*asked this once a few weeks ago and once again recently, here goes my excuse*

“Hey Josh, I see you can write and direct, I like your eye and I like (short xyz___). There’s a lot of viral ad bullshit out there on the net? I’m seeing a lot of that same bullshit on your site, why haven’t you made something longer?”

The reason I have not sought out to create longer pieces on my own has to do with probably why you’re finding a lot of viral ads and bullshit out there: MONEY and TALENT.

It is extremely tough to piece together funds to make longer pieces that don’t suck with actors who don’t suck. Several times in the past few years I’ve started setting pots aside for longer short pieces with high quality production values - mostly shorts in the 5-10 minute range I’ve written with budgets at $1K/minute. As soon as the pot starts growing, guess what I do?

Move cross country.

I just moved again, BTW.

I hold the title of Senior Editor on a couple hours of broadcast footy that ended up on (then) iNHD around 2005/6, and a long time ago I made an hour long documentary about the Denver, CO snowboard/skateboard/music/ art scene (pressed 300 DVD copies at the time - 2004), and in 2000 I pieced together a 45 minute “documentary” about well….nothing in particular…but about 100 people have viewed it since then and you could really say I was still a video infant at the time (this is waaaaayyyyy before desktop editing. No iMacs even, yet).

In 2005 I unsuccessfully started an HD docu-feature called Fuck Highlands Ranch with a very good comedian friend of mine named Chuck Roy. We shot about 70% of the footage…and the remaining 30% was all stuff we needed money for. Chuck was hoping he would lead us to money during production…and it never happened. There are a few pieces from that shooting that wound up on my site which showcase only about 5% of the footy. We were trying to raise about $75K. The end result would have been very META. It was a great script, part stand up comedy, part fictional live action, and part documentary. That was supposed to be my calling card. I’ve heard some say Sarah Silverman’s Jesus Is Magic appeared in form sorta’ how we envisioned Fuck Highlands Ranch (not at all saying someone copied us, just info for reference). There’s about 8 hours of HD material that will never be seen, sitting in my closet. Oh well.

Last summer, I set out to write a low budget feature script that could be made for $50K. I couldn’t do it, turned out $100K would be the minimum, no matter how much I trimmed it. If I had the cash to shoot that film right now, I’d finance it myself.

So, as far as longer format stuff….It all comes down to me finally saving some money. Once I’ve got at least $5K to play with, then I’ll be making some heavy plans and commitments. Until then, I’ve done about everything else I can do for free, or super cheap, and that’s why I spend a lot of time writing now.

BTW, I’m not holding my breath on accumulating $5K of my own to play with just for shorts anytime soon. Despite this, my creative ventures continue and I remain optimistic for the future of my making-longer-format works.