This is a transcript of SYS 457 – Making Anthology Horror With Jamison LoCascio and Adam Ambrosio.
Welcome to Episode 457 of the Selling Your Screenplay Podcast. I’m Ashley Scott Meyers, screenwriter and blogger over at sellingyourscreenplay.com. Today I’m interviewing filmmakers, Jamison LoCascio and Adam Ambrosio. They were on the podcast and Episode 374, where they talked about their start and two of their early or feature films called Sunset and No Fear. But this week they’re back on to talk about their new horror feature film called How Dark They Prey, which is a horror anthology series, where they have put several shorts together as a feature film. It’s another great story from two guys who are living far from Hollywood, but are still out there getting projects produced, so stay tuned for that interview. If you find this episode valuable, please help me out by giving me a review in iTunes or leaving a comment on YouTube or retweeting the podcast on Twitter or liking or sharing it on Facebook. These social media shares really do help spread word about the podcast, so they’re very much appreciated. Any websites or links that I mentioned in the podcast can be found on my blog in the show notes. I also publish a transcript with every episode in case you’d rather read the show or look at something later on. can find all the podcast show notes at www.sellingyourscreenplay.com/podcast and then just look for episode number 457. If you want my free guide How to Sell a screenplay in five weeks, you can pick that up by going to sellingyourscreenplay.com/guide. It’s completely free. Just put in your email address. And I’ll send you a new lesson once per week for five weeks along with a bunch of bonus lessons. Teach the whole process of how to sell your screenplay in that guide. I’ll teach you how to write a professional logline inquiry letter, and how to find agents, managers and producers who are looking for material really is everything you need to know to sell your screenplay, just go to sellingyourscreenplay.com/guide. So now let’s get into the main segment today. I’m interviewing filmmakers Jameson LoCasio and Adam Ambrosio. Here is the interview.
Ashley
Welcome back, James and Adam to the Selling Your Screenplay Podcast. I really appreciate you guys coming on the show with me today.
Jamison
Thanks for having us.
Ashley
So, you guys have been on the podcast before and episode number 234, where we talk about your film Sunset. And then also Episode 375, where we talked about your feature film, No Fear. So, I will link to those in the show notes. And I encourage listeners to go back and check out those episodes as that’s a lot of your origin story kind of how you got started in the business. So, first question, just as I’m researching this interview kind of getting ready for it. I noticed on IMDb, you guys continue to churn out short films. And you know between Sunset and No Fear, I think there was 9 or 10 Shorts between No Fear and your latest feature film, which we’re going to talk about in a second, How Dark They Pray you did a bunch more a couple more short films. Why do you keep doing these short films? And what do you guys continue to get out of these short films? As you’re doing them?
Jamison
That’s a good question. Well, part of our philosophy, right with film valor and our company in general was to kind of come at it from the perspective of let’s stay creative, let’s keep making content, let’s do it for YouTube or let’s do it for professional release on prime. And really now they’re becoming the same even more so, yeah, even more so than the beginning. So, we just been, you know, making the type of content that we want to see out there and things that we feel passionate about, we did do a small, short, during the pandemic, that was kind of a way of getting through that after No Fear that was called the Voices in Normandy. And that was an animated project that Adam and I worked on together taking, you know, real veterans voices and animating their experiences and just trying to, you know, and we did that, because that was something we really wanted to do. So, we always lead with, oh, that’s something we really want to do not let’s create content. And that’s how the things developed in between features. We just keep doing air about.
Adam
Yeah, no, I think we just really wanted to, you know, keep our weapons sharp, you know, you know, honing our skills, try to stay busy as much as we can, especially since COVID, you know, industry took a lot of big hit. And a lot of independent filmmakers, you know, probably don’t have the resources or opportunities that they had once prior to it. So just staying hungry, try to stay you know, sharp with it was the game.
Ashley
And I’m going to throw out this next question. This is just me sort of spit-baling ideas for my own film career, but I’d be curious to get your take on it. One thing that’s occurred to me is this whole idea of a of a, you know, 90-minute feature or 100-minute feature, it really came about in the theatre era, and maybe you could even say okay, the VHS you rent a VHS tape, you have this feature film, it’s occurred to me that these streaming services, there’s really nothing tying you to an hour and 20-minutes or 90-minutes or a feature film. I mean, whether it be 55-minutes or 65 that would definitely reduce the production costs. And one of the ways these places have they pay you I can’t wasn’t they pay you by each second that someone watches it. So, it seems to me, you’d be better off having a 40-minute short, that was compelling and got everybody from second one to the final second, you might make more money off of that, plus your production costs will be a lot less than doing like a 90-minute feature film. Have you guys experimented with that at all? Have you put any of these short films onto some of these digital platforms? And are you seeing any kind of a return? Is there a return that’s somewhat similar to these features?
Jamison
You know what it is? There’s a lot of still that gatekeeping that goes on with some of the distributors where it’s like, you know, we’ve had conversations with, you know, people that are in the know, and maybe not as in the know, as they say they are, which is the reality, where they talk about, okay, well, if it’s not over 82 minutes, but it seems like every time we have that conversation, it goes lower, like it used to be, it’s not over 95, you guys, you know, no way. Now it’s 82. So, what’s it going to be next year, you know what I mean? So, there’s some of that, where I don’t think that matters as much. A short that’s compelling could definitely work in places like film hub, which we’ve been working with now, for a really interesting, they kind of take like any length of thing as long as it’s quality. And then they leave it up to the platforms to decide, which I think it’s an awesome, sort of democratized way of doing film distribution, where filmmakers are a little bit more in control of it. So yeah, those things can work in and there’s a different audience for everything nowadays. Yeah.
Adam
Well, definitely, I think the audience, you know, I don’t think they really want something that’s too long, two and a half hours, it is a long time. I mean, unless you’re really watching, like, an action thriller movie that’s going to keep you in the pocket for two and a half hours. Yeah, you know, your audience will feel it eventually, you know, what might be a good moment, which might feel like, two minutes might take 10 minutes. But in reality, if you don’t have them, you know, engage that two minutes will feel like, a half hour. And James is right. I remember way back, we were talking to some people, and they were like, look, the movie has to be a little bit longer. You know, it just needs to be longer, you know, it’s not, you know, this and that and we’re really pushing it. And I said, James, and well, if they’re saying that they want this movie, it needs to be 5-10 more minutes longer. Do they even like the movie? Like, if that’s been a deal breaker and say, oh, you got to make it 5-10 minutes longer? We’d like it. If it’s 5-10 minutes longer. That’s like, really? What about the other like, 80-70 minutes we are in? So really, I think it’s, you know, make it the length that you want to it’s your story to your creativity. And I think sometimes they put their hands, you know, too much into the pot with the all this stuff.
Jamison
Yeah, exactly.
Adam
But I mean, we’ve come up with a good process of making shorts and making our feature. And you know, it’s all about really comes down to budget, comes down to the story. And then what you could do with it, I think there is a little bit of a plus one, well, not really a plus one. But I think there is a benefit to doing a project that is a small drop of budget and kind of like short time, because you could see a lot of return from that as well.
Jamison
Yeah, there’s different venues for it. You know, sometimes things are just about like getting your name out there when you really just starting and then other times, it’s like, you know, we’re creating content for our YouTube channel, which does have subscribers legitimately does get viewership. I mean, we have stuff that we’ve done in two minutes that has gotten maybe more viewership than like our first feature back in the day. And so that started catching up, you know, so it just depends. YouTube is such a great place and people and we even were just talking to another person on this on the press tour for how dark they pray. And they were saying, you know, YouTube is right there on the streaming platforms. Now it’s become television as well. And it’s right there by HBO. It’s YouTube TV. So, our content being on there seems just as relevant. And it’s what we watch all day. Then, you know, sometimes even more so than something like HBO just depends. So, everything has its own audience in the venue, I guess.
Ashley
Yeah. Have you experimented with like the really short form? That seems like a big push with YouTube shorts, obviously, Tik Tok. Have you guys experimented in that realm at all?
Jamison
Like they’re really small, like 10, like 32nd?
Ashley
One-minute, yeah. Two-minute type shorts.
Jamison
We actually in our own way. Yeah. Like, we haven’t done that type. We haven’t created stuff specifically for that. But we’ve used marketing channels through that. So, we marketed our film, Sunset, remarketed our film Sunset in the last, I think was about six months ago or something and we use it as short as real on Instagram, and it got like 2000 views in like, I don’t know, four hours, it was like ridiculous. And a lot more people, we saw a huge uptick in people watching it. I mean, the return for that quarter was great. So those types of things are still are really viable in terms of just marketing, which is kind of what our channel is about to is marketing, the products that are out there, and then also creating more stuff to create more interested in the stuff that we can market in the future. So, it all feeds in.
Ashley
Gotcha, gotcha. So, let’s dig into your latest feature film, How Dark They Pray, maybe you start out and give us a quick pitch or a logline, what is this film all about?
Jamison
Yeah, so I’m going to try to get it right. It’s for dark tales about you know, about man and the unknown. And it deals with a lot of different elements of the things that we really love about horror, whether it’s slasher movies, or as the monster movies, or some you could say, Lovecraft, or even homage to things like the original Twilight zone and to psycho. So, it has a as a little bit of everything we love. And we really did it as a passion project, still sort of coming out of this pandemic time with a lot of people who were really passionate about doing it with us.
Ashley
Yeah. And again, I this goes back to just as you’re, as you’re talking about, that it’s four short, basically short films, correct into a feature. And, and again, this is another thought that has occurred to me is, you know, it would be like, like, maybe not American history, but there are those sort of horror stories that are not necessarily a connected season. Did you consider that? Like, what would have happened? I wonder if you’d release this as like a series and just made it four episodes instead of one feature with four episodes all packed in? Was that something you can covered with the distributors? Would they be down on that?
Jamison
Well, it’s a good thing to think about. Because there’s a lot to that, you know, like we come out of the realm of really loving like traditional genre films. I feel like that’s kind of a through line for us now, especially, even though we’ve made dramas and stuff like that. So, we really like anthology horror films as well. So, it was sort of designed in a way to be like, you know, I’m thinking of some of the classics like, I guess body bags, but also we talked about your favorite. I’m blanking on it right now. But Creep show, one of your favorites. Yeah. And so, we were talking about how that could sort of fit into a film experience and connecting them and stuff like that. So we never really think that much about, I don’t think at least about like episodes or shows like that. Because I feel like we’re always kind of thinking about film.
Adam
Yeah. Anything Jamison watched as a lot more series and ideals. I am like, there’s maybe a handful of series that I would watch. Yeah, X Files. Hannibal, what was excellent stuff like that. But it usually I’m very anti series. I just, I don’t like waiting. I don’t like when you get to the end, and then something happens. And then you got to wait the next week or whatever for it to happen. And then you’re disappointed with the whole episode. And then you’re wondering where the series is going? I can’t do it. I don’t have to.
Ashley
Huh, that’s interesting. So, well. So, let’s dig into this. And talk about your writing process on this one. So you’ve got four distinct stories? Did you guys write them all together? And maybe just describe that process a little bit? Where did the stories come from? And then what did the writing process look like getting these four stories on paper?
Jamison
Well, I’ll say this, really, this stemmed really, from a really, I’m saying, really template. This stems from a great idea that Adam had, which was blood beach, and we were looking at blood beach. And it seemed so specifically perfect for a short form. But because we’re kind of in the realm of making features, and we do love making shorts, was like, wow, this is so good. And so interesting to me that I almost want to like put this with something else in a feature film format. But without developing that, because Lovecraft is really hard. And you want to just imply sometimes rather than go further into, so I loved blood beach, so much from his idea that it had me thinking about a concept that we had, which was harrowing, which was the war story, which we had two years prior and had written as a feature as a modern feature. And that was not in World War Two as war story. And I kind of wanted to really still do his concepts for that justice because I felt like maybe in the writing of it if it didn’t come through as well as he really explained it to me and what God he cited. We saw an episode of Twilight zone six characters in search of an exit via Rob Zombie, so thanks, thanks to him, but it was that also kind of spurred that into something he said World War Two and a Nazi. So, we did that. And then also just as an overview, and I guess you can talk more about the details but then I thought of maybe doing an alien found footage because we were watching a lot of project Bluebook. And it was an awesome series. And I wanted to really see more of that. And we had never really seen that much found footage alien concept brought together ever, maybe so. Or maybe just once. The fourth kind is something Yeah, not sure you only but that’s like one of our favorites in a lot of ways, such a great movie. And then Nelly came to me because of my father, my father thought it would be an interesting idea to do an homage to those black and white pictures like psycho, and then it kind of became psycho. And yeah, that’s kind of the overview of everything.
Ashley
Well, what how does that actually transpire? In terms of the actual writing? You have these ideas? Do you guys sit in the same room? Do you divide up scenes? What does it actually look like putting these things onto paper?
Adam
Yeah, well, especially for harrowing. We developed the full script. And so, we kind of sat down and said, what was the meaning in the meat and potatoes of the story? And it really was just the themes of the overall anthology was that it’s about people’s convictions, it’s about how far they will go to, in their beliefs to get what they want, or to attain some knowledge. And we just wanted to keep it really bare bones with the stories. And herring, herring was already like that, I believe. When I came to Jameson, about the story, it was pretty much the short story, but we flesh it out into a full feature. And then we brought it back down. Yeah. So, and we were good with that, because we were able to do that with sunset prior, you know, taking a story and developing developing it, and then bring it back down.
Jamison
Yeah. In terms of blood beats, he actually had the entire story figured out. And when he sort of when he asked me to look at it, I liked exactly what it was. And then for various in various ways, we just kind of guided it and developed it into being like, Okay, this is like the ultimate I’ll say, like Lovecraft version of the story that we feel we should do right now. Right, so yeah, but he really had like that story. And then encounter nightly I think was, you know, I think we’re just thought about it. I remember one, you know, sat down to write it, I guess. But one of the things that animals so then brought into encounter, knightly was these great little vignettes and scenes with them interviewing people in the town, which I thought was really fun. And he also, he also directed that film for the first time, which we should get into, and I think he did a great job with it. So, it was kind of looking at each one of them, I guess, you could say broadly was like looking at what is the best version of this that we can make? You know, how do we make the best-found footage film that we can make? What is it about found footage that makes it fun? Interviewing people, you know, having the host to be caught off guard? You know, that’s…
Adam
You know, we use our influences. You know, we watched a lot of anthology movie. Blair Witch…VHS, you name it.
Jamison
I think it’s called … Is that right? Nightmare. Cinema I thought was interesting. It kind of was like with Mickey Rourke. It’s like a super weird movie. But there’s elements of it were I was just like, oh, wow, you can just do anything in this. Okay. And I thought that was that was very inspiring.
Adam
And then the only additions are the newer ones. Were in Delhi and the intro that we did. Yeah. Those were the only things that we kind of said, yeah, the movie is a little too short. We got to beef it up a little bit. And yeah, we just knocked those out of the park, I think.
Jamison
thing. Yeah, we brought them in. We did them really very easy, straightforward. And yeah, Nellie was interesting, because my dad kind of really had the story in his head, which was weird, because I don’t really, I mean, my dad’s very creative, and I trust his creativity. But I’ve never like, I haven’t worked that much with him on stories. But yeah, I mean, he told me that he said, but I don’t know what to do with this, maybe make it your own. So that was kind of the process for Nellie. And I didn’t want it. I wasn’t sure if we should put it in there. I thought it was a little too wacky at first. And luckily, because a lot of people really do look and love that one now, which is great. Adam encouraged it. I don’t know if you want to talk about that.
Adam
But oh, yeah, with Jamison. I mean, he brought it to me. And he said, what do you think? And I think he kind of was like, it’s not going to make it? Because it doesn’t really Yeah, you know, somehow, it’s a lot. It’s a very different from the others. But when I read it, I was just like, What the hell am I reading? This is so funny. And it’s so good. And I made it a point when Jamison was on set to pretty much not be there. It was only Jamison and our sound woman Nicola Kowski who did the whole sound for the whole thing. And she was great.
Jamison
Shout out to Nicole Kowski because it was a three person crew. Yeah, yeah. And she did an amazing job on all the sounds. all the films. Yeah.
Adam
And so here Jamison is in this basement with all these chains and chainsaws with these two women. And I’m like, you know, it’s all going to go fine. Yeah, it was great. They knocked it out of the park. Alicia Spielman was great.
Jamison
Yeah. David Johnson was excellent.
Adam
I mean, it was a lot of fun. And it was just something different than you know, real kooky.
Jamison
Yeah. And I was glad he encouraged it. And a lot of people who are really like, I mean, we could say, like, genres sites, you know, people like McCob, daily and weird, like weird, crazy sites like that, who are like, just committed to heart and I was 24/7, which is awesome. They seem to really have picked up on Nelly and a lot of the other ones a lot of people really like, blood beach. And then there are like, reverse coin where they like, you know, the worst story the most, you know, or, or, you know, or whatever. And then I personally, I like encountered Knightley the most, I just think it’s great. I think he did a great job directing it. I like the two guys. And a lot of people ask as well, is it okay, if people like one more than the other? And I we always think the answer is yes. They’re all different. So.
Ashley
Gotcha, gotcha. Okay. So, once you guys had these stories together, what was your next step to actually turning it into a production? Did you go out and raise some money? Is it self-funded, you do a Kickstarter, maybe just talk about that process? You have some scripts, you have the idea of actually going and getting this done? What is those next steps look like?
Jamison
Yeah, well, Adam is a great producer. So, he always does a great job trying to figure out, you know, basically, what we need, and what we don’t need, which I think is important. I’m also, I guess, you could say, I’m sort of the kind of director at least for my films where I don’t really need to push for that much more, I really try to focus on actors, and things like that. So, we kind of built a very small budget, I won’t tell you what it is, but it’s super micro, we won’t say. But basically, we made it very rudimentary. Like, this is what this film needs. This is what that film needs this with that film needs. And I think the only one that started to creep out of its own budget, like it was the blob was the war story. Because it we started needing period costumes. And we knew that going in, but to really get like accurate, Nazi uniform was very difficult. And so, we had to go to the UK, we had to go to different places, having shifts that…
Adam
Took about the whole time of the production was just trying to get those costumes ready, getting them ready, making sure that you know, nothing got spilled on them. They weren’t ripped or anything. We literally had those costumes in the basement.
Jamison
Yeah, I mean, we financing was amazing on this one, because just to really, like simplify that entire conversation, because you can always talk about that for hours. This was the easiest one we’ve ever done. I mean, we made two phone calls. And people were like, yep, you did it before you’ll do it again. Nice script. Let’s go. And that was it. And that doesn’t always that never really happens. But this one it did. So let us just focus on doing them. And in terms of approach, I mean, we really just focused on one at a time. Yeah, we scheduled basically, if I were to try to say this, right, typically, we always say this. We do what we did one short film a month, for one day, or one day, and then we would wait like maybe a month, month and a half and then do another short. So, we did something like a May then like a July and then maybe like an August. And so that’s kind of how we did it. And each of them were basically done. I mean, in like record time shot. I mean, Nelly as a 22-minute movie was shot in, like seven and a half hours, eight hours. So, nuts. Yeah. So then also, like what beats was maybe shot six, I mean, five hours, maybe the worst story was almost the same. And Adams was shot very quickly as well. And again, I think he did a great job with that. The only thing we needed was we had to go back and do a nighttime shoot. Because he had day and night. So that made him have a day too. But when you looked at the scope of time, it was probably less than eight hours on all of them to actually shoot, which is really fast. So, what is that, like five days, I mean, it’s like literally pretty much a day.
Adam
And it was great. The crew was well, Nicole was great. It was it was great. The only thing we had to deal with was really the weather was a factor, you know, last, you know, half hour, 45 minutes that you need. All of a sudden rain would just come down here like I…
Jamison
Was very ominous and it actually fit the movie in a lot of ways because we were always at like the climax. And the best one for that was blood beach because it actually got not sunny and very scary for us legitimately. But it was also scary because we’re like, wow, we have this much more to shoot. How the hell are we going to do this? But we did and so it worked out like I think we ended both the war film and one beach right when it’s started raining. And that was kind of it for the day. So that was some luck, but also working really fast.
Adam
And preparation really wasn’t a major issue for it didn’t seem like there was a lot of weight on your back to get it done. We really just said, you know what, we’re sitting here, let’s take our time, Let’s not break our backs to get this production done. Because, you know, it was, you know, in the talking about COVID. And, you know, it was very slow. And we said, you know, why are we breaking our backs, just get something out there that, you know, that might be just thrown aside because of the circumstances in the world or whatever. We wouldn’t we didn’t want to do that we wanted so you know, let’s not regret anything in this. Let’s enjoy it. And we really approached it that way. We executed it that way. I mean, there was times where we thought we were just on vacation. You know, on blood. We were at the you know, we would set this nice quiet little beach and there was nobody else there. And you know, Mark lovers who plays Leon, our main character was just sitting there smoking cigars. And it was like, wow, this is a great, you know.
Jamison
It’s kind of like being on like a day trip with a bunch of friends. Which is nice, because the commitment from them was so much there. Like they really wanted to be there. But because we were in the strange, isolated areas during the pandemic, it there was something a little otherworldly about it already. So, it was relaxing. That was interesting. But you were able to get into the space of that world with those people. And it was both fun. And it was very, and it was very calm. I think in a lot of ways even though we moved quickly.
Ashley
Perfect. Perfect. I noticed your poster, it’s sort of is an homage to those like 70s horror films. Maybe you can talk about that a little bit. What was the inspiration for this poster?
Jamison
Oh, yeah. Well, Adam took a great picture of Alicia, when she was there tied up basement…So he took a great picture of her. And we didn’t really have an on, you know, we didn’t have an onset photographer or anything going on. And so, we looked at that picture really hard. And we said, you know, that’s a that’s really great. And we tried to hire someone to do the poster design. And they did a pretty good job. Yeah. And they gave us sort of the graphic texts and things like that. But I think ultimately, we want to get closer and closer to something that was really simple. So, we kind of wound up taking a lot of stuff and trying it realizing it doesn’t work is too complicated. And we ultimately wound up with the simple list idea is the best idea. And it also looks the most professional. So that yeah, it was almost the same process for no fear. But even more so for this one. Right.
Adam
Yeah. And it looked prettier, something in a style like maybe Texas Chainsaw. Yeah, a little bit of high tension in it, you know? Yeah. It I don’t know, we just took the photo, change it to black and white. And it looked great in that. And then Jamison, you know, went into his, whatever Photoshop, boosted up the red. And it was it looked creepy. It looked like you maybe it was like a real person there who’s tied up, it didn’t look staged, it looked gritty, you can see a lot of aspects the background, it didn’t give too much away.
Jamison
Yeah, it was just very simple. It’s like, you know, when you’re doing key art like that, the more complicated you make it look, even if it’s like really well executed, it just looks like a mess to your eye. And you don’t always think about this this way. Or maybe you don’t notice it, because you have a different budget and things like that. But when you look at something that’s this big, and there’s a lot of stuff going on in it, it tends to just not work no matter what you do. Usually, it’s like the simplicity of PR. That tends to work. And very, it’s very graphic. It’s very simple. Maybe it’s black, maybe it’s white.
Adam
Yeah. And also, I’m just seeing a little bit of a pattern, you can go on, like the streaming services to the HBO and you go into the horror section. A lot of the posters look very similar. Yeah, like, you’ll see the same kind of demonic hand. And in a couple of movies, you’ll be like, Yeah, that’s a little too similar. Or, you know, that effect, that zombie effect or that demon effect looks very similar to that poster to that poster. And we wanted to, you know, have something that kind of stands out or something you could be like, I don’t know what’s really going on this. Let me take a better look. You know, just something to go against the herd something with, you know, an homage you know, with exactly, you know, just the, you know, something simple, classic, something that’s going to grab your attention to say, this could be interesting.
Ashley
Yeah, yeah, great ingredients. Simple. I think that does that sums it up. What have you guys seen recently that you can recommend to our screenwriting audience anything you’ve seen on HBO, Netflix, Hulu that you think is great and, and maybe could benefit screenwriters.
Jamison
I really liked 13 lives. 13 lives was excellent. I think we both liked that movie a lot. That’s the new movie by Ron Howard. I don’t know if you guys know have not seen it. Now on Prime Video, okay, and it’s Viggo Mortensen and Colin Farrell. And it’s about the guys who got the kids that got the soccer team that got stuck in that cave. And Ron our directs it and it does an incredible job with his story because he and I mean, Ron Howard’s always good, I guess, but he doesn’t put any type of like spin on it. And we’re not too much with the press and stuff like you know, what is the political nature of this kind of situation? He they’re just they’re trying to get these kids out. And it’s an amazingly well-done movie. The actors are awesome. And I think it’s a great like it’s that ticking time bomb technique, you know, in writing, I think it’s done so well there. It’s like you have this much time. Go. And that’s like what this movie is like, without constantly reminding you have the clock, but just instead that these people could die. Great movie.
Ashley
Yeah, yeah. Perfect. That’s a great recommendation. I’ll have to check that one out. How can people see How Dark They Pray? Do you do with the release schedule is going to be like on that.
Jamison
Yes. So right now, the movies available on Prime Video. Okay. It’s available right now. It is also on watch movies now on YouTube, which is like with ads-based platform, and it’s going to be on many other platforms very, very soon as we go a little wider with it, but definitely Prime Video.
Ashley
Perfect. And what’s the best way for people to keep up with what you guys are doing? I know you mentioned film valor. You can maybe mention that as your YouTube channel. But anything you’re comfortable sharing Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, a blog, we will round up for the show notes.
Adam
Yeah, we had the film valor about a YouTube channel. I believe we have an Instagram and Twitter. Twitter.
Jamison
We’re a little bit on. Yeah. YouTube is like our home. Instagram a bit.
Ashley
Okay, perfect. Perfect. Yeah, we’ll get that. And we’ll put that in the show notes. Adam, James, I really appreciate you coming on talking with me again, good luck with this film and look forward to following along. And hopefully you guys can come back and talk about your next film.
Jamison
Thank you so much. Always a pleasure speaking with you.
Ashley
Thank you. Thank you. We’ll talk to you guys later. Bye.
SYS’s from concept to completion, screenwriting course, is now available, just go to www.sellingyourscreenplay.com/screenwritingcourse, it will take you through every part of writing a screenplay, coming up with a concept outlining, writing the opening pages the first act, second act, third act and then rewriting and then there’s even a module at the end on marketing your screenplay once it’s polished and ready to be sent out. We’re offering this course in two different versions, the first version, you get the course, plus, you get three analyses from an SYS reader, you’ll get one analysis on your outline, and then you’ll get to analyses on your first draft of your screenplay. This is just our introductory price, you’re getting three full analyses, which is actually the same price as our three-pack analysis bundle. So, you’re essentially getting the course for free when you buy the three analyses that come with it. And to be clear, you’re getting our full analysis with this package. The other version doesn’t have the analysis, so you’ll have to find some friends or colleagues who will do the feedback portion of the course with you. I’m letting SYS Select members do this version of the course for free. So, if you’re a member of SYS select, you already have access to it. You also might consider that as an option. If you join us why so that you will get the course as part of that membership too. A big piece of this course is accountability. Once you start the course, you’ll get an email every Sunday with that week’s assignment. And if you don’t complete it, we’ll follow up with another reminder the next week, it’s easy to pause the course if you need to take some time off. But as long as you’re enrolled, you’ll continue to get reminders for each section until it’s completed. The objective of the course is to get you through it in six months so that you have a completed power screenplay ready to be sent out. So, if you have an idea for a screenplay, and you’re having a hard time getting it done, this course might be exactly what you need. If this sounds like something you’d like to learn more about, just go to www.sellingyourscreenplay.com/screenwritingcourse. It’s all one word, all lowercase. I will of course a link to the course in the show notes and I will put a link to the course on the homepage up in the right-hand sidebar.
On the next episode of the podcast, I’m going to be interviewing writer director Hunter Johnson, who just co-wrote and directed a really contained horror feature film called Sawed Off. It’s a really cool concept sort of Groundhog Day in the woods as a horror film where three people keep killing each other over and over again. He talks about how this film came together for him and how it ultimately got produced so keep an eye out for that episode next week. That’s the show thank you for listening.