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Internet Converts

Aug 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Trevor Boyer

How one successful filmmaker traded the headaches of Hollywood for true Internet independence.

Dutch-born filmmaker Helmut Schleppi seems to have two skills that are highly complementary: capturing unique content and finding an audience for it. In the late '80s, he was fresh out of film school and looking for work. “It's not like you get out of film school and everybody offers you a job,” Schleppi says. “I thought, ‘If I do something that nobody else does, then maybe I'll be able to sell stuff.’” He was in Romania when dictator Nicolae Ceausescu was killed in the revolution of 1989. After that, Schleppi had no problem selling his footage of Romania to outlets around the world. More ENG camerawork in other war zones followed, and he'd sell the footage to news outlets and documentary producers.

But like a great many nonfiction producers, he was hungry to get into features. Schleppi settled in Los Angeles in 1999, and in 2003, he completed a project that would at first glance represent the polar opposite of his war-zone footage. A Foreign Affair, starring Tim Blake Nelson, David Arquette, and Emily Mortimer, told the story of two American brothers who traveled to Russia in search of a bride who would keep house for them. The film, which went to Sundance in 2003, sounds like a typical quirky romantic comedy, but it put to use some of Schleppi's documentary production skills. One key scene showed the brothers at an actual “social” in St. Petersburg, with about 20 Western guys and 200 Russian women — all non-actors. “That's the documentary approach,” he says. “We had to do it within that evening and get it before the evening was over.”

With such a unique project, Schleppi and his scriptwriting partner Geert Heetebrij were able to attract the attention of Nelson, a big-name actor who brought the other two well-known principals into the fold. The two Dutchmen were able to bypass the generally impenetrable Hollywood studio system and produce their film, but the Sundance showing would introduce them to the frustrating world of film distribution.

For Schleppi and Heetebrij's current, ongoing project, they decided to skip the Hollywood approach altogether for both the production and the distribution. Schleppi, who grew up as the child of missionaries in Surinam, wanted to tell stories about what he'd seen and heard growing up in South America — the stories missionaries didn't report to their churches back in the First World. Thus, the idea for The Interior, a dramatic project about reluctant missionaries in South America, was born.

Desiring to remain independent as much as possible on the distribution and production ends, Schleppi was inspired in part by a recent documentary subject. He'd chronicled the band Dispatch in The Last Dispatch (2004), in which the never-signed Vermont band played its farewell concert to a Boston audience 110,000 members strong. He and Heetebrij decided to produce and distribute The Interior using the World Wide Web as a tool to find both an audience and colleagues.

Truly open casting

In October last year, a casting call went out over YouTube. The site's power users have a notorious penchant for self-promotion — a primary form of expression is the self-shot clip in which the user says whatever's on his or her mind that particular day. So it's probably no surprise that an invitation to audition for a cinematic production drew a heavy response. Over three months of casting, Schleppi and Heetebrij received about 550 audition videos (from Uzbekistan and Singapore, among other places), more than 2 million hits on one particular casting page, and a write-up in The Wall Street Journal. Leveraging another behavior of YouTube users, The Interior team allowed the public to rate and comment on the audition clips. Mindful of how easy it is to tamper with online voting, however, Schleppi and Heetebrij assumed final say over the casting. “We told everybody, ‘Look, this is not a democracy,’” Schleppi says. “‘We're gonna have our say in the end because it's our money.’”

Somewhat surprising to the filmmakers was that among all the excitement from amateurs, professional-level talent also noticed and responded to the project. Philece Sampler, for instance, a veteran of television and stage acting, submitted a clip via YouTube thanks to a tip from her agent. She would soon become Gloria in The Interior.

Los Angeles-based web design company The1stMovement saw the initial YouTube casting site and eventually became a partner of the project. “There's no way we could have afforded the website we have now if they weren't partners in this,” Schleppi says. “It's beautiful.” The1stMovement created a site with message boards, actors' blogs, and a page with behind-the-scenes video from the production. The company also has empowered the filmmakers to update theinterior.tv via a sophisticated content management system.

One working professional who found the casting site was interested in joining the crew. Shari Odell, a veteran ENG camera operator who'd just shot two seasons of second-unit footage for 24, was looking for an adventure, and the fact that The Interior was slated to shoot in an unnamed jungle location appealed to her. She also had something very valuable to offer the filmmakers (in addition to her skill and experience): more partners.

Odell, also based in Southern California, had shot with JVC's GY-HD110U shoulder-mount HDV cameras on 24. She shot footage that was used as “news” footage within the show, and she says she was impressed by how much better it looked than the actual news footage with which it was intercut. Odell says she knew the HD110 would capture great, cinematic-looking footage, and she also thought that JVC would supply the camcorders, as the company did for 24. To Schleppi's surprise, JVC supplied two HD110Us, and IDX also came aboard with four Endura batteries. North Hollywood, Calif.-based gear distributor Ste-Man supplied Cartoni ENG tripods — Odell's preferred sticks — and Focus fluid heads. Odell was quickly hired as the second-camera operator, joining Schleppi behind the lens.

Welcome to the jungle

To give his writing partner a feel for his childhood stomping grounds, Schleppi took Heetebrij to Surinam in 2006 so they could develop a story. The script for The Interior came together soon after, and then, after casting in the fall, Schleppi moved his family to Panama for preproduction in January of this year. He soon found Gustavo Estrada, who owned 28 hectares of untouched Panamanian rainforest that he had used to create a tourist destination called The Adrenaline Factory. This property became the site of many on-location shoots, and Estrada became the location manager. He provided catering through his business and organized the set building and the local extras.

The four-member cast, along with Heertebrij and Odell, followed soon after. Everyone was put up in a local scuba-diving resort, fed, and paid — although not necessarily their day rates back in Los Angeles, according to Odell. Fueled by $75,000 of the filmmakers' own funds, this was no average web video production.

In Panama, Schleppi hired local crew members — including a grip, a gaffer, and a boom operator — as well as up to 20 extras at a time. The production team rented a crane as well as a Cessna aircraft to capture aerial photography, and to appear in the program. In terms of lighting, the team had a few Litepanels LED lights and two hydrargyrum medium-arc iodides (HMIs), one of which could be consistently powered by a small Honda generator (or both, if they were lucky).

Production on the first season of The Interior was scheduled to run for five weeks. It wrapped in only three and a half, according to Odell, because the cast and crew were willing to work 10- and 12-hour days with few breaks. “We weren't wasting time,” she says. “We were maybe doing 10 or 15 minutes between shots.” Schleppi says that between the non-actor extras, the actors' improvisation, and the pressure to get everything on tape on the first try, his documentary skills came into play once again. That's not to mention the hostile physical environment.

The heat and humidity of the Panamanian rainforest was such that everyone — cast and crew — lost considerable weight. The heat and humidity made Schleppi shy away from shooting to emerging acquisition formats such as SD cards or hard drives. Instead, he bought about 100 MiniDV tapes from Costco — and, amazingly, he suffered only one dropout as far as he could tell later, during the editing of the 720p24 footage. The two cameras performed remarkably well in the jungle, much to Odell's relief. As the gear connection, she had been nervously expecting much worse: tape slack, tape hits, or shortened battery life. None of that happened.

In fact, Schleppi says, the IDX Endura batteries in particular overperformed. Without power at their locations, the crew was able to recharge only after a day's shooting. One night, they lost power in the middle of the night, and the four batteries never got a full recharge. “We went two days without recharging batteries,” Schleppi says. Odell estimates that they'd typically get five hours from each Endura.

Schleppi estimates that 80 percent of the time, he and Odell were shooting without the Cartoni tripods. On such long days of shooting, Odell says she was glad to have a shoulder-mount camcorder that put all the settings she needed at her fingertips, without a menu system. The two used the HD110 cameras' included 16X Fujinon zooms (they'd hoped to acquire primes, but did not) and monitored via the onboard viewfinders.

Schleppi took another risk with the non-premium MiniDV tapes by capturing audio to them exclusively (as two-channel, 16-bit/48kHz PCM audio). Of course, he had double coverage: One camera captured sound via the hard-cabled boom mic, and the other received audio via a Lectrosonics wireless system. (Audio was also mixed live through a portable ENG mixer, and Heetebrij was constantly monitoring with headphones.) Again, in post, Schleppi found few problems — he estimates they needed to dub only about three lines.

Post modern

Back in Los Angeles this spring, Schleppi continued to find seasoned pros who were willing to work on an intriguing project for a deferred income. He says he loves editing and has his own NLE setup at home — a dual-2.7GHz Apple G5 desktop system loaded with Final Cut Pro 5.1.4. Still, he knew that to produce a Hollywood-level final product, he'd need to call in some help. Looking for an editor for the initial trailer for The Interior (as well as someone who had experience with short-form editing in general), Schleppi found Radu Ion, who had worked as a trailer editor for Universal and other major studios. Ion was looking to expand in to feature-length editing, and ended up editing the actual six-minute episodes of The Interior. An Avid editor by day, Ion eventually took to liking Final Cut Pro despite some initial grumbling, Schleppi says.

Culling 13 six-minute episodes from 100 hours of HDV footage was no small task, but Schleppi didn't encounter too many challenges on the technical front. Using an HDV deck, he digitized all the tapes onto an off-the-shelf Western Digital 500GB FireWire hard drive. (He has a backup drive as well, but he says he hasn't needed to turn to it so far in almost blissful defiance of Murphy's Law.) He then imported the clips into Final Cut Pro 5.1.4 under the HDV 720p24 setting. There, Ion and Schleppi fully exploited the color correction module, trying out several looks as they edited.

Audio post was key, and Schleppi again exploited his Hollywood connections by recording sound effects in a professional sound studio. He enlisted Mathew Walters as sound designer. Walters — of Todd-AO in Santa Monica, Calif., by day — has a long list of film and TV mixing and supervising credits to his name. He used Steinberg Nuendo to mix The Interior.

Each six-minute episode takes about a week to edit, Schleppi says, and the first season is 13 episodes long. They contain everything you might expect in a typical segment of a high-budget network drama such as Lost or 24: a slick opening sequence, fast action, exotic animals, guns, string swells, and seamless dramatic sound effects.

Webisodes and beyond

At press time, four episodes have “aired” on www.theinterior.tv. The program is streamed in a 2.35:1 aspect ratio frame. The black background of the site masks the letterbox, which brings the frame size up to 600×450. The codec is Flash 8, and the bit rate is a relatively hefty 700kbps — about double the typical “high-bandwidth” setting of only a couple of years ago. Over a high-speed Internet connection, the show plays back quite smoothly — although snags are evident over a typical home connection such as a cable modem. Schleppi says that the episodes are encoded at the program's native 24fps; to my eyes, it seemed at some points that the Flash player was dropping frames.

Still, for streaming video, the image is very sharp. The high-bit-rate stream displays very little macroblocking during motion or general “soupiness,” and the frequent night scenes suffer none of the image breakdown that's usually evident in low-light web video. Even out-of-focus parts of the frame seem to retain most of the original detail as captured on the HDV tape. Although they're the length of a typical YouTube clip, episodes of The Interior have a decidedly cinematic feel.

At the moment, besides showing the weekly episodes and responding to message-board comments, The Interior team is also casting four new roles for the second season. As for the content that's already been produced, Schleppi suggests that the Web won't be its ultimate platform: He mentions its potential as a TV pilot, or even a feature film.

Schleppi says he considers the initial $75,000 to be a long-term investment in a market with great potential. The team is examining revenue models including advertising and sponsorship/product placement, as well as advertising/sponsorship from some food companies and even pharmaceutical companies. They are also looking at selling HD or DVD downloads and/or VOD for a 90-minute compilation. He says funding for the next season should be in place by year end.

“We're also working on a new series named The Interior Africa,” Schleppi says. “For that series, we'll be partnering up with a website named ‘The Glue Network.’

“When we were casting the first season, we got close to 2 million hits within a few weeks of existence. There seems to be an audience for us out there. Luckily, we have stories for many seasons to come. Our plan is to produce these episodes in different surprising locations all around the world.”

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