Kyle Gilman’s Camera Noise Productions

This Vuze business has gotten me interested in making money from my own movies so I’ve put up a “Buy Stuff” link in the header. Anything available to buy will go up there. First up we have my collected shorts DVD. Sure you can get all these films for free online, but the commentary tracks for Camera Noise and Kalesius and Clotho are exclusive to the DVD. The quality’s probably better on DVD too, although these days Vimeo and Vuze and the like offer pretty high quality. DVDs are certainly very convenient.

Short Film Comedies by Kyle Gilman (DVD)
Includes five short films I wrote & directed.
88 min total. DVD-R with full color cover and printing on disc.

$9.99 plus $3.00 S&H

• Two Night Stand (2005) 18 min — Anamorphic widescreen and Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Sound Audio Track.
• Getting Laid Tonight (2004) 2 min — Letterboxed widescreen.
• The Epic Tale of Kalesius and Clotho (2003) 27 min — 4:3 full screen, transferred from 16mm. Includes Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Sound and audio commentary tracks with me and Jennie Tarr recorded in 2003. Hear in excruciating detail just how pathetic I was in college.
• The Life Story of Kyle Gilman as Told to Him by His Mother Mary (2002) 12 min — 4:3 DV
• Camera Noise (2002) 29 min. — 4:3 full screen, transferred from 16mm. Includes an audio commentary track with me and Jennie Tarr also recorded in 2003.

Camera Noise Logo Merchandise
Great for filmmakers, film students, actors, or anyone else who loves making movies. These are just a few examples of the available products.

Trying to make money with short films is a fool’s game, even in the supposed Internet-based renaissance of the short. I’ve made somewhere around $150 from my short films, mostly from Revver, and I’ve spent a lot more than that making them. I never expect to make money on the Internet, but now that Two Night Stand is taking off on Vuze, I want to get paid!

Vuze shows an advertisement every time Two Night Stand plays, and as of June 30 they had a guarantee of $5 per 1000 views in many countries. If all of the downloads of Two Night Stand include a qualified ad impression, right now I’m owed about $500. That’s a significant portion of the production costs of Two Night Stand. But the guarantee has expired with no explanation of the current offer. And the Sales History for Ad Supported Content in my account shows “No Entry.” Does this mean I’m not getting any money? I’ve emailed Vuze but I haven’t heard back yet.

If they had never offered any money I would be totally happy with the explosion of views from Vuze, but now that the thought of money has entered my head I’m disappointed in the situation. Now it seems like if these downloads aren’t earning me money that I’m somehow missing out on an opportunity.

Update: Vuze has written back, and they assure me I’ll get paid for qualified advertising impressions. I don’t have a report yet on the number, but I expect it to be fairly substantial.

My cover-story in Editors Guild Magazine is now fully online and no longer has to be read in scanned PDF format.

Over the past few days, Two Night Stand has totally exploded on Vuze. It’s over 20,000 downloads in its first week of availability. I know the thumbnail of Jennie has a lot to do with the popularity of the movie, but I’ve also seen a lot of people coming to this site searching for Two Night Stand over the past few days. Today is one of my highest traffic days in a long time. Of course, YouTube is up to 320,000, but that’s taken a long time and I almost never see anyone searching for info about the movie afterward.

It’s funny how things change. Two Night Stand was my first real post-college movie. I had a really hard time finishing the script without any deadlines. In early drafts they wandered around the small town they’d ended up in and got drunk in a local bar. After a lot of revision I ended up with just one location and two characters. I decided not to act in it because I wanted to focus on directing. It turns out it’s a lot easier to make a movie when you don’t have to act at the same time. We shot it in the summer of 2004 right before I moved to NYC. I took my time with the editing and premiered it in February 2005 at The Pioneer Theater along with a bunch of my other short films.

At the time I kind of thought I was done with the film. I had gotten everything I wanted out of it. I made a movie that looked good and didn’t cheat by using the documentary tricks that characterized my earlier films. If the sound recording was bad I couldn’t turn it into a joke like I did in Kalesius and Clotho. After spending nearly $1000 on festival submission fees for Kalesius and Clotho I was totally sick of the so-called “festival circuit.” I half-heartedly submitted it to a few friendly festivals and got into a few of them, although I was disappointed not to get into the Anchorage Film Festival, which is my favorite festival ever.

So Two Night Stand sat on the shelf until YouTube took off. I uploaded it there and hardly anyone watched it. Meanwhile, my Bad Webcam Sex video got 2 million views. Eventually things picked up and now it gets around 1000 views a day. It’s been really great to have all these viewers for a film I never expected to get much exposure. I don’t see any reason for short films to go to film festivals anymore. The Internet is the place for short films. At festivals they’re a sideshow at best.

Anyway, thanks to everyone who’s watched it, and I hope I can make some more films soon.

I just cut a new editor reel for myself. It’s in the usual place, and you can also see it right here.

Kyle Gilman Editor Reel from Kyle Gilman on Vimeo.

I managed to work through some of the focus problems I had with my pictures and I’ve built a fairly complete “Kyle Facing Forward” model. Now I’m going to do 3/4 profiles of me and Jennie and then make the first episode. Here’s another lip sync test. Go to Vimeo to watch it in HD.

Kyle Lip Sync Test from Kyle Gilman on Vimeo.

I had some troubles with Vuze (the peer-to-peer-video part, not the excellent part formerly known as Azureus) in the past, but last week I used it to submit my entry for the OpenCut competition and I saw some real improvement. For some reason my video was not compatible with Vuze’s re-encoding software, so you can’t just hit play and have it start as it downloads. I think that’s because it’s 1080p, and as far as I can tell most of their HD stuff is 720p. But I’m not really sure. Either way, Vuze seems perfectly happy to keep my 280 MB QT file on their servers and send it to anyone who wants it. I uploaded Two Night Stand, and it was re-encoded by Vuze, and it seems like great quality.

To download the full version visit vuze.com

Vimeo still has them beat as far as I’m concerned. You don’t need special software to download or watch anything from Vimeo. Of course it remains to be seen if Vimeo can keep paying for all that bandwidth. Vuze gets to exploit its users’ bandwidth, which obviously saves a lot of money. But if the cable and telephone companies change their business models and start charging residential customers for their bandwidth usage you can be sure Vuze won’t be quite so attractive.

Here’s the full interview from the Editors Guild Magazine in PDF form

I currently have 10 external hard drives hovering around my computer. One of them used to be an internal hard drive, but it was PATA, and my Jmicron PATA controller does not play well with OS X when memory usage goes over 3GB. Don’t ask me why. It causes regular kernel panics. So now it’s an external drive.

I was getting frustrated with having system drives full of junk and having to constantly shuffle stuff between drives, so I went to J&R yesterday intending to get one of the new crinkly 1 TB Lacie D2 Quadras.

But instead I was seduced by the Western Digital My Book Studio Edition II
It’s a RAID 0, with two striped 500 GB hard drives inside. I’ve never had a RAID of my own before and I wasn’t anticipating the ridiculous speeds I would get. Using the AJA Kona System test I get 125 MB/s on the eSATA connection. That’s fast. I have firewire 400 drives that go around 20 MB/s. And it was really cheap: only $280 for a terabyte!

I’ve been suspicious of the My Book drives in the past. They’re so aggresively priced it makes me wonder what they’re skimping on. But Western Digital has been making hard drives for a long, long time. Sure, I’ve had several of their internal drives fail on me, but never without any warning, and it was probably my fault for having bad case ventilation. I never ended up losing any data.

Now I have room to organize everything the way I want it. Naturally with a RAID 0 I’m not putting critical files on there, but I have all kinds of HD media that often needs temporary storage and that’s where it will live. Copying from SATA or eSATA drives to this new one is extremely fast. As far as I’m concerned, eSATA is the future and everyone needs to embrace it right now. Firewire: you’re on notice.

Now I just need a few extra eSATA ports. 4 isn’t going to cut it much longer.

I did an interview with Rob Feld for Editors Guild Magazine a couple months ago, and had my picture taken by John Clifford on my lovely Brooklyn roof about a month ago. Today I got a copy of the July/August issue and there’s a big picture of me on the cover looking squinty yet casual.

Sorry for the bad quality, I don’t have a scanner and it’s not online yet. Also, note that Pineapple Express didn’t get the cover photo. Someone at the magazine has a warped sense of priority.

The article is quite extensive and I’ve definitely been paraphrased and edited for brevity. I just hope I don’t come off like a jerk.