Inside the Untold Drama: Crafting a Trump vs. Anti-Trump RomCom with Erik Bork
So just a quick few words about what I’ve been working on, the rom-com that I shot in November is still in editing. I’ve not seen a first cut of it yet, but hopefully soon we’ll get that first assembly cut and then we can start to really get into the story and the meat of it. In the meantime, I’ve been creating promotional content. I’m going to launch, I mean, and promotional content, I did like a website, I’ve been working on the poster, using AI to do the poster. I got, we took a bunch of still photographs with the actors on the green screen. So, you know, I’m taking the images of the actors and then I’m getting AI to put in some different backgrounds, all that sort of stuff. But the main things are just sort of basic peripheral type stuff that you’re going to need to promote your film. But the main thing I’m doing is I’m preparing to launch a TikTok channel and it’ll be on Instagram, YouTube shorts and all that stuff. But it’ll be short form and it’ll be vertical, you know, it’ll be the cell phone aspect ratio. And what I’m going to do is a series of videos about how to make a micro budget feature film. And I’m just going to make an individual video. Can I keep them, you know, a minute or two? But I’ll just go through every step of the way, you know, writing the low budget screenplay, getting insurance, doing the casting, you know, hiring the crew. Each one of these topics will get its own little one- or two-minute video. And I’ll just run through, as I said, pretty much every aspect of creating a micro budget feature film. So the idea is if you watch this video series, then at the end of it, you would actually be able to go off and create your own indie film. And then obviously that’s, you know, great. If you can go make an indie film, that’s fantastic. But also it’s bringing awareness to my film. I’m using my film to sort of illustrate a lot of the points I’m making, reusing footage and stills and stuff as I make these videos. So, it’s all in an effort to sort of build awareness for the film, which will then we’ll move on. We’ll do a Kickstarter. That’ll be sort of the first hurdle. And once we do the Kickstarter, then shortly after that, hopefully we will finish the film. We’re just going to do the Kickstarter for post-production and marketing money. Obviously we’ve already shot the film and so that’s all paid for and it’s in the can. So we’re just going to do the, and that’s what we did for the Rideshare Killer 2. You sort of do it at the end. And I feel like that’s a little bit of a better strategy in the sense that, you know, do your Kickstarter and then, you know, two years later you finish your film. We’re going to do, we’re going to have our film edited and close to finished. So the momentum we get from the Kickstarter hopefully goes on and becomes some of the momentum to actually watching the film. Anyways, that’s the idea. But the bottom line is I’m creating all of these videos. I’ve got a few dozen of these videos to create and they do take some time. I’m new to vertical editing, you know, that vertical format editing those and just using all of the different tips and tricks. I downloaded CapCut and I just paid, I think it was a couple hundred dollars for like a year, you know, a year pro, CapCut pro, but it gives you access to some interesting tools. And again, I see these videos because I watch a lot of TikTok, but I never was quite clear how they made and they have some pretty, you know, advanced tools in terms of, you know, the green screen cut out. You see that very often. I’ve done videos where I’m talking at the camera, but then it cuts me out and then I can put actual stills or even video behind me as I’m talking and I use video and stills and that sort of stuff from the actual movie. But these are all the tools and the tricks of that sort of vertical TikTok editing. The captions, you know, it’s very easy in CapCut. You just press a button and it generates the captions. I mean, there’s some minor little spelling issues, but I’m amazed at how good that it is. I still pay someone like to do this podcast. I send off a copy of this podcast to somebody and then they actually transcribe it for me. And I would say that the automated transcriptions in CapCut are actually better than what the human can do. So, I might have to change that and maybe I’ll just load at the end of the day. I’ll load these podcasts into CapCut. Once they’re edited, I’ll load them into CapCut and I’ll just generate the captions that way. I’m not sure if it can do that. I’ll have to figure out how to do that, but it does it so well. You know, it generates the tech so well. I’m sure there’s got to be a way of like exporting a transcript, but I haven’t gotten to that. But as you can see, as I’m rambling on here, it’s a learning process. So, which is part of the part of the, you know, what’s fun about it is getting into new stuff and learning all about it. So that’s where I’m at. I’m going to do, you know, I think I have like maybe 25 or 30 of these videos sort of planned out. Hopefully there’ll be a few more ideas that I have between now and finishing. And I’ve completed about three of them. So that gives you some ideas. Take me a couple of weeks just to get those three done. So, I’m hoping to get it down to like maybe do one a day and, you know, in maybe a couple hours I can knock these out and get them going. But again, I’m sort of experimenting with the format of TikToks and just how they’re done and the different tools and tricks. So it’s been fun, but it has been a little bit slow going. But the bottom line is, you know, Bernie is my editor is still off editing the film. So there’s really no rush. So, I feel like I have some time. I’ll probably be doing this for the next few months, at least the next couple of months, let’s say two months, get those done, and then we’ll watch the Kickstarter. And then hopefully, you know, a month or two or three months after that we’ll have a finished version of the film. Anyways, that’s the goal. That’s kind of the timeline.
