It's been over 10 days since my last post and always feel awful when the blog sits here quietly for that long. I guess I've been in a bit of a mood the last week and every time I sat down to write something... I just kinda' blanked out. "Why is that?", you might be wondering.

I think it had something to do with where I'm at in writing the script recently - I've come to a point where I need to find a way to say what the trip means to the people in our film.

That might seem like an easy'ish thing to do... but I've been trying to find the words of how to express my own bike trip for the last 6 years... I've never been happy with anything that I've come up with. But it's time for me to make a decision on that - I can't let the film collect dust forever just because I'm lacking the perfect way to express something. It's become a fight of what needs to be said and what should left for interpretation. It's slowed me down... and that always leaves me down.

But - moving on: tomorrow Babelgum will announce it's winners in the film competition. It's been nerve-racking this last month waiting for the final results... especially considering we reached this point last year in the competition. Regardless though of what happens tomorrow I wanted to take a moment to thank everyone again for all their support and votes - we couldn't have been finalist the last two years without you. Keep your fingers crossed for us tomorrow - and keep an eye our twitter accounts (@Pedal, @Manda, @FToM) for word on Babelgum!

And before I go - I know I've been jumping all over the place in this post - I wanted to mention the virtual panel discussion happening on the New Breed Workbook Project. I did a video-response with my perspective on film festivals. If you have any thoughts be sure to drop by and join the panel.

Labels: Babelgum, FToM, New Breed, Post-Production

Post Production - Week 70 from mike ambs on Vimeo.

Larry shared a pretty personal and emotional letter recently - and I asked if he would mind my sharing it on the site.

I realize that many people might find his words in the letter a bit strange - but that was half the point of me reading it... I'm curious how these feelings come across to other people.

For me, the letter makes perfect sense, all the emotions seems right in line with what I went through... with what I'm still going through - but I know that won't be the case for everyone.

Labels: Post-Production, Vlog, Weekly Update

The results for Babelgum's 2nd annual film festival were posted two days ago, and we were very excited to find that (for the second year in a row) we are finalist! The first year the contest wasn't very competitive - it felt like, I think, a lot of filmmakers hadn't yet heard of it. But this year it was much more popular and the climb to the top 10 was a lot more difficult.

An email I received yesterday had our total vote count at 904! With that final vote-count it's pretty clear just how fast voting took off once they simplified their site and video player.

Again, we can't thank everyone enough for all your votes and support! We would have gotten no where fast without your help.

I wanted to take a moment to stress the importance of focused campaigning. Most film sites have a lot of links branching off into a lot of areas of the project. Our sidebar alone has around 20 links, half of which take a person off the main production blog and to other sites all-together.

We have a handful of ideas for upcoming t.minus campaigns, and like I mentioned earlier in the week, they aren't contest related. We plan on coming up with collaborative projects that tie into the film or episodes, and are confident now that t.minus is the best way to go about them. The focused site could be used to plan a digg event, raise a smaller amount of money for a specific part of the project, give away a limited supply of swag or work-in-progress DVDs, a sudden boost in film request to reach a number more attractive to DIY-friendly theaters. Et cetera.

By having a branch of your film's site that does one thing and does it well - as opposed to linking to a post that is surrounded by sidebar links and recent entries - we were able to really focus the site's traffic (from other people's tweets) and have one main goal for visitors.

The final results for the film fest will be decided near the end of the month by a panel of judges and eventually Spike Lee. Keep your fingers crossed for us - and in the meantime, we have lots of other work to do!

Labels: Babelgum, Post-Production, t.minus

Teaser 013 from mike ambs on Vimeo.

This was taken around out 9th morning of our trip - we're either on the far end of Washington or just getting into Idaho.

In the background you can half see a group of female bicyclists that we ran into several times up until Montana. They had a pretty inspiring mindset about traveling - and one of the women would later email me on the memories from her ride, saying: "...It haunts me now like a dream that only exists in my head, separate from everything in my day to day 'real' life."

I thought that was one of the most perfect and beautiful ways I'd ever heard a person describe the after effects of their trip.

Labels: Post-Production, Teaser

Whew. So our first t.minus campaign is over as of this morning. It was a very interesting experiment in focused promotion for the project and I'm really happy with the way it all turned out.

The shortlist results of the Babelgum contest will be posted tomorrow and I honestly have no idea if we'll make the top 10 or not, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed. I can't thank everyone enough for all their support - so many of you voted, so many of you twittered and send friends messages on facebook, some of you even wrote blog post and put badges on your personal site.

We ran our t.minus campaign for 45 days - ending with around 700+ votes - averaging about 16 votes per day - a total of 3,381 total clicks through Twitter (on our specific shortened url alone... other people used their own tinyurl but we didn't keep track of those numbers).

The numbers are very interesting in how they break down, it's pretty clear that early on in the campaign less people were able to vote (most likely, judging from the wave of emails I received, difficulties in downloading and installing the software), but they still Twittered about the contest for others to see.

Near the end of the contest, when Babelgum opened up their voting and ditched their software, voting really took off.

Twitter was the most powerful and efficient way in which we got the word out about tminus - like I mentioned above, the shortened url we used was clicked 3,381 times. There was a very big jump in the number of clicks and the number of votes - but that gap began to close quickly when voting became more simple.

Above is a graph from Tr.im that shows the ups and downs of the RTs (re-tweets) for tminus. We normally saw between 5-15 tweets a day about the contest, and from that saw between 60-200 clicks from twitter, with a spike around 700 clicks near the end.

I have a lot of ideas of how to make better use of tminus for the next campaign, not sure when that will be or what it will focus on (perhaps 64 Days screening events), but I do think it was a success. It was a long 45 days and I really appreciate so many of you sticking with us through it. I'd love to hear your thoughts on what parts where good and what parts were annoying or could have been done better.

Do you think we should stick with Twitter as our main driver? Or should we experiment with other sites, like Digg, or Facebook? Do you think one has more influence then another? Tminus won't always be geared towards contest or award-related campaigns - we'll try to keep it a mix. Thanks again so much for all the support! We'll let you know the result as soon as we get them.

Labels: Babelgum, Post-Production, t.minus, Twitter

post production - week 68 from mike ambs ☂ on Vimeo.

We're down to the last 24 hours of the Babelgum contest - we really have no idea where we stand at the moment, since the relaunch of their site it's been impossible to even do a rough count of our position. So it will be as much of a surprise to us as anyone when the release their shortlist on the 3rd.

So keep your fingers crossed for us - if you can cast one last vote and tell everyone you think might take a moment to vote. Remember, now there's no signing up for an account or downloading software. Voting could literally take as little as 5 seconds and two clicks.

Okay, enough about the contest for now. I've been trying to get back into writing and editing mode, and haven't been able to re-acclimate as fast as I'd like after spending a few weeks neck deep in html, css, javascript and all kinds of other initials that are mostly over my head.

Labels: Babelgum, Post-Production, t.minus, Vlog, Weekly Update