Alrighty then. Now that the animatic is “done” and we’ve had a chance to sit and revel in some sense of completion, we had a talk last night about the next steps. We need to keep moving forward.
A few weeks ago, we sat down and took a really hard look at our budget for this whole trailer thing. It’s a little scary. What was once a $10,000 short called Passage to K’veer has now ballooned into a trailer that we estimate is going to run us somewhere around $200,000 if we’re going to do it right.
Production design is killing us, but we just can’t bring ourselves to use digital sets. We want to build practical and then augment with CG. Set extensions are fine, but we want to build as much as possible. Miniatures are another money sink. There are certainly cheaper ways to do this, but that’s the problem – cheaper will look cheaper. Our main concern is ensuring that the final product is as “studio-quality” as possible. That’s all fine and dandy, but now we have to figure out where this money is going to come from.
Our first order of business is going to be creating some sort of structure for the company and figure out how we are going to handle taking investments. We’ve learned a lot in our research. It’s going to be a tough road.
We have this idea that it will probably be more fruitful to ask for investments in our company as opposed to asking for money for a single long-shot film project. That being the case, we’ve decided that the trailer will be presented as a marketing tool for the production company. The return on investments will be based on what the company pulls in for production fees, etc. In essence, we will be taking investments in ourselves, not the whole Myst thing. This is good because we can always reassure investors that, even if the whole Myst thing falls through – if Cyan tells us they aren’t interested – we still have a solid reel piece to present and hopefully gain other employment as filmmakers and producers. It’s still a pretty risky investment, but it’s what we’ve got right now.
We’re going to have to write up a lot of legal documents. I’m sure we’ll refine our ideas on this investment thing as those docs take shape.
