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Today's Independent Filmmakers: A New Generation Spurred by Technology
Mark Thomas of Crew of Two, Producers of the Movie Duality
Welcome to the first installment of our three-part interview series on some of the Web's most creative, innovative independent filmmakers. To these guys, the gospel according to Hollywood is open to question. They're producing entertaining quality CGI-laden films and videos with shoestring budgets, and they make no apologies for it.
This new generation of indie filmmakers aren’t threatened by the Internet and other tech innovations. They welcome this new era with open arms.
Indirectly, they're showing us how much money Hollywood squanders on a regular basis. But we already knew about that, right?
Will they succeed? Only time will tell. But in the meantime, we're gonna pick their brains and see what we can learn from their experiences.
[LTVNET] Who makes up the core of Crew of Two and how much filmmaking experience do you guys have? And how old are you?
Mark Thomas Crew of Two is myself, Mark Thomas, and my friend, Dave Macomber. I'm 32, he'll be 32 in October. Before we made Duality, we had only one other film credit to our names, and that was a minute-and-a-half-long Star Wars short called Duel -- the amateurish precursor to Duality.
[LTVNET] What triggered you to produce Duality?
Mark Thomas Four things: Our love for Star Wars, our love of movies in general (and special effects), our desire to make up for Duel's shortcomings, and our attraction to the foolhardy idea of two guys with "next to no" filmmaking or computer graphics experience shooting an entire movie against blue-screen and adding sets digitally.
[LTVNET] Did the experience have any effect on how you view big budget Hollywood productions? If so, how?
Mark Thomas We have long viewed Hollywood with a suspicious eye because it is wasteful and superficial. Hollywood would rather dump $200,000,000 into a single Titanic, a financial crapshoot, than $10,000,000 into twenty E.T.s. Why did Titanic cost so much? Because it could. Having actually put together our own little movie, we've gained some insight into the filmmaking process, and find ourselves further baffled by Hollywood's eagerness to pour huge amounts of money into projects they care nothing about. They say that what matters in Hollywood is the bottom line, but that's not true. Hollywood has a long history of carelessly bankrupting itself. What really drives Hollywood is appearance. If the budget is big it makes the movie big. Hollywood is in business to make money, but they do it by shunning creativity and rewarding excess. Pearl Harbor is a slick, bad movie. Hollywood advertised it as a "blockbuster," and so it is one.
[LTVNET] What are your plans with Duality? Is it a sample reel to showcase your filmmaking talents? Is it the first episode in a major TV series? The beginnings of your own SCIFI channel? Tell me what's on your mind.
Mark Thomas We wanted to make the best Star Wars fan film ever made. We did not make it with the deliberate intention of breaking into Hollywood, though we'd gladly accept some of their money. We made something we wanted to see and hoped other people would enjoy it.
[LTVNET] From a business standpoint, do you fear being "Napsterized"? Yes or no, but please elaborate.
Mark Thomas So far as Duality is concerned, no, not at all. We deliberately leveraged George Lucas's Star Wars franchise, and knew we could never make money from Duality. We encourage people to copy and share Duality so long as they don't sell it. If we'd made this movie with the intention of making money from it, we might feel differently. I'm someone who considers Napster to be an insult and a threat to musicians who already get pretty badly ripped-off by their labels. Artists make art to express themselves, but they have to eat too. Napster was designed to make money for its private shareholders by leveraging somebody else's hard work.
[LTVNET] Where do you see the filmmaking industry going, now that creative people can - technically -produce and distribute quality motion pics without robbing the bank? Will we, should we expect more "Crew of Two's" to appear on the scene? If so, how you guys gonna get paid in the era of "Napster"?
Mark Thomas Duality is just the beginning. I think we're seeing the beginning of the end of the agent-controlled studio system, and this can only be a good thing. The combination of the Internet and high technology will put the power back into the hands of the artists. How we'll deal with threats such as Napster has yet to be seen. My guess is that we won't be paid for the films directly. The money will come through advertising, merchandising and channels yet to be imagined. Kind of like television.
[LTVNET] So what's next for Crew of Two in the near term?
Mark Thomas Dave and I are busy developing a variety of movie ideas. I am nearing completion of a feature-length script (the sixth I have written), an 18th century adventure movie involving tall ships, and Dave has a script in the works. None of these projects are based on Star Wars. In the meantime, we've been taking meetings with some very cool Hollywood people who seem interested in how Duality was made and what we want out of the future. It's an exciting time. I just hope we'll be able to resist the creative traps that Hollywood attention brings with it!
[LTVNET] How many times has Duality been downloaded?
Mark Thomas This is impossible to figure with any sort of accuracy, but I can say that on iFilm alone we've gotten over 500,000 downloads in less than four months. What complicates things is the fact that we made Duality freely available to everybody, so we have no way of knowing how many sites are hosting it. I'm fairly certain that iFilm has seen the most activity, as most of the emails we receive in response to the movie seem to refer to the iFilm version. iFilm offers the movie in three formats -- QuickTime, Real Media, and Windows Media, but I don't know which format is the most popular. We didn't make a DivX version (though conversions do exist). Judging by the email we've received, the DivX version hasn't gotten around too much. Yet.
[LTVNET] Thanks, Mark. We at MusicDish appreciate your time.
www.crewoftwo.com
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