Happy Mother’s Day/Pass the Credit Card

This blog is about the private investment cooperative group which I recently created. I know that sounds complicated a boring. It is both.

If you stopped reading with that last sentence, you will never know about this for-profit system I am creating. No, I am not begging for money. (If you want to donate to my non-profit entity however, a donation button on all of my web pages is located at the bottom of each page. You will be redirected to my Square(up?) account where you can deposit money into my business bank account).

So, what’s up? I finished editing my first full-length film/video. I have a marketable product. I also have potentially 45 individuals that helped me produce the piece. I have given each of them one stock certificate of ownership in the film/video itself.

As I have been pondering the marketing of the product, several things have occurred to me.

1. You don’t give away a marketable product (only pieces of it for promotional purposes).
2. You need an entire set of electronic tools and capabilities just to stay afloat in this market (remember Sears, Penney’s, K-Mart?).
3. If you are depending on others to be involved in marketing your shared product, you will need motivate them, you will need to teach them and you will need to organize them into a corps of money-hungry demons!
4. You better be up on the tools of the trade. If you can’t design a database-driven website, you will need to hire developers, account managers and designers. They will make the money, but you probably will not.
5. You better have some basic business skills.

I hope I still have all of those things. We shall see.

Today, I woke up thinking about how I might design a distribution system for a film/video with a potential for growth and profit. I have 44 other partners all over this country and in Canada.

I uploaded the first episode of “Veil of Secrecy 2020” (VOS2020) to my Lemon Aid Network website. That makes it possible for the members to stream that one episode. However, the entire final version of VOS2020 is over 17 gigabytes and lasts for 1 hour and 48 minutes.

It took nearly an hour to upload that one episode to my ISP’s platform. I have uploaded an earlier version of the entire film before. People have been able to stream it. Most try to download it and get discouraged when that takes them hours.

Then, there are the Apple People. It took me nearly a day to encode that earlier version into the Apple Format from the PC MP4 format. It is still on my hard drive with nearly 5 terabytes of other files related to this film.

I am going to end here. Please comment below and follow me on this WordPress blog.

Who knows? Out of the 45 people who own VOS2020, maybe someone will offer to sell you their share. BTW, two of the 45 are already deceased. Did I hear Ground Floor? Sorry about that reference, but our film is a parody on the Covid pandemic.

Jim

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to My Blog

This was supposed to be the day when I added another “how-to” blog to my Facebook group for the owners of the independent film “Veil of Secrecy 2020” (VOS2020). I did add a subdomain on my server.

It is –

https://www.lemonaidnet.com/VOS2020ownerzchat

Right now if you go there, you will find a 403 Forbidden page. That is because I have not had time to create an index page for that new subdomain.

Once again, I tried to use a ready-made program from WordPress in its “delicious” categories of open source programs. My idea was to create a social media group just for the 44 people who now own the final cut of VOS2020.

This is the concept –

Back in the day, farmers created dairy cooperatives with other farmers where they could get better prices for raw milk by joining their neighbors in a cooperative distribution system where they all agreed on the price they would use to sell their raw milk to the dairies.

This took the form of some farm unions later.

One of the driving factors in Internet monetization is rate of traffic clicking on your content. YouTubers have no such cooperative and each content designer has to achieve a following of 1,000 subscribers and a viewing rate of 4000 hours before YouTube monetizes their sites. Subscribing and liking a YouTube site is the measure for making money on YouTube.

Where the monetization of VOS2020 is concerned, there are many approaches that range from simply making DVDs and selling them wherever and whenever to actually setting up a streaming site where you charge money for viewing and/or downloading the film/video itself.

My current thinking involves creating a private social networking site on my Lemon Aid Network where the 44 owners can communicate and exchange ideas for monetization. Also, I will be issuing 44 stock certificates which will have a small initial value, but could increase based on the sales of the VOS2020 product.

Now, if Microsoft had not needed to update my Windows system today; if my, ISP had successfully allowed me to download an open source social networking system, if I didn’t need to take my partner to dialysis etc., etc., etc., I could have been farther along in creating that networking program.

Anyhow, later.

Jim

Video Showing of “And the Snow Falls – the Musical”

As I left Momiji today after lunch, a somewhat rowdy trio of privileged young white males entered without masks. One lagged behind coming in late to which a posse member yelled, “Get in here before the virus gets you!”

I stopped at their table, with my mask on and told about my young friend who was supposed to play my son in a community theater production.

I told them he had not been vaccinated, had tested positive on October 15 and had died by October 27. They laughed and one said, “12 days.”

Fred may not have turned 30 yet. He was a real estate broker who had played basketball in college. His parents had driven up from Oklahoma to pick up his ashes.

The theater decided to postpone the production and to run a video of its 2019 premiere of my musical, “And the Snow Falls”.

Two things – support live theater by wearing a mask where one is required.

“Film Fest” the Amazon Prime Movie

I watched the independent film titled “Film Fest” on Amazon Prime. As an independent film maker myself, I found it to be enjoyable.

The director/ auteur plays a director/ auteur whose latest ouvre has been accepted into the competition at a little-known film festival. The questionable status of this festival becomes all too evident.

Mr. Director/Auteur’s cast and crew pack up their stuff and leave LaLa Land for the redneck northern part of the state. At the film festival, they encounter every cliché, every overworked situation and every idiot film critic/groupie common to the genre.

I was reminded of “The Big Picture” but any comparison would be giving “Film Fest” unwarranted kudos. The overriding term that comes to mind is “contrived”.

There is one sweet scene in which the producer of the fictional film breaks down and confesses she has maxed out her credit cards to finance the director’s dream piece.

If you are not in any way associated with the production of independent films, I doubt if you will get much from this material. If you are…

God bless you!

James M. Kemp

November 5, 2021

Spout’s First Note

It never occurred to me to create a script of the narrative for my children’s book titled “Spout’s First Note”. There are a number of video versions out there on places like YouTube.

However, any of those versions probably feature a narrative being read by me.

So, I have begun working on a voice-over script which can be read in a setting such as a Zoom meeting and then pasted into an MP4.

If I get the script done by the end of the day, I will post it tonight.

James M. Kemp

October 27, 2021

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The Isolation Film Genre

I went into isolation from the Covid 19 pandemic on March 11, 2020. I had been putting off publishing various videos on all of the social media platforms.

So, I started a series on YouTube that was the stereotypical cooking format. Then, after realizing my isolation might be for more than a week or two, I bought the domain http://www.thelemonaidnetwork.com

I had already published a website as Pops Spedster where I shared educational information for people with developmental disabilities. But I also have a history of being an entertainer.

The Lemon Aid Network became an entertainment platform. Of course, what should happen around the same time? Everything went to the clouds.

I had always used Adobe Dream Weaver for coding in HTML. Then Adobe decided to base its HTML5 platform on a cloud and started a subscription program.

The reality of the average website designer is often more a matter of live updates. I first used Hot Dog many years ago. Then I became enamored with WS_FTP.

In any event, I began developing a pandemic-based entertainment genre which I called The Isolation Film. My production of my film “Veil of Secrecy 2020” is due to premiere October 27, 2021 on The Lemon Aid Network.

Most of that film was shot using selfies and green screens by the actors in five different states. Yes, they were all friends who agreed to be involved in the project in exchange for an equity ownership in any net profits from the film.

We shall see. And anyone else will be able to see the resulting director’s cut – just as soon as I finish editing it.

James M. Kemp, October 20, 2021

“”And the Snow Falls – The Musical”

I discovered a script in 1996 while searching for a “Christmas” show that I had been asked to direct at the On Broadway Theater in Coos Bay, Oregon. We had the world premiere of that show at OBT in December 1996.

My musical adaptation of this script opens December 6, 2019 at the Spotlight Community Theater in Stayton, Oregon. I am the musical director for that production. In the Dan Goggin tradition of music composition, I have taken 10 carols for which there are no copyright claims, and set them to my own lyrics which are derived from my own rewrites of the original Laszlo script.