Monday, October 18, 2010

Making a Business Plan part 9 (I think it's 9)

Hi. I don't really know what I'm talking about but I write stuff in my blog. And as much as I'd like to use some real numbers I just don't know them. I've been going over and over the numbers and working out just what makes sense for us and figuring out a sustainable business plan (which may, in fact, be impossible -- all business plans have to be in flux). And I've come to the following non/half/part-conclusions:

SyFy. It would be nice to be one of their approved producers. It ain't gonna happen anytime soon. Sure, we could blow a couple hundred thousand dollars (of, er, somebody's money) on making two or three movies with some name talent and a giant dino-cobra. "Cobrasaurus", I suppose. And if we could then sell a couple of those movies to SyFy for, what? $35,000 each? And then hope that they like the pictures so much that they decide to let us produce Cobrasaurus IV and V. So we're only at a loss of maybe a hundred thousand dollars or so and we have a chance at maybe getting a deal to produce for one network.

Egads! That's a lousy business plan.

The problem is that I've yet to see a better one.

OK, so what else do we do?

Well, we can keep plodding along.

I mean it's not like we're not going to make movies. So maybe just making some more movies is what we need to do 'till somebody figures out (or lucks into) how we can make money at it.

But here's the thing: that's not a Debbie Downer concept. Plodding along and continuing to do work is a business plan. Sure, at any moment we could just say "This is too hard, forget it". Because having a business is very hard. Running (for instance) a theater is hard. Running a fabricating shop is hard. Gee whiz, life is hard! ;-)

But we're still alive when many companies aren't and so we'll just keep making movies better and better. There's no real magic golden-egg-laying goose that we'll stumble upon. Or at least we won't rely on stumbling upon one. We'll just keep on making movies that don't suck and we'll cut more corners and make them cheaper and be nice to the boom operator and everyone will have fun.

Right?

That means I gotta get back to writing this screenplay.

Here's Arthur again. There's a mistake in the animation. Oops. But overall I like the composite.


Arthur Yowls Again from Andrew Bellware on Vimeo.

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