That’s the email message every project manager gets in their inbox after their Kickstarter campaign successfully funds. I received mine at 9 pm last Friday night, a few hours after we met our all-or-nothing goal ($2500) and had seen a few more pledges beyond that, even though we had finished trying. A nice surprise victory for some pretty tired filmies.

As a first time Kickstarter user who is also a research hound, I knew certain things. I knew that we had to have a team of dedicated people and that we had to have goals, such as:

1. Shooting for 101 backers. It was an arbitrary number, true, but when it comes to the audience growth aspect of Kickstarter, less is not always more. (We actually had an offline event first during which we attracted 8 backers. We had 65 via Kickstarter. Most of the offline backers aren’t the online sort. But one did return to pledge.)
2. 300 – 400 people liking our Kickstarter page. (At the end, we had 345 “likes” on this page, which at 65 backers means that ~ 18.8% of our likers acted on it. Or less.)
3. At least a couple hundred people liking the FB page. (I was fundraising based on the strength of my real-life relationships via Facebook, so this seemed important to me. We ended with 213 “likes,” from among whom I concocted a selective email list.)
4. Having no more than 1/3 of backers be people I already have relationships with. (Pretty close: 61.54% were backers I met via the project; 38.46% I already knew.)
5. Getting 50 – 100 people to the test screening, and having that take place before we finished our goal. (This actually came from actress friend and backer Marisa Welles, who knew as well as I did that my limited filmography would be a stumbling block. About 20 people unaffiliated with the film showed up for the live test screening, and the password-encrypted Vimeo link attracted somewhere around 85 more views.)

In the intervening week between the live test screening (January 28) and the Kickstarter deadline (February 3), Hotcakes got its only real promotion outside of Facebook, Twitter, emailings and good, old-fashioned word-of-mouth: First, we had a radio spot. Then, I got the chance to plug Hotcakes at my first ever Women in Film & Television (WIFT) meeting.

The radio spot I have mixed feelings about: I was up all night driving cab and had never talked on the air before, let alone to four raucous comedians at once. My co-producer and editor listened to the show live and kept thinking Plug the film while the comedians went on and on about me being a cab driver. I watched the website traffic carefully and we only got a few hits from the radio station, and my guess is they were pretty confused, seeing as even after I pointed out the mistake, the archive link says my name is Crystal Wells and links to Crystal’s imdb page. Note: Crystal is my roommate and was a consultant on the film. How her name got there is beyond anybody. But I’m told the culprit’s name is Rudy.

Plugging the film at WIFT went a bit more productively. I got some sleep before the meeting and was able to make a 30 second plug that got people’s attention and left an impression. I’ve seen more search engine traffic looking for “jo custer” and “hotcakes” since that night, which is pretty cool. What little of that I saw before I attribute to the fact that I talk Hotcakes to everyone and anyone in my cab who will listen. I’ve been meaning to acquire and install a laptop so people can like the pages and engage with more than a higher tip and a smile.

Two of Hotcakes’ backers came to us from WIFT: Board member Katherine Cecil and the enigmatic Deuce Hedrick, who has been pushing the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, which also has a film component and is looking for films made by women. (Plus: No fee. If we can have ours ready to go by March 15, we will absolutely be submitting to this fest.)

Even with these late-breaking promotional developments, though, actors started to panic. One asked me if I knew 10 people who could lend me $100 each to cover our $1000 shortage going into the last 48 hours. Another offered to donate his salary to the Kickstarter and asked if that would be enough. Because there were many things I didn’t know. Like…

1. Just because someone worked on your film and took payment doesn’t mean you can expect them to stick around for the Kickstarter campaign. This film marked a first in that everyone was required to read the script. Next time, I’ll also screen for belief in the project, desire for critical success and a strong social media presence.
2. That a series of ill-timed sports losses (LSU to Alabama and the Saints to the 49ers) would bum so many people out that that’s all they could not talk about for a week.
3. That the SOPA/PIPA controversy would emerge not long after the sports losses and effectively block all online communications for yet a few more days.
4. That we reached enough people in time for our last, big push. (How could I know?)

It took a lot of hustle — and a few sleepless nights, towards the end — but we succeeded at our first ever Kickstarter campaign. Thanks go to everybody who helped out because it took a ripple-effect collective effort to make a 37 day sustained campaign look like this:

What now, indeed. Kickstarter, I’m so pleased that you asked…

POST-PRODUCTION GAMEPLAN

This exists on a couple of different levels, the key to all of which is to convert the existing buzz around the success of the Kickstarter and the test screening interest into sustained interest in the premiere (and subsequent screenings) without sacrificing quality to time.

This is not my masterpiece. This is not my magnum opus. But it is the first of several short films I want to make while training myself for that first feature film (hopefully in 2013). As such, the best way to learn is to take no shortcuts. So we have a post-production team consisting of an editor, a composer, a sound designer/Foley artist and a colorist/titlist.

Today is February 6. Between now and March 15, we have to:

1. Get two pickup shots that our test screening confirmed we can’t live without. We’ve our original location secured for one of them. For the other, we’ll need some wooden paneling and some flexible lighting — ceiling-mounted track lighting is preferred.
2. Arrive at a picture lock. We’re closer than we were, but we’re not there yet. Our composer is willing and able to work with drafts, but we’re holding the others up.
3. Have a sit-down with Ryan at his office to arrive at a look for the film.
4. Makes sound notes for Jonathan so he knows exactly what I want and where.
5. Once we have a picture lock, Bob can turn his editing eyes back to the trailer for public consumption while Mike, Ryan and Jonathan all work their magic. Mike will need Jonathan to design sound first then finish his composition and then send it back to Jon for final mixing. Just thinking about this puts knots in my stomach.
6. Sometime before the end of February, start locking in venues for the premiere and other screenings and make sure we have a targeted date for promotional materials.
7. Go ahead and order all of our promotional materials, once we have a six month projected plan for Hotcakes from mid-March to mid-September, meaning that we should know every fest deadline within those dates, what we’ll need & the cost…

Thankfully, not all of that needs to be done in that order. We can overlap some. It helps.

DEVELOPMENT/PRE-PRODUCTION GAMEPLAN

We’ve got a treatment I like for the next short film, which will take the character Frank and make him the protagonist. I want to show people where he lives. I want to show you some of the events that led up to Hotcakes. Chief among challenges in writing the treatment has been to make it a complete and compelling story that isn’t episodic in the slightest, but at the same time feels like a natural extension of the characters as they were conceived.

The gameplan for this is very simple. In broad strokes, it looks like this:

• FEBRUARY: Development. Bounce the treatment and subsequent drafts of the script off all of the actors we’re looking at for parts. Allow them to weigh in, engage. Location scouting. It’s a hell of a lot easier to write scenes after locations are locked.
• MARCH: Script lock. Let pre-production with Camera & Art Departments begin. Casting. This means anyone who doesn’t already have a role gets found. Crew hiring. As of right now, we still need people for each position on this list.
• MAY: Production. I’m aiming for an $800 production budget, all told. Wish us luck. I don’t plan to Kickstart the next film. I may change my mind, but as of right now, the plan is to bring it in as cheap as possible without lowering production values.
• JUNE – AUGUST: Post production. Ideally, we have a finished film about the same time that Hotcakes festival distribution is starting to wind down. Then we have a little breather time before the third short of the year goes into development. That one we Kickstart before we go into production, probably sometime in October.

No doubt about it that this post would look completely different if it hadn’t been for 65 wonderful people (and really, quite a few more). Thank you all so much. I’ve said the words “We couldn’t have done it without you” a lot in the past week. It’s so true.

And here’s another post-victory axiom for ya: It’s time to get back to work.

Earlier today Tony Fennelly, Hotcakes actress and backer, included me in her regular updates to all her friends. I was touched and amused and decided to re-post.

Editor’s note: I’ve not changed the content, so it should be stated that while I’m young and probably at least a little good-looking, I’m not a UNO student. I went to graduate school there from 2010-2011 for film production and decided it was a poor fit. Jeff Bruno, however, is graduating from UNO undergrad this May, along with Cassie Giveans. Jeff sent me Mugged to inspect Tony’s performance. Then I invited her to the film. She said yes.

That said, here’s Tony in her own words:

I agreed to do a black and white film with some UNO students, including Jeff Bruno who had directed me in Mugged. The producer-director of this fifteen-minute short is a beautiful young film student and cab driver, Jo Custer. The film, Hotcakes, tells of three cons, just out of prison, who go to a seedy diner for, well, hot cakes. I was cast as a spooky fortune teller who warns one of the cons of something or other. Jerry Lopez, a brilliant natural actor I’d met in Veleka [Gray]’s class, was convincing as a Mexican con called “Chico.” My friend, Michael Martin, played “Jacques,” a derelict who lives in the diner, sleeping at the counter under a pile of rags.

Fortunately, “Jacques” didn’t need a full set of teeth to be in character.

The original script opened with the three convicts being let out of the prison, accompanied by two guards. But Michael advised Jo that there should be a “Unity Of Place.” [Anyone who has studied theater knows of the three classical unities: Time (within 24 hours), Place (the same place), and Action (one main action to follow).]

The three unities are almost never observed anymore but Jo followed Michael’s good advice and decided that all the action would take place inside the diner. It was much neater and easier. And she didn’t have to rent another location or guards’ uniforms.

A theater space, “Byrdie’s Cafe,” was transformed into a believable diner with realistic-looking “brick” walls. And I had supplied my own wardrobe, a colorful, ankle-length, skirt topped with a multi-hued, knit sweater.

“One advantage of being an older lady is that I have decades’ worth of all kinds of clothes in my closets,” I assured Ms. Custer.

I stood out on the sidewalk listening for my cue of “Action!” to walk into the “diner,” but the evening traffic was so noisy on St. Claude Avenue that I never heard it. (Jo isn’t a trained stage actress. I could have shouted loudly enough.) Finally, we agreed that I would walk out and count fifteen seconds to give camera and sound time to turn everything on.

I made a lot of stage-actress mistakes. I was doing my scene with “Marty” played by Burton Tedesco (who looks like a gangster but actually teaches theater arts at Delgado) and kept waiting for my dialogue cue from across the room as I would do on stage. BUT all Burt’s and my action was taped in one segment. There wouldn’t be any cues from elsewhere. And after I made my exit out the front door, I thought the scene was over and turned around and blundered right back in. WRONG. Burt still had to make HIS exit and I spoiled the shot.

There is a website called kickstarter.com on which producers discuss their projects and offer a preview along with an itemized budget. Some examples of Hotcakes’ are: Crafty (that means food) $305.35. Location $200. (A bargain.) And “Tetanus Shot after DP stepped on a rusty nail: $30.00.” Some of us actors appeared in the preview in character.

You can go to kickstarter.com, type in Hotcakes and have a look.

Or, just click here: http://kck.st/unW276

Editor Bob Krieger emailed me the very first complete rough cut today. My feet are tingling.

Also, we recently confirmed the date and place of our test audience screening. We’ll be hosting the live event at 4 pm on Saturday, January 28 at the theatre inside the WTIX Building behind the Clearview Mall.

For those unfamiliar with New Orleans, that’s in Metairie.

We are so psyched.

The venue can hold 55 people comfortably. All those who give $25 or more to our Kickstarter campaign receive an express invitation. Those who can’t make it are invited to an alternative digital test screening, to which you can bid for, too. It’s free.

Just email: johanna.custer@gmail.com and we’ll get you on the list.

Hey, there. Thanks for keeping abreast of the Hotcakes website happenings.

You can see the widget now to the right of the screen. For every 50 Facebook “likes” or every $250 pledged toward our $2500 goal, we’ll release a new still into the wild.

Want to help us make a difference in New Orleans independent film? In the arts? In the world? Please just spread the word via the links to the right.

Thanks so much.

– The Hotcakes Team

Two Thursday mornings ago, we wrapped shooting on a film so quickly, people seemed flummoxed that it was “all over.” Well, it’s not all over, but we’re catching people up on what they missed. The first part on the making of HOTCAKES is here, if you’re still behind:

One of the most long-winded debates in the filmmaking world revolves around who’s more important on set and, invariably, the conversation often seems to narrow to actors vs. the director of photography or cinematographer, depending upon how you bill your people. On a truly independent set being run by creative minds — i.e. people who are creative artistically and in business (with people) — this is, of course, an exercise in rearranging vainglorious spillings of hogwash. It’s kind of like asking which dollar was more important on a Kickstarter campaign that didn’t make its goal by its scheduled kill time. You need everyone on set as equally as the next person and no one is more replaceable than another, unless the unthinkable happens and someone’s not doing his or her job.

That said, one of our silent-silent MVPs on Hotcakes was absolutely our sound recordist and lead sound designer, Jonathan Berguño. Jon was hooking me up left and right with names of people to include in our production for pretty much every position. He and his RTFM Audio, LLC partner, Michaela Girouard (a.k.a. Hotcakes’ boom op and sound engineer), will be union soon and, as part and parcel of that, they know a lot of working crew. The only bad thing about their collective Rolodex is that they know a lot of union people who don’t want to take the step back to the indie side of film, if they ever stood there in the first place. On the flip side of that same bad, they also know a few really young and green people just looking for experience and willing to work on almost anything.

Hell, we all know those people. And we feel for them — especially me.

I opted early on after looking at a reel to try Zack Lamplugh as our DP, one of the ones on the green side. He had a couple of minor drawbacks. One was that he has a day job at Home Depot, not exactly the ideal thing for a highly technical position that would need to be filled by someone who was alert and on point for three to four long, overnight shoots. The other was that he lives in Hattiesburg, MS. That’s a fair haul from New Orleans. But he assured me transportation wouldn’t be an issue and I assured him that we could cover the cost of gas if he were willing to take off and crash on a bunk bed at the place where I stay. He was. He was also coming into town for a concert and could meet me in person and discuss the look of the film and equipment and even go see the two locations I had chosen — Byrdie’s cafe and art gallery, for our interior set build, and the St. Bernard Parish Jail.

We found an AC by picking him up the morning after he had been in a car wreck. He needed a ride home — partly because his car had been totaled, but mostly because he was on a lot of painkillers and couldn’t really do much besides exist and talk. Some. In retrospect, it was really not a good way to try and get someone on board. But at the time, picking him up from gaffer and grip Kelly King’s place, it seemed like the thing to do. My assistant Jenny Martin and I had to make a pit stop at Strike It Green in Elmwood, to check on a few of our set build rental decisions, and he tagged along in complete delirium as I told him that we could really use one AC who could also slate. When I found out he was a filmmaker himself who also does color correction, I asked him to color correct TOLL ROAD for free so I could assure myself that I should pay him to color correct HOTCAKES.

In his delirium, he agreed. Jenny and I mentally crossed off one more crew position and a rather important part of the post-production process that our editor doesn’t really do.

Then a whole lot of nothing big happened. Jenny and I met regularly. We sent out weekly or close to weekly updates. I juggled cab driving with writing character back stories and the 15 page version of the script. I talked with an actress in L.A. about maybe being in the film and then maybe doing voice over for the film. I lost eight days of cab driving while rewriting the script, a significant amount of income. I met with actor Jerry Lopez, who I had tried to work with last April before FUERA stalled in production, and managed to get him on board without much effort. He really liked the script, especially the rewrite. I received a lot of support from Dan on both the writing and the casting and Burton, our lead, provided some much needed morale and a strong sense of having anchored himself to the project.

Then I got stressed. Emails were being returned by the cast, but not by key members of the crew. Jenny’s a good assistant, but not an AD and not yet a filmmaker. I had been all alone in the pre-production and I couldn’t even get a simple answer to a question about my DP being on Skype, Google Plus or gmail video chat. We needed to discuss shots. I sent out one last email to my DP, trying to probe for commitment to the project and then began fielding emails from my gaffer/grip — and good friend — Kelly King. Kelly, it turned out, had not received the new script. He had no idea what was going on. He sent me a sort of manifesto on how a film set should run, communication-wise, and I realized that this was not the time for that discussion. I tabled it for a later date and simply told him that we wouldn’t be working on this one together. We’d have to iron out our relationship later.

Then I got an email from the AC, the one I had driven home whilst he was still under the influence of pain meds. He had all kinds of demands that were completely out of sorts with what we had discussed while he was less than fully functional. He wanted a lot of money. He wanted us to understand that he was worth a lot of money. He made it clear that he does not slate. He was completely out of touch with the project and our needs.

During this same time, I was trying to reach Ryan Fink at the St. Bernard Parish Film Office about how his negotiations were going with the fine folks at the jail. Little did I know, Chris Brown, the man who had given me the tour, was the one I should have tried to contact. I’m not big on haphazard communications. I’m a Libra. I like to go directly to the source and Ryan was the one supposedly in talks with the authorities at the jail. He was the one I had sent all of our information to in a one-sheet: our budget, the size of our crew, tentative shoot dates and times, what exactly would be needed, etc. So I pinged him and only him.

Well after the fact, Chris asked why I hadn’t called him. These are the lessons we learn.

The good news is that there was a better lesson on its way. Part of the reason why you want to work on a film with a budget is that you learn a lot about your limitations and abilities from managing it and working with it. I had already decided that I wanted to pay everyone and had allotted $2000 for that. I had already decided that the set was absolutely the second priority and kept playing with that budget. But Cassie had kept set costs way down, so low that even after transportation costs, there was still room left in her $1000 minimum budget. (I gave her a final ballpark: $1000-$1200.) That pretty much just left crafty and that nebulous realm of the last minute and unforeseen — once we decided that we had more like a $3500 – $3700 film, rather than a $5000 – $6000.

Taking the exterior jail scene out of the equation not only made the fiscal decision possible, it also meant anchoring the story to the location. Our fictional restaurant, Jailbirds, was no longer a random place. It was now The Only Place You Need to Know. And it made the story stronger in every way possible, lending strength to each of its components — to each of the characters, to their relationships to each other and to their individual relationships with the location itself. Something exceptionally challenging about writing a 17:6:1 (17 pages, as the final rewrite turned out to be; six characters; one location), it reinforced my main directorial goal: To create good and — hopefully — even riveting dialogue scenes.

Game on.

There was only one problem. Well, two. One: We had less than ten days until we started shooting and my entire camera crew — DP/camera operator, AC and gaffer/grip — had dissolved. Two: I had been sick for eight days and had lost another week of income, along with a lot of much needed pre-production time…not in the budget. Or the plan. The last three days were especially grim: I had a fever and chills. I slept ~ 36 hours straight.

I contacted two people — one being Dawn Spatz, whose work on TOLL ROAD without any collaboration in pre-production was pretty right on; the other being Joshua Huval, who I had worked with just once on a thrown-together UNO Filmmakers’ Club “One Week Film Fest” shoot, EL DUELO AGRIO. Dawn was going to be in Texas, but she was supporting us from a distance; Josh said he was in, for sure. Very grateful, I started inundating him with information. So much so, I thought that’s why he wasn’t responding to any of my messages via email or Facebook, even with less than a week to go and the actors well under way in rehearsals.  That’s pretty much when the Director/Producer in me totally freaked out…

…to be continued.

As of eight am on Thursday, December 1st, HOTCAKES wrapped, to the amazement of even those who were more or less in the loop on how production was going. This is the story of how a ~ $3700 film was pulled together in one month, or at least the first part:

A little over a year ago, I sat down and wrote a five page script, the final assignment of a screenwriting class I was taking as a first year film production MFA candidate. Known as a “5:3:2,” it was five pages of a complete story set only between three speaking characters and on two separate locations and was meant to be shot this fall for a directing class. After writing perhaps a paragraph about each of the three characters and four drafts of a script, I set it aside and let it stew. Then spring came and with it, a stalled production.

Film schools impose many rules on their students, none of which makes much sense. The earlier “3:2:1″ exercises (three pages, two speaking characters, one location) had already been sabotaged by the arbitrary restrictions of twenty minutes total footage and the denial of certain crucial pieces of production equipment — really basic stuff like a monitor, so that the DP and the director don’t have to pretend they can see what they’re filming for large screen projection on a 2.7 ” LCD. Or bounce material, which any student with the money was allowed to buy, but not use. Not exactly the Robert Rodriguez method.

Nor fair.

My first 3:2:1, TOLL ROAD, suffered from all of that plus the lack of any collaboration in pre-production. My second, the more ambitious Spanish language film FUERA DE BALANCE, never get off the ground. Not being able to find an SFX person to make sure we shot it correctly was the first blow, but the death knell sounded when I couldn’t find any fellow grad students to crew for it. I had to scrounge. When we didn’t get all of our basic, non-special effects shots in on the one production day we had, I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised. I had a DP who was really just a grip and had been alone in setting up his shots most of the day in addition to operating the camera and a sound guy who had to leave one third of the way through production. The only consistent people on set were my two patient, professional actresses and the garrulous owner of the location house.

From then on, each time I peered at the original HOTCAKES script, I vowed to defend it from all this chicanery. This was not the kind of filmmaking I set out to do one late winter night back in ’02. I left film school and focused on writing for the summer. Prose, mostly: One short story, a novella idea and one locally interviewed and published article. But I kept returning to HOTCAKES and told at least a dozen people about it to gauge their reactions, which were overwhelmingly positive. It had flaws. In its one in-class reading, it had gained laughs mainly from the Mexican accent the guy reading for Chico employed. Everyone agreed that it worked without anyone really being able to put their finger on why.

In early summer, I ran it by a producer who said she didn’t really like it. Then she said that most of the scripts she read and liked were thirty pages long or more. I took another look at the story. Maybe Chico was a bit too one-dimensional. Maybe Frank could be more of an asshole and more likable at the same time. Maybe, after all, I had a larger story. I started to think about the characters almost every day. I set up a Twitter account with the film name (@Hotcakes_Movie) to help keep the idea in the fore of my thoughts. About a month ago, after getting dissed by a guy who appeared to be trying to make a film in Denver, I decided to pool the extra energy and drive I was feeling and make it live.

I started where I always start: talking to actors. Daniel Schubert-Skelly, a guy from Mass I had met on TREME and who later tapped me to be a camera operator/actor for a truly terrible play, threw his hat in the ring for one of two main roles and suggested that I talk to Burton Tedesco, who had also been lucky enough to be in the terrible play, for the same. I like Burton a lot, so the conversation began. They read the five page script and were intrigued enough to stick around until I hammered out 15 pages which included two whole, new characters and gave an existing character in the script, a waitress, actual lines. Then Dan recommended Cassie Giveans as a production designer and I found an art gallery that could provide what many a diner I’d scouted could not: room to really make it ours.

The art gallery comprises the other half of a coffee shop and pottery studio and still had its October installation of sheep paintings up when I threw this by the proprietor of Byrdie’s, Heather Lane: “So hey, I have this crazy idea of building a diner in your art gallery and filming it. What do you think?” Seeing as November’s installation had been sacrificed to Fringe Fest (she hosted not one but two small shows), she thought it might be doable. Fringe ended for her on November 21, so we could pull in materials and begin building on November 22, as long as we were out by December 1st for the new installation and the set didn’t disrupt the natural flow of business. I figured we would need four production nights for the 13 pages of interior: three for sure and one for safety and/or pickups.

We had our primary location, we had our production designer, and we had one or two leads on where to go to build the damn thing — Strike it Green, in Elmwood and The Green Project, only a couple of blocks from Byrdie’s. Cassie and I started pricing and window shopping at both places, along with our two assistants. The first physical item I bought for the set, after a $25 Green Project membership, was a set of kitchen pantry doors that are shaped a bit like old Western saloon doors. They were $24 and white, which fit our B&W Western motif and our budget. We also spotted a vaguely Western style white bar at Strike it Green, a 14 foot long monster. We were on our way. That really only left the two exterior pages to worry about, the part of the story set outside a prison.

Someone — I can’t remember who — suggested the St. Bernard parish jail just down the road from me a few miles and I contacted the one guy I’m Facebook friends with who works in the St. Bernard Film Office, Chris Brown. He suggested I come in, and so I did. Chris was super nice. He told me all about how it worked. The prison would charge $2500 per day for use of their interior, in addition to $35/hour for each detail worker. He drove me over to the prison and showed me all around the grounds. I would have to tweak the script but it would work, I told him. As long as interior didn’t include the jail yard just inside the gate we would want to film in and around. And as long as they didn’t require a certain number of detail workers. And as long as the million dollar insurance policy wasn’t priced too high. I kept hearing different numbers falling anywhere between $400 and $1000.

What I had hoped would be a $3500 budget film was more and more looking like it was going to be a $6000 budget film — a lot of money for a short which doesn’t make returns, traditionally, and by someone who still finds herself with a significant amount left to learn. This was my first set build, my first managed crew, my first paid set, my first budgeted film.

That’s a lot of fucking firsts — a lot of cracks into which failure could creep and divide us. And it’s entirely probable that the combination of all those firsts amounted to the reasons why we lost a few members of our crew in the communication shuffle that followed…

…to be continued.