Savage County Official Trailer from Savage County on Vimeo.

In the summer of 2009 in Memphis Tennessee with a script co-written by Dan Alvarado and a crew of talented actors and filmmakers from Los Angeles and Memphis, I directed Savage County as what was originally intended to be a fifteen-part web series that worked as either short chapters or as a feature-length “film for new media.”

Greenlit as a leap of faith on the part of my boss, David Gale, and MTV Networks and produced by BR2 in Memphis* – it was a project that was exciting initially only for its potential. When we made it, we didn’t know where it would live, or how it would work within the network’s many tendrils. With a production budget of $250,000, it was always possible that it might just be an expensive experiment in online horror.

Since then, it’s become much more.  Thanks to a campaign by Eventful, millions of people checked out the Savage County trailer and 150,000 people have demanded that MTV air the show.  It premiered on MTV2 on October 7th, reprised on MTV Tr3s on October 30th and 31st, and is being represented for sale by Cinetic Media through their FilmBuff service.

Savage County is currently available on Xbox, Playstation, and iTunes.  The physical DVD release is scheduled for January of 2011.

Leading up to the release of the film, we released a number of assets to give the audience a taste of the film, including two original comic books (the first is HERE, the second HERE), five exclusive trailers, an iPhone and iPad app, and an immersive transmedia experience by award-winning producer Nina Bargiel.  Perhaps most notably, we commissioned artist Vincent Castiglia to create an original poster executed (as is all his work) in his own blood.

by Vincent Castiglia

In making Savage County, I was inspired by the innovative horror filmmaking of the seventies – an era of films that did a lot with limited means.  In paying tribute to these films and this time period in horror filmmaking, I’m proud that we were able to do so much with our limited means, while taking advantage of all the new possibilities that new platforms offer.

* Craig Brewer‘s production company, run with his producing partner, and Savage County producer Erin Hagee. I met them working on $5 Cover: Memphis.

How Do I Say This? Intro from holycowboy on Vimeo.

How Do I Say This Teaser from holycowboy on Vimeo.

This was my MFA thesis for the UCLA school of Film, Television and Digital Media – an “Online Video Advice Column” that like This American Life, focused on themes (such as “How to tell your friend he’s a bad actor” or “How to tell your parents that you’re gay”) and like PostSecret allowed the audience to participate anonymously in the creation and sending of the videos. It was funded by mtvU and Cisco, won the 2007 SXSW Interactive Award for Best Student Site, and was picked up by mtvU for a second season. Videos from HDIST played on mtvU, MTV2 and Logo.

The most viewed video from How Do I Say This was this Super8 “Video Valentine” a music video for iamb:

Video Valentine from holycowboy on Vimeo.

$5 Cover: Seattle Trailer from MTV New Media on Vimeo.

The below is excerpted from an email I sent to some friends at an unnamed tech company, regarding my documentary This is Fi. I think this would actually work as a way to crowdsource documentary film logging and transcription – allowing people to donate labor instead of cash.

The Problem:

* We have over 100+ hours of footage (video diaries) of a man who speaks accented English.

* The first step in turning those 100+ hours into a 90-minute movie and a rich media website is transcribing and logging the footage.

* The cheapest cost I’ve found for this task is $50/hour of footage by an Indian offshoring company called REDACTED. This would mean a minimum of $5000 to get started on the movie.

* If we don’t hire it out, we’re looking at 400-600 man hours of doing the logging/transcription ourselves.

We were just granted non-profit sponsorship for our doc… Which means that my partner and I are about to go beat the bushes for $5K in donations just to transcribe the film. Ouch!

Buy what if we weren’t asking for cash? What if we could ask – even our brokest friends – for a donation of time and boredom.

Proposed Solution:

* What if we broke our hundred hours of footage into manageable sizes (15 seconds) and crowd-sourced the transcription. (Like Aaron Koblin’s work with Mechanical Turk.)

* The structure would be the video version of the recaptcha project – people’s transcription would be checked against other transcriptions… Sometimes a user would be providing a first pass, often they’d be validating.

* “Donations” of transcription would be charted against the goal (think “Kickstarter”). People would be able to see the impact they’d had on the process.

Why this matters:

* Distributed logging could be a significant cost-cutter not only for doc projects, but for corporate video/reality shows/etc. It’s a way to aggregate the time of interns/support staff/even audience members into meaningful work without wasting resources on managing volunteers.

* Metadata collected here could be an early part of the feedback loop – just by adding opinion information to the logging data… For example: what did you see? How compelling was it on a scale of 1 to 5?

* Even if not using volunteers – paying micropayments of 10 cents per 15 seconds would be a drastic reduction in cost over conventional logging. Paying by the second could bring a huge savings to production co’s IF there was some way to track the data from the original source footage, to the review area, and back.

The question:

* Is this possible?

* What are the stumbling blocks of breaking-down and reconstituting the footage and associated metadata? Can editing software talk to the net?

* Do you know of a solution that does this already? This is probably ridiculous – but could you batch-upload to YouTube and then scrape YouTube comments for logging info?

What do YOU think? None of us have money to donate to a film… What about time? A little effort? What if it was a game? Would you compete against friends? Would this be more/less boring than minesweeper/solitaire?