low as 2 pages per day. In the end, I went for a healthy balance of 5 pages per day. The schedule also had to work around actors and locations availability.

The hotel would only allocate us 2 days, which was not enough (with some persuasion, we eventually got 4 days). They also said we couldn’t film in the entrance lobby – a shame, as it was quite large and grand looking. Instead, we had to improvise with a hallway below (which actually added to the claustrophobia of the film, so turned out to be a good thing in the end).

As we approached filming, the actress playing Amy informed us she could only work weekends, because of her day job – I would have to reschedule everything. At first I thought this was going to be impossible until I had some inspiration.

Thing is, Amy’s character is in a coma. So the actress playing her was not much more than a living prop, for most of the shoot. I realised we could gets coverage of her lying in a coma in a few hours and then cut those shots into the rest of the footage. This also reduced her days needed on set and shaved £900 off the budget! Win – win.

Completing the Puzzle

Filmmaking is like a jigsaw puzzle. The goal is to collect enough pieces so they eventually fit together to create the illusion of a complete picture. Where those pieces come from or how you create them doesn’t matter, as long as they fit together convincingly enough that the audience goes with it.

For the hospital, we so far had one small room which we hoped, with some paint and any medical props we could afford to hire, could be turned into something medical looking. But we also needed a ward, an operating theatre, two doctors’ offices, and some connecting corridors. Everything we tried was either too expensive or unavailable.

After a tweet asking for ideas, someone suggested Croydon College. They replied positively and we headed over to take a look at the place. There were 2 buildings – one still a functioning college and another which was empty (and falling apart) but hired out to film crews. We were showed a set built for a recent Kevin Costner thriller. A lot of the walls had been painted green (which, according to Andy, was for better lighting and grading). There was junk everywhere. But the price was good and we believed we could somehow make it work using areas from both buildings.

Anyway, we were out of options with a few days to shoot. Could we make it work?

Action!

Jeff had arrived safely from the USA. Great friend and supporter, Debbie Dzurko, flew in from Canada to play a small cameo and generally help out. Both of them were given rooms at an old friend’s house in Highgate (we’d known each other since school). They were a 10 minute drive from my place in Muswell Hill. So, every day, I’d pick them up in the van we’d hired to cart the equipment around in and drive to the location.

Filming began on February 18th, 2015 (roughly 4 years since we’d wrapped on Third Contact). While we were filming the doctor’s’ office scenes, Will and Laura and others were hastily turning the studio into a private hospital room. Fingers crossed the paint would be dry for the weekend shoot.

The doctors’ offices were shot in one of the college staff offices (recently vacated) – we just rearranged the furniture and props to make them look like different spaces. For the corridors, we would use the old building. We would spend £600 for half a day in the training hospital – cutting this into the other footage would help create a stronger illusion for the audience.

Not of Sound Mind

This was the first time I got to meet our sound recordist – Dave Sohanpal. I immediately got a bad feeling (and so did a number of the crew). In the days leading up to the shoot, Dave had been emailing us demanding more budget for equipment (even though he’d originally agreed to shoot with what we had). His final message was something along the lines of “If it sounds like shit then it’s your fault”. In hindsight, we should have got someone else at that point. But I was just swept up with too many other things to do.

Dave showed up with his own equipment and refused to use mine (saying it was shit). He said he’d “borrowed it” for a week but after that we’d have to pay to use it (I had no intention of paying). I was a sound engineer for 20 years, for music and film, so I have good knowledge in the area. I had Sennheiser 416, which is an industry standard shotgun mic. Dave was using something else, which he insisted was “better” for interior work. Thing is, Dave had some reasonable credits on IMDb, so I gave him the benefit of the doubt.

However, watching Dave work, I soon started to suspect he didn’t know what he was doing. So I wanted to hear the sound he’d been getting to reassure myself he was doing an ok job. At the end of every shoot day, the camera guys would give me the video files to transfer onto a hard drive. Dave was supposed to do the same with the sound files, but he kept “forgetting”. After 2 days shooting, alarm bells were starting to ring. I asked him how the sound was and he said “great”, but never letting me hear it.

Audio Nightmare

Added to the situation with Dave, when we arrived at our perfectly transformed studio we found they were rebuilding the block on the other side of the (very narrow) street. The studio windows were old and thin and barely blocked any sound. We had to record dialogue in what was supposed to be the tranquility of a hospital room but actually sounded like a building site, with pneumatic drills pounding every minute.

I took the double duvet off my bed and hung it across the window to dampen some of the sound. Andy decided he’d set up artificial daylight on the window side of the room, so we didn’t have to worry about the changing light outside – this also served to dampen a little of the noise. But still – pneumatic drills are loud. Plus road traffic, sirens and all kinds of other city noises. Added to that, we’d not only hired the worst sound recordist on the planet, but also he also tried to extort money from us.

Sounding Out

The day arrived when Dave announced the “borrowed” equipment was no longer available. This was good news to me, as he’d no longer be able to avoid me hearing his work. The next day of shooting didn’t involve any dialogue, so I gave Dave the task of recording foley with my Zoom H4n plus Sennheiser.

I spotted Dave had the Zoom set to use the inbuilt mics, even while he was aiming the 416. He insisted he was doing things correctly until I showed him. Even if he didn’t know how to use the Zoom, how could a sound recordist not hear in the headphones the difference between inbuilt mics and the gun mic? Not possible. So now I was pretty much certain – Dave was a fraud.

Next day, we were back in the noisy studio recording dialogue. I asked Dave to let me hear what he’d recorded and found the audio breaking in and out – the cable was broken. Yet, he would’ve just carried on recording without saying anything. That decided things – we had to get a new cable. And sack Dave.

But first we had to try to get the audio he’d recorded from him.

Bye Dave

Acting as if everything was fine, I asked if we could have the sound files before he went home. “Of course,” he said. But as soon as my back was turned, he left. The following morning, Yana confronted him, followed him upstairs and stood by him, waiting. Dave flipped into a sudden rage, charged past her, down the long flight of spiral stairs and out onto the street, screaming all the way for us to “FUCK OFF” and stop “bullying” him.

We never saw Dave again.

With 2 weeks of shooting left, we now had no sound recordist. And no idea if we’d lost the previous week’s worth of sound. I decided to take over. Although it would be an unwelcome distraction from directing, and probably not look good to the cast and crew, I knew we’d get good sound for the rest of the shoot. And we did.

The saga with Dave continued later. But, for the rest of the shoot, most drama occured in front of the camera.

Improvisation

While we managed to pull together enough locations to shoot the majority of the show, we were still short of one place. In the script, Philip goes through a door to find himself in a strange dark room full of futuristic devices. He finds his wife, under a white sheet in the middle of the room, and connected to this alien tech. Figures link them up and he makes his first journey into his wife’s dreams and memories.

So this location had to reflect somehow the idea of entering a dark, dreamlike world. But it was a location too far, for this production. For what I imagined, it would probably have taken another week and another £30,000. But we couldn’t just forget the scene – I had to think of something.

We had access to the dining hall in the hotel. It was below ground, no windows, and quite grand. It had the feeling to me of that dining hall in The Shining. The hall was also full of big round dining tables and I wondered if they could be made to look weird and alien somehow.

We put one table in the middle, for Philip’s wife to lie on, under a white sheet. Then we turned the other tables on their sides, and placed them around her, facing her. They looked like a small circle of standing stones or something. Then I got Andy to set up the lighting so Amy would be under a bright white light and everything else in the room would be in shadow. My hope was I’d be able to turn it into something more scifi with some post computer effects – but as I’d never done CGI before, I didn’t really know for sure how it would turn out.

Final Scenes

The last few days were spent getting the scenes which took place outside the hospital or hotel. For the cafe we found a bar in Ladbroke Grove that was closed during the day. With a bit of dressing and selective angles, it was pretty easy to turn into an arty-looking coffee house. Rental fee: £100.

The rooftop and street scenes where shot last, at the offices of Marcus Markou – an indie writer director who had come to the IMAX show and we’d since made friends. Famous for making breakout hit Papadopoulos & Sons, he also played a little cameo in Kosmos as Dr Javalama.

We needed a crowded street, but we only had about 10 volunteer extras to work with (plus any of the crew who weren’t needed for the shot). So we chose the narrowest of side streets, to make it easier to squash everyone together. Then we got everyone to walk up and down a small section while Jeff ran along it, as he chased after the mysterious girl (Starla) from the cafe.

We completed the shoot with Andy remarking it was the first production he’d worked on that finished ahead of schedule.

Post-production

With the footage in the “can” (2 hard drives from Argos), everything was distributed to the post-production team: me.

I spent the next few months locked away in my room working on editing the whole thing together. I also had to do the sound design, grading and VFX (I’d never really done either of the last 2 before, so I had a bit of a learning curve ahead).

Meanwhile, Dave kept emailing us, threatening to delete all the sound files he had unless we paid him several hundred pounds. We agreed to pay him for the “work” he did, but no more. After his supposed deadline passed, rather than deleting the files he sent more emails, the money demanded increasing each time (which he would claim was to compensate him for the trouble of sending more emails). Dave had turned into a hopeless blackmailer, like a character from a Coen Brother’s movie.

Of course, I wasn’t going to pay him 1000s for what was probably unusable audio. Instead, to warn others, I posted his email on Facebook. A few days later, I received an email from a Metropolitan Police Detective telling me to stop “threatening” Dave Sohanpal on social media. I couldn’t believe he was stupid enough to get real police involved, considering what he’d done.

ADR

This meant over a third of the dialogue would have to be re-recorded. Kindly, the actors volunteered their time to re-do their dialogue in my makeshift ADR set-up. Virginia had experience, having had to ADR the whole first season of Farscape (working on a tight budget, they had to shoot the whole thing in a noisy warehouse). Terry was also something of an expert – nailing each line in one take!

Jeff was back in America, but luckily he was a music producer with his own studio. So I would send him the clips which needed new audio and he would work on them alone in his studio. He’d send me a few versions for me to select from.

VFX

In the script, my idea for the device for connecting minds was insect like, crawling under the skin. This would have to be animated. But we couldn’t find anyone in our budget range to do the work, so at the last minute I changed it to a simpler static device (and watching Black Mirror, 3 years later, seems half the episodes have a similar device). A device would be applied to the side of the head using a grey syringe like tool (in fact, something I found in IKEA when we were looking for cheap set-dressing furniture).

I made contact with a VFX guy who worked for the famous Industrial Light and Magic. He agreed to help and got to work designing a device. It was great to have someone with professional skills involved. Problem was, it took him weeks to create a basic device. I wanted to get the first episodes out in May and, going at this speed, it would have take many more months to have the final VFX done.

So I had a go myself, using whatever resources and images I could find on the web. I’d never used After Effects before, so I was learning the basics of motion tracking and masking. The image I used for the device was a pic of the head of a metal detector. I distorted it to try to make it look like it was sitting on Amy’s head and added flashing red and green lights, and an “under the skin” glow to give a sense the device was searching her mind.

DIY CGI

I had a whole list of other things to do. Painting out a railing on the rooftop took days. One of those thankless jobs because, hopefully, the audience will never know there was a railing there. Again, I didn’t know what I was doing so I often had to do it all again properly once I worked it out. Adding the floor numbers to the left scene, room numbers to hotel doors, images and videos onto laptop and smartphone screens.

For the weird dark room scene, I painted out the legs of the tables and added animated screens to the back of them to make them look more like some strange advanced technology. I also changed the structure of the walls and painted out some of the details of the hall, like the chandeliers, for example.

It was never my intention to create a polished film. I wanted to test out the distribution idea. I wanted to present a story which drew people in and got people wanting to know more. It didn’t need to be perfect. But I needed to finish it in good time so we could try it on an audience and see what people thought of the show and the distribution platform.

The Platform

With a few days to go until launch, I got my first look at the Kosmos website. There were some cool ideas, like users as Kosmos Citizens and a leaderboard showing who had acquired the most views, to add a bit of gamified competition. Geat ideas, but not quite developed. The intention was these things could be improved on, if the general concept of the platform worked.

We set the target views for the trailer to “unlock” episode 1 and launched the website. In the first few days, there was a lot of buzz. Some people loved the “crowd-sharing” idea, some people just accepted it and others hated it. The website was pretty slow, which didn’t help. For the first few episodes, people seemed excited by the unlocking process. But this excitement wore off gradually over the following days (I wanted 1 episode to be “unlocked” per week, roughly). By the final episode, although people enjoyed the show, they didn’t have much appetite for the unlocking game anymore.

So I guess, in conclusion, the idea was fun and perhaps could have worked better with a lot more development of the idea and the platform. But ultimately, in my opinion, I’d have to put this one down as a fail. If the idea was to accelerate the viral effect of the video, it didn’t really achieve it. In fact, when we first discussed the idea, we considered the possibility of the goal being pledges instead of views. Which would have been a system similar, perhaps, to the platform Patreon.com.

There was a ton of positive feedback (and love) for what we had created. But, without more serious funding, it wasn’t possible to continue making more episodes. My plan was to build a kind of community around the show and build upwards. But it was clear that moving the Kosmos platform forward would be a fulltime job for a team of developers. And making a show with such a large cast and tricky locations needed much more funding to be sustainable.

Post-production Phase 2 & Novels

After the initial release of all 5 episodes, I felt lots could be improved with the grading and VFX. So I went back to Premiere and After Effects and spent several more months re-grading every shot, improving and adding more VFX and generally polishing things a bit more.

After I edited all 5 episodes into one feature-length pilot and uploaded this to YouTube, the show immediately started getting traffic (it’s currently over 500,000 views). And that was it, unless we somehow got major funding from somewhere. There was a demand for more story, however, and I still had lots of notes for further episodes…

The End

At the end of the project, I had learned a huge amount – about storytelling for a format I had been unfamiliar with, about filmmaking with a bigger crew (and shooting to a tighter schedule) than I was used to, and about marketing film in the age of streaming video.

A few months after we finished filming, I turned 50. 43 years after I first decided I wanted to be a film director when I grew up, I guess I’d finally grown up. For a lack of confidence, it had taken me almost 4 decades to get round to it. I had no expectations of making it a career – but here I was making films.

Simon’s Next SciFi Series: SILENT EYE.

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Further reading: Micro-Budget Filmmaking: Organisation