How to make a viral short film (+3M views).

in this video i'm gonna be talking about how i made the biggest most expensive most difficult short film i ever made will the machine we got one million views in its first month online right now it's sitting at over three million views i'm gonna be breaking down everything from writing it financing it shooting it post-production release strategy and one of the craziest things i ever had in my entire life that happened right after we finished shooting that movie so get gumpy first off why make this expensive short film well me and my writing and producing partner chris who also ended up being the lead actor in will the machine we've been scrappy filmmakers since we were kids making a lot of low-budget quicker turnaround films and we were kind of stagnant in our film careers nothing was happening so we decided let's flip the script let's spend a lot of time and money on one project and see what happens there so this would be our attempt to open doors to film festivals and show that we could make films on a more professional level writing so we tossed around a few ideas then we realized oh will the machine is a character from a feature that we already wrote he's the antagonist we could rip him out and make an interesting character study out of him plus chris was actually a d1 football player in real life so we knew we could bring some authenticity to the character to the script the character was kind of an amalgamation of a few different famous athletes like mike tyson michael jordan but mainly it was hall of fame running back herschel walker's childhood as a kid who was bullied a lot transformed himself into this alter ego and became a hall of fame running back in the process we went through 17 drafts before settling on our shooting script getting feedback from friends and collaborators the whole way through building the team so once we had the script we were working through more drafts we started adding people on first people we linked up with was a freelance editing client of mine was a small production company and they'd actually done a couple of award-winning short films recently so i knew their connections and experience would be invaluable throughout the process chris and his original plan was to make the short right here in los angeles and we were only going to spend about eight grand on it but once we started collaborating with these producers and talking to them about an idea we had to shoot the film in our hometown of richmond virginia which was the former capital of the confederacy and intertwining the city's history with the main character's story and then the tragedy in nearby charlottesville happened with that unite the right rally it became clear that we could really elevate this project and story make it something much more powerful by going back home filming it in our hometown so once we got excited about that the budget went a lot higher but i'll get into financing in a little bit next on board was our director of photography jeff tomczy who had worked on a web series i directed with he contributed a ton of experience a ton of gear a lot of extra hours and helped to the point that he became a co-producer on the project and really elevated the whole thing here he is doing some camera tests with chris in los angeles for all the running sequences that were going to be in the movie after that we needed our second lead actor so our old roommate ellis happened to know denzel whitaker who we'd seen in movies like bad lieutenant training day black panther so we sent him the script and after a few long talks about the project and the story he came on board which added a ton of momentum to the project and the team we were building at this point chris and i had to do a scouting trip in richmond to find all the locations we were going to use and while we were down there we stopped at the virginia film office and got a ton of help from their staff in terms of finding locations finding people to help us out how the permitting process was going to work spoiler alert there were no permits needed gotta love filming in virginia they also gave me this big book of film production contacts which i used along with google and personal recommendations to fill out the rest of our crew person by person financing so we budgeted the film to be a little over twenty thousand dollars and we raised that money through a few different means i put in six thousand dollars upfront that i'd saved from editing jobs we did a kickstarter and we raised six grand through that chris and i took out a loan through lendingclub.com i believe for 10k and then later in post-production chris chipped in a few thousand dollars to cover some additional expenses that we ran into there's a lot to get into here i mean that kickstarter campaign was a huge project in and of itself so if you want more details about how we financed it or about financing short films in general then drop a comment shooting six months after we started writing the film myself chris and jeff our director of photography flew out to richmond with an insane amount of equipment and we're ready to start shooting the movie we stayed in my parents house to save money and denzel flew out a couple days later and that was the entire la team that was on set everybody else was a local hire we had scheduled a five-day shoot out there and one regret i have is that i should have brought on really experienced a.d or producer on set so this meant i was just managing way more details than i probably should have been as the director of the film and i'd come home from shooting i have to do the call sheets for the next day but the call sheets actually made maps and photoshop showing everybody where to park where we were going to be filming we just didn't have time or money to waste on set and the beauty of filming in richmond is they don't require location permits so we had free rain over all of our exterior locations as long as we didn't block any roads or sidewalks we even strapped a camera to a car and filmed chris running down a road for a whole morning and the police couldn't have cared less this kind of thing would have been absolutely impossible to do in los angeles for our budget for the main location where the races take place in the film we had found a couple of flashy options that overlooked the city but ultimately we thought they were too unrealistic so the little park we settled on had the perfect level of seclusion while keeping some of the grit and character of the city in the background so we shot for two days at that park on the first day we ended up running really behind schedule and really dug ourselves into a hole for day two where we're gonna have to make up all these extra shots what i ended up doing was staying up that entire night making a very very detailed shot list for day two at that location and i had time deadlines for each shot so i would know as the day went on if we were falling even a few minutes behind schedule so we flew through our shots on day two got everything we needed now we were gonna film the high school weight room scenes at me and chris's old high school but like a week before we were gonna shoot the principal and athletic director just pulled that location from under our feet really put us in a bad spot we couldn't find a replacement location in richmond in time so we decided we were going to have to do that as a pickup in los angeles at a later date but we used that extra day on our schedule to shoot some stuff at our friend alice's mom's house and got some stuff of will at home by himself i'm so glad we did we'd actually cut the idea of showing will at home from earlier drafts of the script but seeing the final short film now i think it's pretty crucial that you see a little taste of what his home life is like so we wrapped and then the next day one of the craziest thing that's ever happened to me happened chris jeff and i are at the richmond airport applebee's having a celebratory margarita as you do and uh chris looks at me and he says i think that's herschel walker and i look over and literally two feet next to us is herschel walker the guy that chris started writing about four years before that we spent years developing this feature film script around uh and molded into this new will the machine character the guy that inspired the whole project is right there the day after we finished shooting this film we went up to him talked to him shook his hand told him that we just made a short film that was kind of inspired by him he was really gracious about it all but truly one of the most insane coincidences of my life kind of rocked my whole world view if i'm going to be honest as a lifelong skeptic and at the very least i figured well this has to be a good omen for the film post so i made an assembly edit of the film minus the weight room scene that we hadn't gotten a chance to film yet and it was clocking in at over 20 minutes long and it was a much longer process than usual to find the story in the film we eventually realized that we were giving the audience too much information trying to make them empathize and sympathize with will too much we decided will's kind of an let's let him be the and make it the audience's job to figure out why he's an and once we started thinking about the film that way it became much easier to make decisions and edit we were able to tighten up the film to around 13 and a half minutes pickups you can check out my video about finding film locations for a lot more detail about how we got the high school weight room location for the pickup shoot it was an absolute nightmare and took forever but once we did we had a one and a half day pickup shoot out here in los angeles and then the movie was fully in the can finishing post things really got exciting because we really got to bring in some top tier talent to help finish and polish up this movie through our dp we got the colorist of the walking dead to give the film a world-class color grade for free and then through our production company producers we got an amazing score from a very talented composer for a super bargain rate same for the guy that made our key art and our movie poster i tracked down a sound mixer online he gave us a 5.1 surround mix and a stereo mix so it would sound great on a movie theater at film festival or on a laptop at home then i edited the trailer and i got a dcp or digital cinema package made which some festivals require to project the movie in a theater and then that was it the movie was completely done the total time from starting to write the film to finishing that dcp was a year and eight months which is kind of crazy but keep in mind that we were in really no rush with post-production so i really took my time there i was doing it in between paid editing jobs so at this point we started submitting it to film festivals and if you want to hear about how we handled our film festival strategy definitely check out my video on how to get accepted at film festivals go into a lot of detail about it there finally we get to the release and the release strategy so we had a decent film festival run but once that was coming to an end we knew it was time to release the film online and to give it the biggest platform possible we wanted to give it either a vimeo staff pick or a short of the week unfortunately we were denied both of those but our producers connected us to amaletto who offered to release the film on their channel and they had over a million subscribers on youtube at the time i think they have way more now we had thought about should we just put it on our standard story channel because we do have a fair amount of subscribers it gets a lot of traffic from bad as bad so it would have a fighting chance there too but ultimately we decided you know amoledo's got over a million subscribers we want this film to have the best chance that's possible we accepted and to our great delight it was a star performer on there it got over a million views in the first month and amaletto were great partners we had to deal with them to cut us into the ad revenue so the film has been making money uh the entire time it's been on there and realistically it was an expensive short film it's never gonna make all of its budget back from amaletto ad revenue but it has made thousands of dollars on there which was really helpful when chris and i were trying to pay off the loan we had taken out for the film and since putting it on amaletto we also licensed it to a couple of smaller streaming platforms like argo and shot tv but those were for smaller upfront like three-digit licensing fees so today will the machine has probably made back somewhere between a quarter and a third of its budget but that was never the goal the goal was to have a calling card that i could use to attach better talent and more financing to my next big film project and in that sense i think the film was a great success so that's how i made my most successful short film check out this video to see how i made my most successful feature film we got over six million views and made a good profit and sorry for the lack of videos lately guys i got busy and carried away writing the first draft of this script i talk about this a little bit in the future and subscribe because more will come but not if nobody gives a sh and that's just how the world works i got things to do

Channel: Standard Story Company

Views: 32,347

Keywords: will the machine, making will the machine, making a short film, behind the scenes, football short film, High school football

Id: xt73Mdf4d0A

Length: 11min 14sec (674 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 10 2021