Back in January, I wrote a post about planning for the future by making the most of tools we have online: Twitter, Facebook, social maps, etc. It focused on the importance, for indie filmmakers, to build an audience outside of a theatrical distribution deal. Because if you’re not a rare-enough-breed to make it into Sundance and then on-top of that strike a fair distro’ deal… then you’re stuck with your film and no one to watch it. A photo from our Pedal Push Party fundraiser back in May of ‘07, just days before we began filming in Washington – via Mike Hedge. But there’s another aspect to planning for the future that I’ve been thinking about: the actual event(s). Sure, you’ve made the most of social tools and built up a great base of people interested in your film. Now you have to plan the events these people are interested in attending – at this stage, you could blow it without any past experience. I think it’s important for Amanda and I to release the 64 Days episodes for a number of reasons – one being that they are great learning experiences. We learn what people react positivity to, what they react negatively to… or what they don’t react at all to. 64 Days – Part 1 from mike ambs ☂ on Vimeo. And it’s not a clear ‘do this, and not this’ learning experience. There are aspects of the episodes that I personally love, and that people seem to not care for, or at least they aren’t moved in the same way. But regardless, what I know at this point, after only releasing a total of 9 episodes, compared to what I knew before is a – not huge, but still – vastly beneficial gap. So I have to take that into consideration when realizing that the day will soon come when the film is complete, and I will likely not have a distribution deal, and I will need to plan the actual screening events for people to attend. Will I be ready? This idea is not set in stone, and I’m sure people’s reaction to this post will help shape my decision, but I am currently thinking of planning a series of 64 Days events. A multi-state, re-occurring screening event of the 64 Days episodes – both older and new releases – at venues ranging from local-movie theaters to art-friendly warehouses. We have a very ambitious goal of having the film at 90% complete in 11 months – it’s ambitious because there’s still three follow-up interviews to be scheduled (and plane tickets to be bought), we have pick-up shots to film with Larry in Northern California, we have more Stockpile footage to collect, there’s 64 Days episodes to release, and I still have a day job, etc. But let’s go with the 11-13 months from now the film will be 100% complete, that leaves us enough time to plan 4-6 events in cities like: Ann Arbor, San Francisco, LA, Austin, Seattle, Chicago, Fargo, Portland… It would require lots of organization, lots of volunteers, lots of aspects of event-planning that we aren’t familiar with. We would need to be able to build onto each event – drawing on more interest, giving those people who are present at the events the info to help spread the word (if they enjoyed 64 Days), as well as request to see the actual film when it’s released. Stickers. Buttons. Fliers. Organization. Fold-out chairs. If you are making an independent film – I would highly recommend making (promotional / behind-the-scenes / tie-in) episodes to: a) help spread the word, b) set a tone for people to associate with your film, c) make your mistakes early on (when the stakes are less high). And if you have those episodes, it’s time to put them to maximum use: a) organize events, b) meet the people face to face who enjoy your stories, and c) be involved with the community you’re building on a personal level. Be sure to let us know your thoughts on the idea of a re-occurring 64 Days event. Would you go if there was an event in your area? What would you expect from the event based on other events you’ve gone to? Would you be interested in getting involved? 11 months to go – time to get to work.

I have a dozen things to do today, and maybe that’s why I’m taking a breather to write this quick post… so I don’t pull my hair out. It’s been a few weeks since we’ve stopped to talk about Stockpile, and where we are at with it currently. When we first launched Stockpile back in September, we did so using two different sites: Vimeo and Ning. If you’ve been to Stockpile’s overview page, you’ve seen that Ning has been closed down, at least for the moment. The main reason for shutting down the Ning group was we were having issues getting access to the original files uploaded to Ning… so for us, it was going to be a problem when we had a beautiful clip someone shared with us of their bicycle trip, and we only had access to the flash version. Yes, I could grab the .flv file if I wanted, but I wasn’t about to stick a re-compressed flash file in a feature film’s timeline. As for Vimeo’s Stockpile group, that’s been going very well. Although we haven’t been able to commit as much time to it yet as we would ideally like to, I’ve been doing a lot of writing, story-boarding and editing lately. But I feel good when I make the time to watch a few new videos, many of them are inspiring and remind of different aspects of my own trip. They get me excited about how to use those clips to tie together different moments in the film. The group has grown to 33 videos, 95% of which are specifically personal bicycling videos. We have 37 members, and are excited about seeing more from them. And we currently have 5 discussions happening in the forums. Over the next year of editing the film, we have goals to grow Stockpile to hundred of members and videos. We’re still trying to find the best workflow for watching and taking notes on clips people upload for us. If you haven’t joined Stockpile yet, drop by our Vimeo group and add yourself! And if you know anyone who knows anyone who’s taken their own long-distance bicycle trip, we’d love to see their footage. Okay, there was my 15 minute break – back to working on the things I mentioned in my last post.

I was very happy to wake up this morning to find new (and some of our first) videos in the Stockpile group on Vimeo, and I wanted to take a moment to thank the people who were the first to join and upload to the group. The first member to join, outside of Angela, Amanda and myself, was Stephen Niebauer. And the first video added to Stockpile was called, ‘A loney valley in Nevada‘ by Merten, he took the footage during a NY to SF solo-ride he took just this last summer. I embeded a video below from the end of Merten’s coast to coast ride. It’s all in German, but it’s exactly the kind of footage we were excited about getting. The end of my tour from New York to San Francisco from Merten on Vimeo. I really hope we can pull this off and reach out enough to collect a massive amount of other traveler’s media, it would greatly add to the film to actually *show* the way we are all connected by the places we’ve been at different times. When I think of the film’s core message about the importance of doing something you don’t believe you’re capable of doing, and the way that I might be able to cut together thousands of videos from all kinds of different people and places to support that idea, it’s just very encouraging. And something I can’t wait to see come together.