The Great Divide

For years I’ve been looking for a way to balance out my amatuer / silly side of filmmaking with my more professional aspirational side of it.

On one hand I have movies which don’t really make any sense, aren’t very good and other people typically don’t want to watch. But my close buddies and I like them. Because we made them.

On the other hand I have films I’m seriously trying to get made to tell a good story and further my skills. Movies I wouldn’t feel ashamed to send to film festivals or sell to people.

However for years I’ve been trying to find a way to present both without the amatuer side affecting peoples views on Scape Films as a whole or myself as a filmmaker. Movies like the Withers Trilogy aren’t meant to be seen by one person alone just kind of sitting there watching it. They’re not funny to people who don’t know us or our style of comedy. Even then they are better watched with us or in a big group of intoxicated friends. Maybe that means we’re bad filmmakers since we couldn’t make them more universally funny and understandable. But we never tried. We had no script and no real idea where we were going, we just sort of made them for the fun of it.

There is a small following for those films, by people who know us. Which I why I’ve now finally put them on the internet. A quick and easy way to watch them. But I fear putting them on the Scape Films won’t help us with our serious aspirations.

I believe those films have helped us in some way or another when it comes to experimenting with filmmaking. But I’m not sure they belong on the site. But there is a side of me that wants Scape Films to be partially amatuer. To say “hey we’re not all stuck up and serious all the time over here, we like to have some fun too” but another part of me wants the site to say ‘We mean serious business and are out to make good films”. But how do you do both? I start to think about premieres and radio advertising and suddenly the Withers Trilogy pops into my head and BAM it’s like this isn’t going to go 0ver very well.

I’d be lying if I said others peoples thoughts and opinions didn’t matter much to me. My goal with filmmaking has always been to impress the fan boys (which I am one of) I want people to watch my films and say “Damn that was cool” or “Man that was funny”.

It’s only been a few days since the Withers Trilogy has been online and I totally went to town on the new Scape Films website. Spending days updating it. Now I’m considering doing a total strip down of the site. Leaving up only the pages about who we are and how to get a hold or us and the pages about our serious projects like “Falling Apart” and the soon to be retitled “Crash”.

Then building a second site (I don’t knwo where) that deals with just our amatuerish/silly films.

Wow I think about this too much.