Interview: 'Four Eyed Monsters' Co-Director Arin Crumley -- Part One

I first met Arin Crumley and Susan Buice back when their film Four Eyed Monsters premiered at the Gen Art Film Festival in 2005. At the time they were just two run-of-the-mill indie filmmakers who were trying to work the festival circuit and land distribution for their film. Little did anyone know at the time, but these two amazing artists would help pave the way for a generation looking to change the ways in which we watch, promote and distribute films. Since 2005, Arin and Susan have been working full-time to not only spread word about their little film (which never found distribution, but still managed to score two Independent Spirit Award nominations this past year), but also open up new avenues for folks to experience film.

Last month, Four Eyed Monsters became the first film to be shown (for free) on YouTube in its entirety. And, as part of a promotion with Spout.com, anyone who signs up for a free Spout account will have one dollar donated (out of Spout's wallet, not yours) in their name to Arin and Susan. Their hope is to eventually raise $100,000 -- the total amount of debt they've accumulated over the past three and half years. As of now, they've managed to get roughly 36,000 people to sign up -- but they're looking for more. The promotion runs through August 15th, so head on over to Spout to help pitch in. After the jump, you'll find the first part of my two-part interview with Arin. Additionally, for the first time in Cinematical history, you can watch video of our entire 40-minute phone interview (from Arin's point of view) above. In part one Arin and I discuss the Spout promotion, how they managed to accumulate $100,000 worth of debt on such a low budget film, whether the two filmmakers would ever be interested in writing a book about their experiences, the disadvantages of extreme self-promotion, their ultra-popular video podcasts and the pressures that come along with building a massive fanbase. Check back Friday for part two, and enjoy.

Cinematical: So I've spent the past half hour or so watching those videos that people have been uploading after watching Four Eyed Monsters online. A lot of them are very personal; that must be wild for you two to watch.

Arin Crumley: Yeah, I know -- it's been completely trippy. I think we got over 60 video responses. We're really happy with how it's worked out, showing the film for free online. It's been the single, most profitable thing we've done -- showing our film for free online -- because of the Spout thing.

Cinematical: Yeah, I was going to ask about that. Is it still going on, and how much have you raised through the Spout.com promotion?

AC: It's going on for approximately one more month; it'll stop on August 15th. Spout is willing for it to go as high as $100,000 ... people signing up, and we get a dollar for each one. So far we've got around 35,000 people to join. We're beyond our one-third point, and our goal within the next month is to get that up to the full 100. That's pretty much the amount we've accumulated over the past three and a half years on a collection of about 10 credit cards.

Cinematical: Wow, 35,000 dollars is still pretty good.

AC: Yeah, we're stoked about it. It pretty much means 5% of the people who watch our little video, in which we ask folks to sign up, actually join Spout. So hopefully the more people who watch the film, the more people join Spout.

Cinematical: What aspect of the production cost the most? Because based on what I've seen of the movie, it looked pretty low budget. Where did the $100,000 debt come from?

AC: [laughs] Well, we do get that all the time. We do get people who are really blunt about it; posting a comment on YouTube like, 'I'm looking at this thing and I can't see where you spent $100,000. This is total bullshit, you're just trying to make money. You made this all up!' I think they just watched the first few minutes or something; I kind of get the impression these people haven't even watched the film. We don't generally go into major budgetary detail, and we also don't go into timeline detail. We don't tell everyone because it's irrelevant. We don't tell them that it's taken over three and a half years to get to this point that we're at right now. And it's been full time for both of us, aside from the little bits of work we've had to take in order to make the minimum payments on credit cards.

Cinematical: Did a lot of the self-promotion cost money?

AC: No, not that much. We haven't spent any money. If someone looks for where money was spent, they're not gonna find it. Because what did we spend money on? We didn't spend money on film, paying crew or paying cast -- although we did need to spend some on food for ourselves. Of course it's a micro-budget film that doesn't cost any money. But it does take a lot of time. We're doing all the animation ourselves, all the editing ourselves, all the shooting -- ya know, being in it too. At one point we needed to take acting classes because some of the scenes we sucked too bad at. So all these things begin stacking up and it ends up being extremely tedious. And then when you get into learning how the web works; learning how to do websites, learning how RSS works, video distribution and researching things. You could spend all this time and probably write a book, or a thesis paper, or something substantial from the amount of research we had to do just for us to even play in this space at all. Because it's so brand new, everyone is doing such unique things and you need to know what everyone else is doing you can kind of participate in the whole new media stuff. So I don't know what to classify the cost as other than it's just living.

Cinematical: You mention how you've compiled so much information, one can write a book. Have you and Susan ever thought about writing one?

AC: We would love there to be a book, but I'm not really a book writer and neither is Susan. We want to disseminate information. We post a lot of tutorials on our website --every time we do something, like in the case of the video podcasting, the day that we started that we posted a tutorial on how it was that we were doing it. We've posted tutorials on video comments, video editing techniques that we use -- we're working on a tutorial right now about selling DVDs on B-side; how to sell downloads of your film. And another tutorial on how to get good quality videos onto YouTube. If they open up to more users being able to use a 300 megabyte limit on a YouTube account -- which means most filmmakers will be able to post feature films -- we'll post a tutorial on how to get your entire feature film up there at relative decent quality. There's a lot of theories that we don't put out in the tutorials, but sometimes we put those on the blog. But in terms of here's how you can do something right now today; here are the step-by-step guidelines on how to do it. It's a little tedious, but whenever we can we try to get in there and make one of those to post on the tutorial site.

Cinematical: You've grown a pretty massive fanbase through the film and the way you've promoted it. Is there pressure to deliver more new content all the time? How many times a day does someone ask what you're working on next?

AC: [laughs] I thought you were going to say 'how many times a day does someone bring up Episode 9 [of the video podcast]. It's interesting when people ask what's going on next. I'm curious to know what people expect. Not that I'm necessarily going to cooperate with what they expect, but I'd just like to sort of know what they might be expecting. On a pretty regular basis since the film has been up on YouTube, people have been expressing that they want to see another film from us, which is kind of cool to hear. Previously, we had really played up this episodic series of episodes one through eight, and it seemed for awhile that we were going to keep doing that. So people regularly check in on us, and say 'Hey, what happened -- you guys were posting these episodes and the last one ended on this big cliffhanger -- what the hell!?'

Cinematical: [laughs] Well count me in as one of those people. I've watched all those episodes, and number eight did end on a major cliffhanger.

AC: It's just like the wrongest thing we could possibly do. But see, we didn't think it through. In fact -- and I hate to deflate us because I know some people sometimes are like, 'Wow, these kids are really smart; they've done some really clever things here' -- but trust us, there's no masterminding. We're just kind of rolling with the punches. We get in a situation, we get inspired to do something and we just start doing it. We definitely didn't plan on putting out episodes one through eight and then dropping the ball. We know that the project is beyond us; there's a lot of people involved. So we wanna work with people on it. But the reality is that we haven't been happy with this version of what the podcast can be. And so it's just been sitting on a hard drive not doing anything. We've also been extremely busy handling ourselves -- all of the deals that we need to make to get the film on TV, to get the film in some other countries, getting the film on various internet platforms. And that is a full time endeavor alone. That's connected to getting us out of debt a lot moreso than those episodes, which is kind of a sad reality. I hope someday that we're going to be in a world where audience appreciation and monetary stability are kind of lined up, but we've definitely proven we're not in that world today.

Cinematical: Is that what's most frustrating about the process -- that you put so much into promotion that you lose some of the creative spark?

AC: I hate being perceived as bitching about things, so I don't want to sit around and complain. Because actually it's an amazing time to be able to get your stuff out there. There are so many tools and technology opportunities -- not only at our disposal now, but especially on the horizon. But I think our reality has been, yes, that it's hard to take care of your creations. Because you make something and you don't want to just throw your baby out the window. You want to let it grow up, become an adult and have its own life. But you have to carry it for awhile before it can do that in today's system. The reality is that it really takes a full company to do that, and that's why distribution companies exist. Now, if you're really crazy, insane -- a workaholic -- you can maybe pull it off single-handedly or with a few people devoted to making it happen. But yeah, that's a completely different endeavor than wanting to create ideas and experiences for people. I hope that, eventually, it will be possible to make that happen without doing the tremendous amount of legwork. What I hope is that you can have a project and on the software there will be a button that says 'Done.' And the second you have an idea that you're comfortable with going out there -- whether it's a feature, a short or a video blog -- you hit the done button and it's all one democratic playing field of videos. And the people who want something from a particular creator get it immediately. All this happens today through email, iChat and instant messenger in a very manual process, but I think that technology is changing - that social networking is changing -- and there's going to be a very automatic process to it all. But of course that's just like a digital utopia that doesn't completely exist.