If you want to get your film distributed, you need to be persistent.
This week, Aj Martinson, Producer/Director, shares how his persistence paid off to get his first indie film distributed. In this episode, he talks about finding his first distribution deal, film festivals, and self distribution.
Listen to get tips on how to find distribution for your film.
Key Points:
2:23 – How he got started
6:46 – Creating first project
24:13 – Shooting first documentary
37:27 – Film festival for documentary
28:11 – Networking with crew
44:32 – Something going wrong
58:17 – Favorite gear
Links
Section 3 Films
Panavision Grant
American Film Market
Cinando Database
Selling Your Film Without Selling Your Soul
Caption Max
The End of Blindness
Full Transcript:
A.J Martinson (00:00:00):
You need to bleep this, but fuck you motherfucker, you are the worst fucking director I’ve ever fucking worked with in my entire life. You will never make a movie again. I’m going to walk the fuck off this set if you don’t get your together right the fuck now. In front of not only my crew, that I’m going to try to work 22 days with, but in front of my grandma who came to support, my mom and dad are there. The entire family. I stopped and I went okay, but let’s finish the scene now and we got back in and we finished the scene and I kept my cool until I went home that night. I went home that night, I kid you not, I cried. I was like, first of all, I’m not making this movie and second of all, I’m not making any movies ever again. I’m quitting tomorrow morning.
Tanya Musgrave (00:00:39):
Welcome to the Practical Filmmaker, an educational podcast brought to you by the Filmmaker Institute and Sunscreen Film Festival, where industry professionals talk nuts and bolts and the steps they took to find their success today. On today’s show, A.J Martinson gives us a fantastic view into the land of distribution and sales, both for his first indie narrative and now his feature doc. Quick disclaimer, as you all the post workflow is full of [inaudible 00:01:04] and this particular episode, I fell down on the job and forgot to have him wear headphones.
Air, go, you’ll hear some bleep through of my audio, some echoes and flexing sync if you’re watching, I’m sorry. The distraction is regrettable, but bear with us because the absolute knowledge that A.J when it comes to the first steps of selling his films is so worth it. Without further ado, I’m your host, Tanya Musgrave and today we’re chatting with producer director of Section 3 Films, A.J Martinson. He wrote and directed Cold War Spy Thriller Blackmark, distributed by Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, and has worked commercial and documentary his most recent being The End Of Blindness, about an Ethiopian doctor who is the only ophthalmologist for 3 million people. Welcome to the show.
A.J Martinson (00:01:52):
Hey, Tanya, how’s it going?
Tanya Musgrave (00:01:53):
Hi, this is awesome. Because like we met up at the Sundance house and we’d honestly not gotten a huge chance to chat about what your experience has been. I only knew that you were in the throes of screening and getting distribution for your feature documentary, The End Of Blindness. But I wasn’t aware that you also had a narrative feature that you’d written and directed that was also distributed and then I saw that you were also involved with commercial. It seems like quite a story. Tell us how you got here.
A.J Martinson (00:02:25):
All right. I’m sitting in high school, I’m 16, bored out of my mind in English class, which is funny because now I write a lot. I’m sitting in the chair thinking, what could I do that’s a fun and exciting career? Like, oh, I know what I want to do. I want to sit in a chair and boss people around all day long.
Tanya Musgrave (00:02:43):
Don’t we all.
A.J Martinson (00:02:43):
What job is that? Film director, of course. I’m half kidding. I’m like half kidding.
Tanya Musgrave (00:02:50):
But yet like huh.
A.J Martinson (00:02:52):
Yeah. Really the impetus has to do with the movie I’m releasing right now, The End Of Blindness. I was invited to Ethiopia just when I was like maybe movies. I was like playing with a handy cam, like how we all start out. My cousin who runs Tropical Health Alliance Foundation invites me to Ethiopia. I bring my camera and I film a three minute micro doc on this crazy foot disease called Podoconiosis. It’s horrible. It’s like a viral infection of the foot. It’s super nasty. Larry was doing great work in Ethiopia, providing shoes because that’s what would cause it. Just walking on this volcanic soil, they’d get this foot disease and not fun. He was like treating it and preventing it. I filmed this tiny little documentary. I used to watch like a lot of 60 minutes as a kid for some reason. I think my dad liked it.
It was always on and so I made this little 60 minutes. Check out this crazy issue that no one here in the United States has ever heard of. My cousin encouraged the film and he showed it to people and I got hooked on this process of making documentaries and making movies. I got out of high school and said, I’m done with school for a while. I’m not a fan. Actually to get on, my first job was an internship for Steve McVety who produced The Passion Of The Christ.
Tanya Musgrave (00:04:14):
Oh wow.
A.J Martinson (00:04:15):
Yeah.
Tanya Musgrave (00:04:16):
What?
A.J Martinson (00:04:16):
And I got that job, right? Yeah. I went for a walk in my neighborhood and because when you were born and raised in LA, you know where all the film shoots are?
Tanya Musgrave (00:04:24):
Oh my God.
A.J Martinson (00:04:25):
I was just walking in the neighborhood and I went up to like a grip truck and I was like, “Hey guys, you need a hand. They’re like, no, because you’re 18. Like what? But like go talk to our UPM. She’s super cool.” That UPM got me the internship and then later hired me on at MalPaso Productions to do Jersey Boys as a PA. Just by like hanging out. The movie they were filming was Hop and they filmed this big high school scene, four or five blocks away from where I grew up.
Tanya Musgrave (00:04:54):
Oh my gosh.
A.J Martinson (00:04:56):
That’s kind of how I got started. I remember getting in trouble at school because I got phone call from Empower Pictures to schedule my interview and I walked out of class without saying a word to take the call. The teacher wrote me up. I had to go to the principal’s office. They were like super pissed and I’m like, this is my career bye. I’m outy.
Tanya Musgrave (00:05:17):
That’s amazing.
A.J Martinson (00:05:23):
That’s how I got my start. It was a crazy time. There are tons of adventures in there. I was a second AD on a feature film that shot in Texas six months after the internship ended and they paid me a dollar an hour. Yeah. A dollar an hour [inaudible 00:05:39] legal. We called it like a friendternship because I was like helping out this production. But I learned. I saw how movies were made and we shot this crazy film in Texas. Marfa, Texas people were bringing shotguns onto set to shoot rattlesnakes and it’s the DP and the ranch owner in the middle of nowhere. I don’t know.
Tanya Musgrave (00:06:02):
Oh my word.
A.J Martinson (00:06:03):
It was crazy, but it was super fun. Again, just learning the process end to end. How do you make a movie? And how do you set up a crafty table? Because they didn’t hire PAs. Second AD really just meant PA plus.
Tanya Musgrave (00:06:17):
How did you get from there to writing, directing distributed in your own film and which one came first? You did documentary first technically, but as a journey just kind of been like whatever’s been up, it’s a commercial, then it’s a documentary, then it’s a feature or it’s just like, oh, I actually just did commercial first or feature. I worked within a traditional Hollywood model first and then I branched off and did my own thing.
A.J Martinson (00:06:46):
I set a goal when I got out of high school and that’s, I have to write and direct a feature film in four years as my thesis from not going to film school because I skipped college entirely.
Tanya Musgrave (00:06:57):
Okay.
A.J Martinson (00:06:58):
That was really the driving force and when year three hit and I didn’t have a script… I wrote a script, but it was terrible and it would cost like $20 million and they was like, no. It’s like, I didn’t have that like low budget indie, I can actually do this script. I picked a spy thriller in Soviet Russia in 1960. I’m purely not good contained.
Tanya Musgrave (00:07:19):
Period film. Awesome. Perfect.
A.J Martinson (00:07:23):
Period film with night exteriors with kids. I broke all the rules you’re not supposed to do.
Tanya Musgrave (00:07:29):
Did you have a dog in there too? Big herd of sheep?
A.J Martinson (00:07:34):
Yeah. Big herd of sheep. It’s all shot on drones. No. Yeah. I set this goal of like, okay, four years I have to make a project. I have to have something that I can say I did. If after four years I can’t do that, then I’m going to quit Hollywood and be an accountant. It’s going to be super awesome and crunch numbers all day long. Screw creativity. It’s like one or the other, there’s no in between.
Tanya Musgrave (00:07:58):
Oh no. Until your soul dies.
A.J Martinson (00:08:03):
Yeah. That’s it. Dream’s over, time to give up. I got to year three and I put the pressure on and I think I banged the script out for Blackmark in four months. It was fast. It was too fast in retrospect. If you wonder why we have a 4.5 on IMDb it’s because I wrote that script way too fast. I was like, I just got to shoot something. Let’s go. But it was really cool.
Tanya Musgrave (00:08:28):
At first I thought you were talking about 4.5 out of five. I’m like, that’s not bad and then I’m just like, oh wait.
A.J Martinson (00:08:37):
No. Out of 10. It’s like very rotten unrotten tomatoes.
Tanya Musgrave (00:08:40):
Very rotten.
A.J Martinson (00:08:41):
There are parts of the story that when I watch it now, I don’t even understand what I was trying to say. I’m like, wait, what is the point of this scene?
Tanya Musgrave (00:08:48):
That’s a good sign.
A.J Martinson (00:08:48):
Yeah. It’s super stellar filmmaking. I’m hard on the story. All right. I’m very hard on the writing of that film. I am proud of the production, because it went from, I was going to shoot it and I was thinking like maybe I shoot it myself and like three best friends to all of a sudden I looked at my bank account and I started hiring this crew person and that crew person and that, and then all of a sudden it’s like, well, if I just squeeze these numbers just like this… I’m very lucky. This is a little bit of what made this possible is I had access to this incredible location where we could film everything.
Tanya Musgrave (00:09:24):
Really?
A.J Martinson (00:09:24):
Yeah. The sets were basically 75% there and we just had to do wall treatment and things like that.
Tanya Musgrave (00:09:33):
Oh my gosh. That’s awesome. That’s amazing.
A.J Martinson (00:09:35):
That saved all the money to do a period piece. I got lucky and it was very lucky. We didn’t have to spend so much money on the props and stuff.
Tanya Musgrave (00:09:45):
Do you mind if I ask what the budget was?
A.J Martinson (00:09:48):
We shot for $100,000 and that was seriously, I’d been living at home scramping and saving and drain the bank account and then like knock on the door of like every family and friend member, hey, can I have some money? And they’re like no.
Tanya Musgrave (00:10:03):
Okay. I’m just like, wait a second. You just saved a $100,000? Where did you work before?
A.J Martinson (00:10:10):
But yeah. A lot of that was self-funded. I was doing editing because nobody likes editing. I was doing cinematography work and I bought a camera and then set up my own little production company. I think back then we were churning like $45, $50 a year with very little overhead. Three or four years of that.
Tanya Musgrave (00:10:10):
And if you’re living at home.
A.J Martinson (00:10:32):
And living at home, that like lucky thing didn’t go to college to of the parents are like, well, there’s some college money we were going to spend. I got help but yeah, a lot of it was just save work, save work. Of course, we didn’t spend the $100,000 all in one shot. There were kind of stages to the production. I bought the props over six months and then I’d go work like seven or eight. It was kind of this layered thing. I went all in on it and we shot 22 days. Originally, I was going to have four or five people by the time the whole thing was done, including post-production cast and everything, we had like 90 people who worked on it.
Tanya Musgrave (00:11:14):
Oh my stars.
A.J Martinson (00:11:15):
It was like insanity. It was insanity and it became way bigger. One of my favorite people that I worked with on it is the cinematographer Nick Matthews, who is like this guy’s going to be ASC in four months. I swear.
Tanya Musgrave (00:11:27):
Wow.
A.J Martinson (00:11:27):
He’s so good. He came in and was like, why would we make this as an indie film? Let’s make it look like a blockbuster. I’m like, but can I afford that? And he goes, watch me. He’s like, go get the Panavision grant. You can go to Panavision and say, “Hey, I want a camera.” They’ll give you a camera package for a $1000, which is just a cleaning fee for as long as you nee as long as you request the right package. That’s something I learned. I put on the ground, I’m like, I want anamorphics and I want the Alexis 65 or whatever the equivalent was at the time. I want the top of the line key. They laughed at me.
I like called them because they said no. I called them, I’m like, why do you mean no? The movie I shot in Texas, which is way different than this. But you gave them one, why can’t I get one? They’re like, well you asked for like 6 million, like Star Trek doesn’t get amorphics right now. Why would we give them to you? I’m like, okay, well what can you do for me? They’re like, well, we can give you an Alexa Classic and Primo Primes and like OConnor heads and Mon… I’m like, yes, please. Okay. Done. We shot it on Alexa.
Tanya Musgrave (00:12:32):
Wait. They’ll just with anybody? Back up.
A.J Martinson (00:12:34):
Yeah. Basically any, as far as I know… I haven’t checked on it in a while and you can do it multiple times. But if you say you’re a student, a low budget film, they just want to build relationships with people. If it’s gear that’s sitting in their back closet.
Tanya Musgrave (00:12:49):
Oh my word.
A.J Martinson (00:12:51):
Yeah. You didn’t know about this?
Tanya Musgrave (00:12:52):
No, I did.
A.J Martinson (00:12:54):
This is huge. This is so huge.
Tanya Musgrave (00:12:54):
Yes. This is amazing.
A.J Martinson (00:12:55):
Yeah. Pangram, I’m all about Pangram. They were amazing. There’s three stipulations. You have to pay a cleaning fee. It’s not absolutely free, but like, come on. This was a $20,000 camera back then.
Tanya Musgrave (00:13:07):
Yeah. What’s the cleaning fee?
A.J Martinson (00:13:07):
$1000. It’s like $1000.
Tanya Musgrave (00:13:10):
$1000. Yeah.
A.J Martinson (00:13:11):
You have to have serious production insurance because they giving you all of this like…
Tanya Musgrave (00:13:16):
Yes.
A.J Martinson (00:13:17):
You have to have the insur… I think on the Blackmark alone, we spent $10,000 just on insurance.
Tanya Musgrave (00:13:23):
Gotcha.
A.J Martinson (00:13:23):
You have to have a beefy insurance package to cover it.
Tanya Musgrave (00:13:27):
All right. You get this crazy package, sorry. I’m derailing you so like…
A.J Martinson (00:13:31):
No. It’s good. The pangram grant is one of my favorite things I owe them so… The film looks so good because Panavision was like, “Hey, here’s all this camera equipment.” My DP was like, oh, by the way, I’m a boss and I know how to use it. It looks like a proper movie. The actors did really well. There was a lot of training. We went non-union because no way am I going to be writing union checks in perpetuity on an ultra low budget where the distributors aren’t paying, you get pennies on the dollar back. I was very careful about that. Pulled every friend and family favor I could. Cashed in all the cash that I had and we shot it. It looks like the technical aspects of it, I would say exceed the story by a factor of like 10 to 100. As a director, it was pretty good, as a writer [inaudible 00:14:23].
Tanya Musgrave (00:14:25):
It makes a good trailer though, right?
A.J Martinson (00:14:26):
But it makes a good trailer and it’s sold and people bought it. It’s really big in Turkey and Istanbul for some reason. Yeah. Well we mentioned it in the film and I think they’re like, oh wow. An American movie mentioned something that happened in our country. That’s historical. We love this film. Yeah. Some places it’s played okay. My favorite review is military.com called it, and I quote “weird”. That was the whole review.
Tanya Musgrave (00:14:51):
That’s amazing. That’s awesome. If it sold and it made its money or what have you know, or if it made any money, that’s what works. Who really even cares? It’s 4.5. It’s just like, well look at the bottom line. Do you mind if I ask what that bottom line has looked like for you? How that first distribution deal happened, what you learned from it? How did these conversations go? I’m so curious.
A.J Martinson (00:15:18):
I was introduced to a really good friend who’s he was like playing really heavily in the producer space at the time and he clued me into the fact that distributors need content to sell. That was the first paradigm shift. I used to think that there was a stepping stool. By the way, don’t do this. This is the bad way of doing.
Tanya Musgrave (00:15:35):
Okay.
A.J Martinson (00:15:36):
First you make a movie, then you hope your movie gets into festivals. If you get into the right festivals, distributors will notice you and then maybe you’ll make a sale. That’s so wrong. It’s like hot garbage. Festivals have nothing to do with distribution unless you’re going to Sundance or South by South… Like the top five.
Tanya Musgrave (00:15:53):
Yeah.
A.J Martinson (00:15:54):
After that, it’s marketing and that’s really cool. We can talk about that in a bit. But what he told me is he’s like, look, people need content to sell. People make a living selling it. You just need to reach out to them. He turned me onto a couple of tools that we use, first of all, afi.com. I’m sorry, the afm.com the American film Market has just a list of every sales agent and distributor at their booth. I made a spreadsheet and I copied every single email off of that list into my spreadsheet and I created a template. Me and one of our other producers on the film sat in this office day after day and just emailed people. My name is A.J Martinson. I have a cold war spy thriller. Here’s a trailer. Here’s a link. Let me know if you’re interested in a deal. We emailed like, I think about 100 people and we got 30 offers back on the film.
Tanya Musgrave (00:16:43):
Wow.
A.J Martinson (00:16:44):
Just from cold call emails.
Tanya Musgrave (00:16:46):
What? Okay.
A.J Martinson (00:16:47):
Yeah.
Tanya Musgrave (00:16:48):
What kind of deals? Is it the like, Ooh, red flag stay away kind of deal. Or is it that like, these are pretty decent deals.
A.J Martinson (00:16:55):
Whole gambit and that was cool because we had 30 deals, but I was able to compare and see what a bunch of different people were offering. We didn’t see any of the worst kind of deal, which is like pay me up front. We didn’t see any of those. That’s like giant red flag. We saw a lot of like, “Hey, you’re going to have a $65,000 marketing overhead expense and we’re going to have to recoup that first before you see any money.” That to me is like… I actually developed a formula. I’ll have to go get my spreadsheets out if you want it but there’s like a formula where you can put in the number of territories you’re going to sell and their marketing expense and calculate the adjusted number of territories you’d have to sell before you get money. I created all these formulas to actually have a metric of how good the offers that we were seeing were.
Tanya Musgrave (00:17:44):
Myself and the listeners say, yes, we want that. Yes.
A.J Martinson (00:17:47):
You’re going to have to bother me in about a week to get that over to you because it’s going to take some time to go find it. Oh yeah. Okay. It’s not polished. It was very like thrown together. Maybe you can help me make this an official scoring system. But yeah, like basically you’d look at these deals and they’d say, oh, you’re going to sell 12 territories at $10,000, you’re make $120,000. Well, if your marketing expense off the top is $60,000 and then you only make 20%. I usually make 80% after that. Well you really need to sell 15, 18, 20 territories to see money. If there’s only 21 territories, you do the math and you’re like, oh, screw these guys. This is overwhelmingly bad.
I did all of that to try to get a barometer and then you incorporate your feel of the company. Who’s calling and who’s nice. Who do you want to work with? And then you couple on top of that, you have to do your due diligence to your research. You got to call every person that company will give you as a reference of saying like, “Hey, you got your film with these people. Do you like it?” And then you do your own. They’ll give you some names and then you’ll do your own research and you’ll go call whoever else you can find on IMDb that went with them. That’s was my process of weeding down these 30 offers. There was one, it was 10% only, zero marketing fee. It was like, wow, that looks really sweet. They were only going to take 10%. They’re going to get it all these places.
Unfortunately I called somebody and they were like, oh, I haven’t made a single dollar since I worked with them. It’s like, okay. Nope, nevermind. Cut that off the list. Done. It’s that kind of due diligence that you have to do because you’re right. Sales agents and distributors, there’s a really bad rep in the industry for a reason. A lot of them are really sketchy to work with. But the deal we settled on and I can’t give the exact specific number of how much it was, but the deal we settled on was a really sweet minimum guarantee offer. Okay. This never happens but what they did is they actually found our Kickstarter campaign. They saw that we had fundraised a certain amount of money on Kickstarter. They’re like, what if we just give you that amount of money in cash and then a little bit of extra money on top of that, how would you feel about that?
I looked at my producing partner and I’m like, that’s like 99% of our budget right there. They’re like, but we’re going to own the film and we’ll do whatever we want with it for 15 years and you get it back at the end of it. I’m like, yeah, that is cash in hand. They’re putting their money where their mouth is. That means they’re actually going to get it out there. They’re actually going to try to market it. It’s not this back burner project. They have skin in the game. That’s the deal we chose and they produce other content too.
Tanya Musgrave (00:20:24):
Oh my gosh. Yeah.
A.J Martinson (00:20:25):
It’s like, okay, if I work with them, maybe there’s a chance in the future I have another film. They want to produce it. Like it’s a relationship. It was a long debate. There’s that pie in the sky that you get like, oh, but maybe if I trust this other company and don’t do the minimum guarantee. Maybe I’ll make like $1,000,000 or whatever, but at the end of the day, all the expenses and all that kind of stuff, I just took the cash. I took the cash and ran. I was happy. All of that money I had poured into the film came back into my bank account. I didn’t have to eat ramen noodles every day and I had a little bit of cash left over to like make the next film.
Tanya Musgrave (00:21:00):
Oh my word.
A.J Martinson (00:21:02):
It was a once in a million. I tried to leverage that over other sales agents. I did, they’re offering me this much. Would you offer me an MG? They all like laughed at me. They’re like, hell no. I’m very fortunate we found that company and it was really good. It was a really positive experience.
Tanya Musgrave (00:21:20):
When was that?
A.J Martinson (00:21:22):
That would’ve been about 2017.
Tanya Musgrave (00:21:24):
That was now about five years ago. You’re now kind of in that distribution space again with your documentary. It’s a completely different vein, but what differences have you seen this time around?
A.J Martinson (00:21:37):
Let’s start from the beginning. Why did that movie sell?
Tanya Musgrave (00:21:40):
Yeah.
A.J Martinson (00:21:41):
Blackmark sold. It was originally called Redfish Bluefish and I was going for this like artistic weird, like the Soviets in the Americans and like our poster is this like very artful. My poster that I paid a designer wasted my money apparently to design is this very artful like piece. I have it hanging in my room cause I love how that looks. I got this really talented guy who does like Marvel posters and he’s like, I’ll do that for side cash. I love that poster and they took it to Con which segways into the next film because they took it to Con and like everyone complained about the poster. Oh he is got a Soviet hat. We can’t buy it in Soviet Russia because he is got the hat. Oh it’s too red. Oh it’s too artful. It’s like this duo town thing.
Tanya Musgrave (00:22:22):
Yeah.
A.J Martinson (00:22:23):
Turns out they’re not selling this as a cold war spy thriller. This is an action movie for them. It’s just broad genre and because we had two gun fights in the movie and some gunplay, they’re like boom action movie. We’re going to make money. The cover of the –
Tanya Musgrave (00:22:38):
Awesome soul.
A.J Martinson (00:22:39):
Yeah. Soul. The actual cover of the film is my lead character holding a gun, running through the streets of Washington DC, which doesn’t happen all in the movie. Yeah. The capital building is burning in the background. You’ve got like Kennedy’s limo on fire. There’s a helicopter that crashed. Nothing to do with like the movie itself. Oh my. They told me stars, like my first meeting, they’re like, Hey, we’re renaming this by the way. You don’t have a choice. It’s Blackmark now, it is not Redfish Bluefish, which is one of our character names.
Blackmark is cool, but I have to redo all my title sequences and everything. That’s why it’s sold. We had key action elements and their trailer makes it look like the most generic action shoot them up. It’s these big, Keasy like the nuclear holocaust is coming, but one man… I’m like, no, it was supposed to be artful and now it’s this. On my website, I recut my own trailer for like my website and I use my own poster, my own key art because what they’re doing, what I wanted to do with it were very distinct.
Tanya Musgrave (00:23:50):
Yeah. Well you’ll get it back in 10 years and you’ll have Redfish Bluefish back on it.
A.J Martinson (00:24:00):
I don’t know if I want it back in 10 years. I think they can keep going. They’re doing way better with it.
Tanya Musgrave (00:24:04):
I never look back dollar.
A.J Martinson (00:24:05):
Yeah. I’ll sign it away for another few and see what they can keep it going. I don’t know if I need to reenter that void. The End Of Blindness is different. There’s no action elements that you can play off of. It’s cataract surgery in Ethiopia. It’s heartfelt. It’s emotional. But who at the end of their day wants to cataract surgery in Ethiopia. It’s a very niche specific audience. It’s like ophthalmologists. Actually we found through our Instagram stats, like women 40 to 60 who are interested in nonprofit. Those are our two markets. It’s a very specific thing. What we did is I did the same process. I emailed 50 distributors. This time I used a tool that I learned about when I went to Con because I watched them selling my film and we can talk about that too. Don’t watch people try to sell your movie.
Tanya Musgrave (00:24:05):
Okay.
A.J Martinson (00:24:55):
Not good. Not good for your soul as an artist. But I went to Con I learned about the Cinando database. For about 200 Euros, you can get access the global distribution, like names, email addresses, physical addresses of thousands and thousands of sales agents and distributors around the world. You just search. You’re like documentary distributor and then the whole list of everybody who goes to Con pops up. You do the same thing. You make your spreadsheet, you email all the people.
Tanya Musgrave (00:25:26):
What is this called again? Sorry.
A.J Martinson (00:25:29):
Cinando.com. Yeah. C-I-N-A-N-D-O.com.
Tanya Musgrave (00:25:29):
Okay.
A.J Martinson (00:25:34):
I did my same thing. I emailed 50 people and I got zero offers. Yeah. Not a single soul. I emailed distributors I’d worked with on other projects who like work in this space, and they’re like, no. I’m like why? They’re like 55 minutes. Lesson for your audience, if you want to sell something, 75 minimum is so critical. Don’t make a 55 minute. There’s not a TV market. That’s the same… People can really schlep and sell a 90 minute film, a 75 minute film, an 80 minute feature. But when you have a 55 minute, one off, unless it’s a series, it’s really difficult. That was kind of a hard lesson to learn and I almost went back and recut it, but I was introduced to a friend of a friend who’s in the Producer’s Guild and she wanted to be my producer’s rep. Now, normally I’m like, Ugh, producers rep, that’s another 5% to 10% of my money gone. But she was PGA and she came highly recommended.
We brought her on as an executive producer. Well, no, one’s biting on what I’m doing. Let’s see what she can do and if she can’t get any sales, then I’m doing it myself. We’ll go self-distribution. She brought me a couple of, kind of end offers and then she found me Passion River. Passion River is awesome. They specialize in documentary and educational content. That’s of their bread and better. They have features too, but they actually run the magazine that goes out to libraries and universities across the United States listing all of the like EDU content that they could purchase for their collection. They run that magazine. I signed with them. First of all, I produced End Of Blindness for much less than Blackmark. Penny’s on the dollar comparison.
The overhead low, we don’t need this to be a huge money making machine. We don’t need to sell every person. We just need to connect with our core target audience. If everyone in our core target audience buys the film, we’re going to be golden. Passion River with their EDU content arm, that’s what really attracted them to me. They also let me do a couple of key things that some of the other people weren’t they let me sell my own DVDs. I could set up my own shop and sell my own DVDs. They gave me the rights to do my own screenings. These are things that Blackmark and many of the other like distribution deals we were looking at, weren’t going to let you do. It’s hard to even get a copy. I had to go to Walmart and buy my own movie to get the physical copy of Blackmark.
Which was super fun. Because like, hey, there’s my movie in Walmart. Like bye. It was really cool doing that, but it is kind of lame that I don’t have any access to the material. They let me sell my own DVDs, do my own screenings as long as it’s in the context of an in-person thing and were very cool with us working with the nonprofit so that people who gave to the nonprofit or other people could have free access. Because we want to use this as a marketing tool to help build connections for the nonprofit we were working with. Between all of those dynamics, they were really kind to us and they’ve been just such a pleasure to work with. When I talked to filmmakers from them, every single person was like, we love Passion River. I see cheques in the mail. They’re honest with their reporting. They actually report quarterly.
Tanya Musgrave (00:28:55):
Oh nice.
A.J Martinson (00:28:56):
I was like, cool. If nothing else happens, hopefully they’ll make something for me. If nothing else, I can like sell my own DVDs and make my money back. Just shipping them out of the back of my car on the street corner, like fine. There is going to be a way to make this happen. It was a pretty easy, yes and their terms were good. Again, can’t really be super specific, but their terms were good. We went with them and like I said, in the first I think two weeks of the DVD being available, they shipped out over 300 copies.
Tanya Musgrave (00:29:30):
Wow. Okay.
A.J Martinson (00:29:31):
That’s huge.
Tanya Musgrave (00:29:32):
Yeah.
A.J Martinson (00:29:34):
A streaming sale is like five cents, right?
Tanya Musgrave (00:29:36):
Yes.
A.J Martinson (00:29:37):
Or like an iTunes sale, you maybe you get like $5. DVD sale, you’re at like $7 to $8. In one week I’m actually seeing money coming back in on the film with over 300 and they’re still selling it and they have it on streaming and it’s on iTunes.
Tanya Musgrave (00:29:52):
Nice.
A.J Martinson (00:29:52):
And they’re going to get it on like Tubi and all the AVOD and VDOT and they’re pitching international as well.
Tanya Musgrave (00:29:58):
Okay. Nice.
A.J Martinson (00:29:59):
Even if international doesn’t go, just the domestic is hopefully going to be enough to carry us over the budget line because we produced at such a low budget number. It’s been a really good relationship.
Tanya Musgrave (00:30:10):
That’s incredible. It always seems like that unicorn on the other side of the fence that you’re just like, ah, how I get over there? But they do distribution and stuff. Do they do advertising? Is that like, press? What happens with that?
A.J Martinson (00:30:34):
That’s the rub. When we did the minimum guarantee and so it was the minimum guarantee to a sales agent on Blackmark and they sold it to Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, through Archstone Entertainment and there’s like five conglomerates and it’s ridiculous. Anyway, all of that to say, when we went with them because they had this direct pipeline, Sony did all of the advertising. I think for a hot second, there was like a Snapchat ad for my Cold War Spy Thriller.
Tanya Musgrave (00:31:01):
Ooh.
A.J Martinson (00:31:01):
Because they were really like knew their demographics and that’s where all the cold war spy thriller lovers were hanging out. They handled the core of that advertising. It wasn’t much, honestly I think really it was just that Snapchat ad. I didn’t go on any shows. There was no interviews. There was no publicity. They got it into Walmart. They sold a bunch of territories and then let each territory market it. Maybe late in night, if you’re in France, you’re going to see a trailer for Rogue Mission at like three o’clock in the morning, which is the French version of the film or like maybe that’s happening. I have no idea.
Tanya Musgrave (00:31:34):
What if it’s [inaudible 00:31:37].
A.J Martinson (00:31:37):
Once I sold it, they’re like, you’re just going to get your money. Go away. We don’t want to bother you anymore.
Tanya Musgrave (00:31:42):
Yes.
A.J Martinson (00:31:44):
But in the doc space and with End Of Blindness, our executive producer, Martin Maulul, she was very clear on, you need to be publicized for this. You need to get articles and press done. She really pushed me to like think of it like that. I probably wouldn’t have done it if it weren’t for her because the distributors, I don’t know, we’ll put it in our magazine that out to 300 people and we’ll put it on iTunes and it’s kind of up to you. See if you can get a following on Instagram. We don’t know how marketing works. That’s not their emphasis. Their emphasis is on business to business. Selling territories.
Tanya Musgrave (00:32:15):
Got it.
A.J Martinson (00:32:16):
Getting it on streaming platforms, that kind of thing. It was up to me to market it and I know nothing about marketing. Well I know a little bit, I’ve done a lot of commercial stuff. I have an idea. I have a sense, but it wasn’t my forte. But what we really did, Martin pushed us to get a publicist for the film. We found October Coast who does really good indie publicity. They’re not insanely expensive. It’s like a good line item, but it’s not a line item that’s going to kill you. They sent out a PR blast to a bunch of outlets and we got 15 interviews, articles, press quotes for the DVD.
Tanya Musgrave (00:32:54):
Wow.
A.J Martinson (00:32:55):
Reviews on rotten tomato, on people’s YouTube channel, all over the map, just from this one publicity push.
Tanya Musgrave (00:33:02):
Wow. Okay.
A.J Martinson (00:33:02):
With October Coast. I was really pleased with that experience. They actually got us on like radio shows. It was sports byline. It had nothing to do with cataracts. I have no idea if anyone from sports byline watched the film, but we were on the radio. If you were tuning in, you heard about the End Of Blindness and Dr. Samuel and all that stuff. We saw a pretty big increase in our website traffic. We saw an increase in sales. We saw an increase in clicks to the iTunes link, all of these things just from this one publicity campaign that lasted for, I think two weeks. It was very short. It was like, boom. That really got me into this heads space of like, okay, marketing, advertising, Instagram.
I started doing boosted posts, but little bit of money at a time finding the core target audience. I think we finally kind of narrowed it down. Like I said, people, 40 to 60, usually women who are interested in nonprofit stuff. But having that data is so critical. Because now I know like, okay, what magazines do they read? What magazines do ophthalmologists read? Through pestering people on Instagram, you can get an article written about you. You can get coverage in this different magazine. We have an article that I’m writing right now for ophthalmology business minute. That came about because I tagged someone on Instagram and then I tagged them again. They ignored me and I tagged them again.
I sent an email and I said, Hey, we’d love to have an article. When Santa Fe got ready, I sent out this beautiful little invite card. Yeah. I said, “Hey, come to the Santa Fe film festival, see our movie because they’re right there.” And then I get an email response. We’d love to do an article about you. It’ll come out in late February. I’m like, cool. Persistence. But every time an article would come out, a podcast would drop, the numbers on the website would spike we’d triple our traffic. Make a few more sales. It was really cool.
Tanya Musgrave (00:34:55):
Something you had mentioned before in our correspondence, you were talking about the comparison between DVD sales and streaming. Talk about that.
A.J Martinson (00:35:06):
Yeah. Fascinating thing that we’ve discovered in this, with the nonprofit, the nonprofit sponsored a certain number of discs that we could sell or links or discs or however it is for people who had donated to the film. I just want to say for clarity and I have to give this disclaimer, the nonprofit didn’t pay for it. It wasn’t donor money that paid for it. It was someone who was affiliated with it, with sponsoring it. The nonprofits very particular that no money was used in the production of this. No donor money.
Tanya Musgrave (00:35:34):
Yes.
A.J Martinson (00:35:35):
I got to throw that out there.
Tanya Musgrave (00:35:35):
I can completely understand that.
A.J Martinson (00:35:38):
Yeah.
Tanya Musgrave (00:35:40):
Very important to know.
A.J Martinson (00:35:40):
This is a two separate entities.
Tanya Musgrave (00:35:42):
Yes.
A.J Martinson (00:35:43):
Anyway, but someone very near and dear to the nonprofit sponsored a certain number of discs going out so that people could experience where their money went. We were giving them out for free and we said, you can pick, you can do streaming link. You can do a Blu-ray or you could do a DVD. Of the responses we got back, 25%, I would say wanted streaming. I’m going to do the percentages wrong, but 10% wanted Blu-ray. Five people asked for a Blu-ray. Nobody wanted Blu-ray and the entire rest of that pie heart was all DVD.
Tanya Musgrave (00:36:18):
Oh my gosh.
A.J Martinson (00:36:18):
It was a huge ratio. I think we ended up shipping almost 100 discs out with that promotion. I was shocked because I’m kind of a [inaudible 00:36:29]. I like my Blu-rays. They’re nice. Right. But then I think about it. I never put a Blu-ray in. If it’s on the Netflix or the Tubi or the iTunes, I click and stream. That’s how I like to see it.
I don’t know if you know this, but Blu-ray to set up replication for Blu-ray, to do mass production requires, I think they lowered it now to $500, but it used to be like $2,000 licensing fee. That you have to pay just to do the replication. It costs like 14, 20 times the percentage of making a DVD. It’s a lot. It’s a lot more money to make a Blu-ray. We found, I think going forward streaming is a must because that’s the future and everybody has a DVD player and nobody buys the $20 Blu-ray. I didn’t even replicate. Ours are like limited edition, hand duplicated to keep constant because we can’t afford that setup fee. It’s ridiculous.
Tanya Musgrave (00:37:25):
You’re putting things where you had mentioned before, as in like, don’t go the festival route, and then hope for distribution. You’ve jumped straight into distributing what you can, but tell me about the festival route for this.
A.J Martinson (00:37:39):
Yeah. You can see my award hanging out back there. I’m so happy.
Tanya Musgrave (00:37:39):
Hey. Hi.
A.J Martinson (00:37:45):
Its like I’m now an award winning filmmaker. Isn’t that what we all want to be? I remember being 18, how do I get an award? I want to be an award winning filmmaker. I don’t want to be just a filmmaker. It’s all nonsense. But it’s good for the soul. It’s good for the ego. We need to be uplifted because like often I don’t know, maybe people will resonate with this. You make art in a vacuum. You show it to the people you know and then it goes out into the ether and maybe people enjoy it. I don’t know. But I found that film festivals are really for publicity and marketing, not so much for gaining distributor attraction.
Part of that was when I was talking to distributors, I said, hey, what festivals do you go to? Half of them said, we never go to festivals. Why would we waste our time? Except for the top five film festivals, you’re not going to really get distribution. You’re not going to make a lot of sales. It really is just for marketing. On End Of Blindness, what I did is I applied to film festivals that I thought we had a shot at getting into to save my money. $50 for 100 film festivals is like, what is that? I can’t math right now, but it’s a lot of money. It’s not cheap. We really tried to laser in and focus like, okay, probably we’re not going to go to Toronto or Con or Sundance, but maybe like a regional festival or like, oh here’s one that focuses on medical documentaries. Let’s go there. Really trying to like pair the film with the right film festivals to maximize your return on investment. Because you have to think about it like that.
Tanya Musgrave (00:39:11):
Yeah. Of course. Absolutely.
A.J Martinson (00:39:12):
We got accepted into five, six film festival through that method.
Tanya Musgrave (00:39:16):
Okay. Nice.
A.J Martinson (00:39:16):
They were like arranged, there was a couple of regionals like we did Albuquerque and Santa Fe people in New Mexico love our movie. I’m very excited about that. Most of it was like height of COVID. We didn’t screen at any of them, except for now, we finally have our first screening at Santa Fe. But what it did is when I went to my distributor and I was like, sending out those emails, you stick the laurels in the email. Look we’re winning festival. We won best documentary at one, we were nominated at two others. We did the IMPACT DOCS Awards, which is like, not really a festival. It’s just like, Hey, we’re going to judge your film and send you a trophy. Hey, they like the film, you get a trophy. Now there’s one on my desk and it feels really good.
Tanya Musgrave (00:39:58):
Yeah.
A.J Martinson (00:39:58):
By the way, that’s not like a pay to win one. I just to set it up. There is a standard and you have to… But all this to say targeting the right film festivals, getting those laurels, putting them on the DVD jacket, putting them out in your press release, putting them out when you talk to distributors and sales agents, it was really key. We started that process simultaneously with distributors so that if the distributor had a festival strategy or a marketing strategy, it would work out. That’s actually what’s cool about Santa Fe, we are selling the DVDs. We are driving people to go get the streaming links while we are also advertising like, “Hey, come to Santa Fe Film Festival and watch the movie screen.” We get this kind of multi-layered marketing so that we’re always driving people to watch the film in many different ways. It’s kind of nice doing a festival with that in play.
Tanya Musgrave (00:40:52):
Yeah. I think you had mentioned before something about grassroots marketing campaigns where you’re allowed to, because of your agreement, you’re allowed to do that. Whereas I assume before you weren’t?
A.J Martinson (00:41:09):
Like on Blackmark?
Tanya Musgrave (00:41:10):
Yeah.
A.J Martinson (00:41:11):
Yeah. Well there was no –
Tanya Musgrave (00:41:13):
Like screenings and stuff like that too.
A.J Martinson (00:41:15):
Yeah, exactly. They took the global rights thing. Because I did an MG, a minimum guarantee with Blackmark, it’s a lot different. For instance, if I was getting a percentage of every sales, there would still be like an incentive to handle the marketing on a different film or on a new film. But in this one instance, the success of this movie is heavily tied to me finding and carving that audience and getting them really hyped and excited and going grassroots.
Tanya Musgrave (00:41:45):
Gotcha.
A.J Martinson (00:41:46):
There’s a great book I’d recommend. It’s an ebook. It’s free. It’s called Selling Your Film Without Selling Your Soul.
Tanya Musgrave (00:41:46):
Ooh.
A.J Martinson (00:41:52):
That was really inspirational of like, okay, people can do this. It’s possible. If I do a film in the future, I might be really tempted to do a self-distribution model where you do an aggregator, like Bitmax and get all of the data because that’s the one thing you always sacrifice with the distributor. They’re not going to give you the data.
Tanya Musgrave (00:41:52):
Any metrics.
A.J Martinson (00:42:14):
Of who actually bought.
Tanya Musgrave (00:42:15):
Interesting.
A.J Martinson (00:42:15):
Very few if any. You have to guess. You have to go like, okay, well I know we did good on iTunes, but who’s buying on iTunes? You’re never going to get that. Yeah.
Tanya Musgrave (00:42:27):
I feel like, and I’m kind of just curious why to give them job security, I guess. But being open with that would increase the chances of a filmmaker finding you that is actually up the alley and you know, oh, hey, these are the kinds of people that actually bought your film. Fantastic. I have a friend who made a film exactly for that audience. Why keep it under wraps? I don’t get it.
A.J Martinson (00:42:53):
I can only guess. What I say is not probably the right answer, but my guess is it has to do with the amount of work it would take to provide that data. Let’s say you have one film and then you have 15 films and then you have 50 films and like… Passion River, they take a lot of films. They have a huge library. When you’re managing that much data, the only amount of time you’re going to have is to give them the quick report. Here’s how much money we owe you, done.
Tanya Musgrave (00:43:21):
Yeah. This is true.
A.J Martinson (00:43:23):
I think it’s less malicious and more time to benefit. They don’t care. They’re not going to see more sales if they provide that data. That’s my guess. But that’s why it’s really important to pick a good distributor or a sales agent who you can call on the phone and they’ll answer. They’re kind to you. They’re not pushy. They’re not nudgy and they communicate clearly. That’s my first question when I ask people like, do you like working with them? It’s like, hey, do they report on time? If they don’t report on time, you’re not even getting the data you’re owed. That’s a breach of contract straight out the gate.
Tanya Musgrave (00:43:58):
Yeah. I think I’m going to also mention right now, I think you’re familiar with it too. The Facebook group, Protect Yourself From Predatory Distributors and Aggregators. I believe that’s an indie film hustle group on Facebook that you can join. Everybody talks about every single distribution deal that’s gone bad. Hey, what about this? Oh yeah. Stay away. Or hey, with your particular experience, which has been good, absolutely go with them. I want to know a story of when something went wrong and what you did to fix it or grow from it?
A.J Martinson (00:44:39):
This is what went wrong. All right. I got my prop and this is what went wrong on End Of Blindness.
Tanya Musgrave (00:44:46):
A whole stack of DVD, CDs?
A.J Martinson (00:44:49):
These are every single quality control check I did while making the DVD for the movie.
Tanya Musgrave (00:44:55):
Oh my gosh.
A.J Martinson (00:44:55):
This is what perfectionism looks like. Bad, unhealthy, horrible perfectionism. If you start at the bottom of the stack, you’ll see version one. In the stack, I think there’s at least 97 versions of this.
Tanya Musgrave (00:45:08):
Stop.
A.J Martinson (00:45:10):
Each one was a different watch through of the film.
Tanya Musgrave (00:45:13):
Oh my God.
A.J Martinson (00:45:14):
That means I watched it at least 100 times while making it over the course of six months of trying to make this DVD. The way it would go is at first, I was checking like the technicals. I’m like really particular about my encoding for DVDs. I’m going to get geeky with it for a second.
Tanya Musgrave (00:45:33):
Yes, please do
A.J Martinson (00:45:35):
Most places where you go to buy a DVD, they use off the shelf, media en coder to take it from HD to SD. It looks horrible because they’re not scaling it down correctly. All your texts looks nasty and it looks jagged and it’s awful. Yeah. I spent three months researching every single different encoder for DVD so that my DVD could look as close to HD as possible when people played it, like most Hollywood films do. We’re never really bothered it like when you put Lord Of The Rings on DVD on it, looks good. Yeah. I found my own custom encoding. I negotiated with the authoring house that was going to make it, I’m going to send you the files. But what that means is like, I have to check the files and I have to make sure the encoding is done. That’s a problem when you’re a perfectionist.
Tanya Musgrave (00:46:23):
No, this is a good thing if you’re a perfectionist, because you know that it’s going to look good.
A.J Martinson (00:46:28):
Well, you know that it’s going to look good, but then you start watching your film over and over again. What happens when you’re the editor and the encoder and you’re working with the sound mixer really close and you did your own subtitles? You’d watch the film like, is there a comma missing there? Is that shot a little green?
Tanya Musgrave (00:46:46):
Oh no.
A.J Martinson (00:46:47):
Is there green in his hair? Did she blink at the wrong time? It just spiraled into like, watching the film, finding one thing, rendering the whole thing out again, watching it down again, burning a DVD, on and on. This goes on for months and months.
Tanya Musgrave (00:47:02):
This sounds like [crosstalk 00:47:04].
A.J Martinson (00:47:03):
And we get to the encoding house, it was an absolute nightmare and it was terrible. It gave me so much to talk about with my therapist. It’s beautiful. But we go through, I would say maybe this many DVDs to get it to the encoding house. We get to the encoding house and like all the careful work that I did, they change in the authoring process. Yeah. Not in the actual, like DVD itself, but the subtitles, which I learned how to do proper subtitles. By the way, if you want good subtitles, any type, and I used Captionmax, are fantastic. Don’t go to Rev, they don’t know how to time things correctly.
Tanya Musgrave (00:47:50):
Interesting.
A.J Martinson (00:47:50):
They are terrible. I know this is what happens when you get the CD and the filmmaking. Save yourself hours of heartache. Go to captionmax.com and just order professional subtitles that are made for movies. Don’t sweat it and ask for the Netflix spec, because Netflix looks better than most other specifications. I could go on and get geeky with that. But anyway, to get to the encoding house, it was like that many. You get to the encoding house and you find out that the software they’re using changes the timing of all your subtitles.
Tanya Musgrave (00:48:21):
No.
A.J Martinson (00:48:24):
That you spent so much money and time trying to get perfect. Anyway, it’s not their fault. The manufacturing house was great, but I had to really get in there and go over each detail again and so that was the next stack of 50. Was just checking that back and forth. Anyway, all this to say, that was something that went really wrong. Really showed one of my weaknesses as a filmmaker, this perfectionist mindset. Because honestly let’s be real we’re business people as well as artists. If that shot is a little green, if that caption is a little off time, you still got their ticket money. They’re still watching the movie. It doesn’t matter. You’re not going to win any more audience members for that. The story is the only thing that matters, and then the marketing is the only thing that matters. Not to be dark about it, but that’s the truth. If you get someone to buy the disc, they bought the disc. Anyway, you want to have artistry, but this is too much artistry, there’s a balance.
Tanya Musgrave (00:49:21):
That’s borderline. I’m glad to hear that you had a therapist to help you through whole thing because like, oh my gosh, now I’d be worried for you. I’m just like are you okay, bro?
A.J Martinson (00:49:32):
My girlfriend is an angel. She was very understanding in the process and like, was very I know that you want this to be really good, A.J, but nobody’s going to care. Let it go. I can still… There’s three or four things and eventually I’d to be like, no, I’m making a stand against this crazy craziness, like it’s done. That was –
Tanya Musgrave (00:49:53):
There’s a time. There’s a time to say no.
A.J Martinson (00:49:56):
There’s a time and you just got to say –
Tanya Musgrave (00:49:57):
There is a time to say it’s done.
A.J Martinson (00:49:58):
It’s done. Now it’s its out and I’m very happy. I don’t have to do this. I don’t have to wake up in the morning and watch the movie again anymore.
Tanya Musgrave (00:50:06):
You could burn those if you wanted. I’m just saying.
A.J Martinson (00:50:09):
I could, but I think it’s a shrine. It’s like a good reminder of what not to do what?
Tanya Musgrave (00:50:13):
What not to do, yes.
A.J Martinson (00:50:15):
If anyone starts to fall into that trap, my advice to get out of it is hire people you trust and step away. Hiring Captionmax to do the captions, hiring a good sound mixer to fix my sound, finding really good authoring houses who know what they’re doing. It just makes life so much easier. It was a hiring problem. It’s too much DIY, too much perfectionism and it can lead to really big problems.
Tanya Musgrave (00:50:40):
But at the same time. Yeah, but at the same time, shoot, I’m going to, I’m going to be calling you when I’m just like, “Hey, so I have this thing, where do I even start?”
A.J Martinson (00:50:51):
That’s the thing, some of this is perfectionism, but I’m a curious person. I get interested in like, why is this not working?
Tanya Musgrave (00:50:57):
Yeah.
A.J Martinson (00:50:59):
It was really fun to like, learn about subtitle, timing, and learn about like how to do a proper Dolby in coding on audio and how do the best possible video for DVD. I took away from it a lot of really good stuff. But next time I’m going to have like a quality control guy so I don’t have to watch it.
Tanya Musgrave (00:51:15):
So that you don’t have to, good. It sounds like lessons have been learned so we’re all good. Now I want to hear about the chaos. Please tell me about the chaos.
A.J Martinson (00:51:25):
I don’t know how most first days of a feature are supposed to go, but the first day on my feature was absolute insanity. We filmed one of the climax scenes of the entire movie on the first day. Do not recommend, but because we got a like $10,000 location for free, which is a whole nother story that I actually can’t talk about. It’s my [inaudible 00:51:48] connection. No, I’m just kidding.
Tanya Musgrave (00:51:49):
Ah, gotcha.
A.J Martinson (00:51:51):
Yes. Yeah.
Tanya Musgrave (00:51:52):
Don’t come back to me.
A.J Martinson (00:51:53):
No, but we got this amazing, gorgeous location on a favor, but that was the one day that we could shoot and…
Tanya Musgrave (00:52:02):
Got it.
A.J Martinson (00:52:03):
We only got one day, you only got one chance. It’s the crux of the movie we had, I think it was 12 pages we had to shoot. A normal day is six, but we had to shoot like 12 pages and including like a fight scene. That’s the fight scene at the end of the movie and everyone’s first day. Yeah and fight choreography. It was with people who were like a little bit older. It was like, this was not a day that was going to move to quickly by any means. I think the worst moment of my entire filmmaking career happens were like on hour nine or 10. One of the actors stops in the middle of the scene, points his finger at me and goes, you need to bleep this. But fuck you motherfucker. You are the worst fucking director I’ve ever fucking worked with in my entire life. You will never make a movie again. I’m going to walk the off this set if you don’t get your together right the fuck now.
Tanya Musgrave (00:52:58):
Oh.
A.J Martinson (00:53:00):
In front of not only my crew that I’m going to try to work 22 days with, but in front of my grandma who came to support, my mom and dad are there. The in entire family. I stopped and I went okay, but let’s finish the scene now. We got back in and we finished the scene and I kept my cool until I went home that night. I went home that night, I kid you not, I cried. I was like, first of all, I’m not making this movie and second of all, I’m not making any movies ever again. I’m quitting tomorrow morning. But I went to sleep, felt better in the morning, picked myself back up. The next time that same actor came to set because we had like four more days with him. He was not wrapped.
Tanya Musgrave (00:53:41):
Yeah.
A.J Martinson (00:53:41):
He still came back and we made sure really treat him with the care and respect that he needed, that he was looking for. We learned a lot. By the end of the shoot, he was like, Hey, look, what I saw on day one and what I saw at the end of this project were two different people. I’m really like, I’m so thrilled to be a part of this and I’m proud of like the movie that we’ve made together. Basically, I’m sorry.
Tanya Musgrave (00:54:06):
What pivoted? What set did he see at the beginning versus at the end?
A.J Martinson (00:54:10):
Well, I think when you go in on a six… Our day ended up being 16 hours, the first day. Yeah. It was bad scheduling. We didn’t have an AD. I was trying to AD and direct and make rookie mistakes. We were in chaos. It was a bad first day, and we were all getting our sea legs under us and lik, first feature, brand new crew, brand new, everyone’s trying to gel and a really hard day. I think he didn’t realize I didn’t have as much experience I think as he was expecting on day one.
Tanya Musgrave (00:54:43):
Gotcha.
A.J Martinson (00:54:44):
We adapted and the scene came out totally fine. The movie plays like nothing was compromised. But I think I learned very quickly how to deal with people that need just a little bit of extra attention on set. Actors want to feel special. Everyone wants to feel special. Making sure that you set up an appropriate dressing room for someone to a go retreat to, so they’re not just hanging out in the middle of nowhere that they can have quiet time and space and relax and get in their head. Every actor’s different. Somewhere like I’m going to go paint the flats for you.
We had one, like I walk into where the PDs working and one of our actors, he’s a good friend of mine now. His name is Elliot. I kid you not, he’s in full wardrobe with a paint brush, like rolling flats. I’m like, Elliot, no, if you get paint on that, we’re done it’s over. But he wanted to help. He’s like, I’m having a good time. There’s just different spectrums of people. Our production learned on that day, how to manage a different type of people than I was used to. When I say manage, it’s just make that person feel happy and safe and comfortable so that they can give their very best performance. I like him, we’re still in communication to this day. He’s a fantastic actor. He’s a great person. You just got to learn the hard lessons sometimes of how to deal with different people.
Tanya Musgrave (00:56:01):
Gotcha.
A.J Martinson (00:56:02):
It was worst first day ever, but really good lessons learned.
Tanya Musgrave (00:56:06):
Oh my gosh. I can’t say that I would’ve been able to keep my cool in front of everybody. I would’ve broke it down right there. Like, okay, you’re right. Everybody go home.
A.J Martinson (00:56:22):
We’re done. That’s it. Goodbye. No, it felt like that. But when there’s too many trucks in the driveway, it’s going to take too long to pack up and you just got to sit there knowing you messed up. It was like, well, let’s see if we can finish up and we got it. We got all the stupid footage. Except for, we missed one scene and we found a different house to pick it up in and totally fine.
Tanya Musgrave (00:56:42):
Yeah and it worked out. It all worked out. But it’s those situations where, like the question that I ask is seriously, just because of the growth. What did you do to fix it or grow from it? There are all of these kinds of situations that I’m sure so many people could relate to having an interaction with somebody who is just like, and they drop a lot of reality on you and not so fantastic words. You’re just like, all right. But do they have a point? Yeah. That’s the heat of the kitchen.
A.J Martinson (00:57:21):
Yeah. If you’re not going to go to film school, you’re going to have to take knocks like that. If you’re not going to –
Tanya Musgrave (00:57:26):
Even if you do go to film school.
A.J Martinson (00:57:28):
Yeah. But for me in particular, it was my trial by fire. It was really good for me. It was a great experience to have that happen and then to be able to come back from it. I’m actually kind of thankful in some ways. I wish you didn’t have been in front of everyone. I wish grandma didn’t have to hear the profanity, but she went home was like, oh, those Hollywood people. Like, oh, and I very carefully constructed like, oh, it’s okay that I’m a filmmaker. They’re all really nice. She was having a great time and then boom, explosion. Again, I’m really thankful for it. It was a good learning opportunity. The guy he’s out of the pressure of those horrible moments, he’s a total sweetheart and no knock on him. It was kind of deserved. Yeah, it was good.
Tanya Musgrave (00:58:13):
One of the things that we like to ask is about the tools of your trade, what gear or gadget is an old reliable or resource? The one that is your kind of old standby?
A.J Martinson (00:58:23):
I really like small cameras now. When I got started, when DSLRs were brand new, the Cannons just came out like the 5D Mark II, I didn’t like small cameras. They were shaky. It was hard to stabilize them. They didn’t have good balance. But I am a huge fan of the Sony A7S-series. That’s what I shot End Of Blindness on. Actually, at that time I had to develop my own custom color science for it. On the A7S, if you shoot in S-Log, you’re going to get banding in the highlights because it’s an 8 bit camera.
Tanya Musgrave (00:58:52):
Yes.
A.J Martinson (00:58:53):
You really want 10 bit to shoot in Log. What I did is I took the normal gamma, which is the light to dark, the tones. I took the normal gamma in the profile settings set the S gamma, which is the color science to the same as you’d normally shoot with S-Log. S-gamma three. When you do that, what you get is no banding in the highlights and really great skin tones.
Tanya Musgrave (00:58:53):
What?
A.J Martinson (00:59:16):
Really great colors. It doesn’t look like an A7S. Another documentary that I DP, we shot it in Europe and it was matching with an Alexa.
Tanya Musgrave (00:59:24):
What?
A.J Martinson (00:59:25):
Not perfectly, but with a little color grading. I showed people they could not tell which was the Alexa, which was the A7.
Tanya Musgrave (00:59:31):
That’s insane.
A.J Martinson (00:59:32):
The real trick with those cameras, yeah, is just finding that like really perfect color, balance and color tone, that was awesome. Once I developed that hack for it, I was sold. Because instead of bringing around this giant 10 pound F5 or FX9 or whatever, you get this tiny little thing.
Tanya Musgrave (00:59:52):
How about your favorite new gadget? One that revolutionizes, how you work.
A.J Martinson (00:59:58):
Okay. It’s two parts. I’m going to bounce off the cameras and like these new, A7S IIIs with 10 bit recording built in and auto focus. When I did End Of Blindness, it’s one camera SLR at shooting at F28 24. I’m like pulling focus while I’m shooting. I’m like, maybe it’s in focus. Somehow we got enough usable things, but this eye tracking auto focus and I can just tap the screen for low budget documentary, corporate, whatever. Oh my gosh. That just… Oh
Tanya Musgrave (01:00:32):
Man. Okay. All right. Is it true that they finally put in a sensor cover for when you’re changing lenses?
A.J Martinson (01:00:44):
Lenses?
Tanya Musgrave (01:00:44):
Yeah.
A.J Martinson (01:00:45):
I don’t know. Mine doesn’t do that.
Tanya Musgrave (01:00:46):
Sony for the longest time did not have this. Cannon had developed it for their R series. But I remember that for the latest Sony, and I cannot remember which one it is, I’m sorry. But for the latest Sony, they have a sensor cover as well as that auto focus. I’ve heard also that the menus are not as horrific because I hate Sony menus.
A.J Martinson (01:01:16):
It’s terrible.
Tanya Musgrave (01:01:16):
Yeah. I was on set one time and the guy… Because I was shooting some BTS and I had my A7S as well and he’s just like, oh, “Hey, do you like it?” I was just like, I hate it. Honestly, it’s a diva. I hate it. I like, I hate the menus, hate them all. He’s just like, honestly, it’s like that all the way up into their cinema cameras. Awful, awful. Like user interfaces it’s horrible. But this last one I heard was really fantastic with the user interface, with the sensor cover. My question is, do you still have to use the lenses? I know you don’t have to, but there’s some Sony lenses that they’re still focused by wire. That makes it really hard. You can’t set any marks or anything like that. It’s just like this continuous barrel that…
A.J Martinson (01:02:02):
I’m going to give a kind of a story that people might relate to. I used to be really geeky about like, I need to have a focus wheel and I need to have a cinema lens with the stops removed. I want it to be like, I’m making a film wherever I go. That is exhausting Tanya. That is exhausting. I couldn’t get two anymore. I’m sorry to say. I just don’t care. I want it sharp. If I’m not doing something that requires the creative aesthetic of like a cook lens or something that’s really pretty, then I’m just going to slap those good old Sony lenses on it and just use that auto focus and abuse the crap out of it. Because oftentimes, I don’t have the budget for a first AC. On like the features and the docs of course, again End Of Blindness, I didn’t have any AC. I had nobody. For stuff like that –
Tanya Musgrave (01:02:50):
But features and commercials and all of that fun stuff, yeah. You do that.
A.J Martinson (01:02:52):
But when it’s just you and a camera, just a couple of guys, whatever. Oh my gosh. Fly by wire, auto focus, lock onto the eye for me, shoot at F1.4. I don’t care. As long as it looks good. That’s my priority.
Tanya Musgrave (01:03:09):
How do people find you or follow your work?
A.J Martinson (01:03:11):
People can check out Section 3 Films, which is my company. At section3films.com. You’ll just see my portfolio, things like that, some trailers. But what’s really exciting is where you can check out the End Of Blindness, because we’re doing this massive social media campaign right now. We’re posting frequently. There’s a little bit of conversation going. You can check us out on Facebook. You can check us out on Instagram @endofblindness. You can find links to all of that @theendofblindness.com, which is the central hub for the whole thing.
Tanya Musgrave (01:03:41):
Awesome. Well man, seeing into the depths of distribution and having all of these resources literally listed out has been incredible. I know that I valued it incredibly, but thank you so much for being open and for being on the show.
A.J Martinson (01:03:57):
Oh, you’re so welcome. It was a pleasure and just remembered never this again. Don’t do this.
Tanya Musgrave (01:04:02):
Never again.
A.J Martinson (01:04:03):
Do not… For the audio listeners, I’m holding up a stack of 100 DVDs. Please save yourselves. Captionmax all day long.
Tanya Musgrave (01:04:12):
Yeah. Pretty much. If you enjoy this interview, follow us right here and on Instagram. Ask us questions and check out more episodes @thepracticalfilmmaker.com. Be well and God bless. We’ll see you next time on the Practical Filmmaker.