Breaking the Bubble

Chris Graves (left) and M. Griffith (right) working on Secrets of Blackmoor. Photo by Ryan Swan.

Doing a documentary about the early days of Dungeons & Dragons and especially one telling the story of Dave Arneson and his group of gamers is a real long shot.

The greatest proof for how ridiculous and irrational this idea is can be seen on Kick Starter.

Kick Starter is littered with the wreckage of many people's movie dreams. It is the place people turn to in order to fund small films. By small, we mean less than a million dollars. Film projects begin with every good intention and all kinds of fantasies of success, and yet the reality of funding and then producing a film often leads to failure.

If you ignore all the other films except for the D&D films the pattern becomes all too obvious. Many have tried to make documentaries about the history of D&D, yet most have failed.

For us, it's a marvel that Secrets of Blackmoor came to completion first!

We started our production later than all the others and we had less than half the budget of those others. On top of that, neither of us is truly a documentary film maker. Chris is more of a narrative film cinematographer and Griff is an art video maker. We didn't really know how to make a documentary and invented our own workflows and strategies with each step that arose as we moved forward.

Again, we're perplexed that the movie with the least funding and the least experienced crew is the film that you can see right now.

It's still the only Origin of D&D History film.

If you do not make feature films, this may not seem like that big of a deal, yet, it is. And 6 years may seem like a long time to make a documentary. Most indy film makers we know spent 10 years making their documentaries.

So there you have it. Two guys, without enough sense to realize that making a film is hard, bet everything to make the first D&D documentary ever - It's a fluke!

We often joke that we were too stupid to know that we should fail. 

We love it when people visit our social media, Face Book and Twitter, and say nice things about Secrets of Blackmoor. Yet what we had hoped would happen in regard to the film is not happening much at all.

We truly believed that: If You Build It - They Will Come.

Now we are learning that they will only come if they know about it.

A lot of you have seen the film. You enjoyed it. Now you've moved on. Yet we're still here and we need your help more than ever.

We want to make Volume Two of Secrets of Blackmoor. We've already begun shooting for it and we have tons of amazing footage already shot. The problem is that Volume One is kind of stalled out. People aren't renting it online in very high numbers and we can't seem to even sell out our remaining DVD stock. This is with online advertising that we have to pay for.

It comes down to one simple problem. Although you know about Secrets of Blackmoor, most gamers have never heard of the movie.

We're still out there posting about the film. We've also tried posting on gamer forums with little success. If we do it ourselves, our posts get deleted because it looks like SPAM to moderators.

We could create a bunch of sock-puppet accounts and make posts ourselves while pretending to be other people, yet that is really disingenuous. It's just not our style to do things in this manner.

We need your help.

Everyone who has seen the film likely knows someone else who has seen the film. Out of millions of RPG players, the reach of our fans is limited on social media. The aggregators that share posts and tweets are designed to be somewhat circular. We are literally posting to each other. We are all trapped in a bubble together. We need help getting out of this bubble.

What the film really needs is endorsements, by gamers, for gamers. It needs a genuine voice, your voice, saying: I watched this, it's awesome, you should watch it too. Here is the link. 

We need those of you who liked the film to go to gamer forums and ask people if they have seen Secrets of Blackmoor and what they thought of it.

We need you to post the link to the trailer and movie rental page on Vimeo: 
https://vimeo.com/ondemand/sobfinal

This brings us to another issue. We chose Vimeo for our Video On Demand streaming service because Vimeo offers the best deal to indy film makers. We recently ran ads and discovered that although people will click the link to the Vimeo site, they won't sign up. It's just a hassle to sign up for yet another service. We get it, we're kind of the same in that way when it comes to having to sign up for yet another web site.

We've decided to try out Amazon now. Yet Amazon takes a large percentage of our sales. Half of what you pay to see the film goes to Jeff Bezos. This means we need to sell twice as many movie rentals just to cover our production expenses; this is money we already spent while making the film.

If you help us drive viewers to the Vimeo page it really helps us defer costs.

Please help us break the bubble by reaching out on gamer forums and creating discussions.

Talk to people about the film and why you like it. 


Thanks, Chris and Griff