Cinema Therapy Studios Update! (Patreon)

Here's an update of where the Studio is at. Apologies, it's long-ish.

Participation

We’ve heard from many people that they’d like to be involved in ways we hadn’t even anticipated, so here’s what we’re planning to do:

1. Create a Form for people to submit story and character ideas.
2. Create a Form for people to submit any skills/interest they have in working on the project in any way.

Neither of those submissions is a guarantee that we will use your work, or be able to put you to work on the short this year. But we will credit everyone who contributes to the finished product in as fair a way as possible.

We’re also going to be coming up with our own ideas, which we’ll discuss along with everyone else’s to see what sticks.

For the sake of transparency: We’re not planning on paying ourselves to write/direct/produce this short film. So story submissions will be unpaid. Please don’t write an entire script. Outlines or story treatments would be entirely sufficient. Just three sentences on the back of a napkin can spark a lot! Moonstruck was based on a two-sentence writing prompt, and I have three features outlined from that one little idea now.

We are going to be paying our cast and crew, so if there’s a way we can use your work for that, obviously, we’ll pay crew day-rates for that work.

Supervillain Tier

We’re still figuring out exactly what is going to be included in the Supervillain tier, and what the cost is going to be, but we'll have that all locked down very soon!

There are a few things that we know will be included. You’ll have access to every livestream of the filmmaking process that we do. We’ll do two or three livestreams for all Patrons, but SV access will be essentially all-access to our whole process. We’ll have streams during some writing sessions, production meetings, on set, and some places in post.

Those will mostly be view-only. We’ll be working, so we won’t have much/any time to answer questions, but you’ll get to be a fly on the wall.

This is honestly kinda unprecedented. I don’t know of any other show or movie that has opened up the creative process this much. Also, lots of it will likely be boring. You’ll get to see just how the sausage gets made, and it’s… surprisingly tedious. There’s a reason it takes years to make a movie.

There may be a merch component, but we're working that out with DFTBA (our merch supplier/shipper) and what that might look like for Blu-Rays, Posters, etc... So we can't promise anything there aside from: We want to make it happen.

One of the other things that we know Supervillains will get is exclusive pitch meetings.

The Pitch

Once we’ve selected the story ideas we’re going to pitch, we’ll put together a pretty standard Hollywood pitch, outline, walkthrough of the plot/character beats, and lookbook (a document with images from other movies/art/photos that gives an idea of the general vibe we’ll be going for visually.)

We’ll pick three or four ideas, and present the pitches to the Supervillains to get feedback from them. If you’ve got a great idea for how to sell an idea, or a great idea to include in one of the lookbooks, or ways we can improve our pitches, we want to hear it!  From there, we'll revise our pitches and share them with all our Patrons to vote on which movie to make. This will likely be a video with a voting poll.

Timeline

This is all still tentative, but we want to give you a general sense of how long different parts of this process take, and what we're aiming for:

• Launch Supervillain tier and begin story submission process in March
• 2-3 weeks to go through story ideas and develop our 3-4 pitches
• ~1 week to present pitches to Supervillains, revise pitches, and share with Patrons to vote
• It’ll take 8-ish weeks to write the script and go through a couple rounds of revisions (keeping in mind, we’re not going to be writing full-time. If we were, a 15-20 page script would take 2-3 weeks)
• 4-5 weeks of pre-production, including casting (we’ll use some locals from Utah, and some people from LA), finding locations, hiring crew, working on any props/costumes/etc.
• 1 week to shoot!
• ~8 weeks of post (editing, sound, VFX, color)
• And we're DONE! Theoretically, by September, to submit to some of the more prestigious festivals, but we reserve the right to be later than that. 😁

We'll be sharing updates and behind the scenes with you all along the way.

We're so excited to get started on all of this with you! These are fairly humble beginnings, but we might just be changing the entire industry, if we get this right. 20 years from now, we may all be looking at today as the start of something groundbreaking! Or we may all be emerging from shelters into the glaring light of an irradiated morning wondering if the MutaCrows are going to attack today. WHO KNOWS! But it’s all exciting!