Synopsis: The following Lynn Lund interview is the unabridged companion to Jawbone.tv's featured article Interactive Film 'The Outbreak' Punished by Bandwidth Costs, YouTube Still Best Bet. Lund discusses the intentions and results of SilkTricky's zombie hit the Outbreak, along with hosting advice for other indie filmmakers.
Jawbone.tv: What was the actually intention of the Outbreak as a project?
"Both Chris [Lund] and myself had worked on so many projects for so many other people, and it was something that Chris always wanted to do was to make his own film. But to put an interesting spin on it, we thought, what have we learned from our field, what’s new and exciting, what could we do spice it up a little bit? And we thought of doing this film where you could do like a choose your own adventure."
"And we loved the horror, zombie genre while growing up. So we thought, this is like a perfect application for this type of film because you’re constantly, in horror films, people are making idiotic decisions, and you’re always screaming at the TV like, 'Don’t do this! Go there! Duh!' And so it seemed to like, have a really good application in that genre, and so we moved forward with that and when we did it, we didn’t really have any high exceptions."
"We paid for it out of pocket. It was sort of one of those things where we’ve done so much work for so many other clients, let’s do something for ourselves for once. Just sort of like a pet project. And we hired professionals in the Portland, Oregon area to help us with this, and obviously, knowing that it was a personal project, knowing we didn’t have a big budget, people really helped us out … though we were able to actually pay everyone. No one worked for nothing."
"And then we had a few friends from the east coast where we’re from originally, fly out and help us with this too, so it was just like a personal project that blossomed into more. And I think, what we did, knowing that this might be the only thing we get to produce in our lives, we wanted to do the best we could with the resources we had, so we really put our all into it."
Jawbone.tv: What were the results?
"Immediately, we got a lot of recognition, just in the US and overseas. We were not aware of how much this kind of genre, the zombie genre, there are so many followers of it that were just starved for this type of content, and we had no idea. We were being picked up by so many really cool horror sites. And people started blogging and talking about the site, and it just kind of blew up because initially we just launched it, you know, we did a soft launch to our friends and family and said, look at our little project, and then people [through] word of mouth started checking it out."
"Everyday I’d do a little google search to see if anyone mentioned the Outbreak. And each day, more and more people mentioned it. And then it just, by the end of the next week we were just blowing up and we had no idea this would happen. We had a very basic hosting plan. I think we started off with GoDaddy, just like one of those basic hosting plans you get when you register a domain. And from there we had to got to RackSpace, and then we exhausted that within a day or two, and then we were tearing through a terabyte of bandwidth a day and we had to switch, we switched two or three more times, and then we finally settled with Rackspace/Mosso [now called RackSpace Cloud], and were still paying out the teeth, but less than the other hosting services."
"But beyond that, what came out of it is that we had quite a few Hollywood types calling us up, producers, directors, horror film directors who were interested in Chris as a horror film director, they were interested in us as a production team. We actually went down to L.A. and visited with a talent manager who was interested in working with us, this spring, and through him we were able to interview and meet a bunch of different talent agencies down there, and we got signed with William Morris [now merged with Endeavor to create William Morris Endeavor Entertainment]. So that’s what’s happened in short order."
"We haven’t really had the opportunity to work on any more … we were planning on doing another film this spring, but a lot of the questions that come up are, How do we monetize this? How do we stop from digging into our pockets? If we’re going to deliver high production value, good storytelling, then how do you monetize this? And we’ve talked with several studios through our connection with William Morris, and no one’s come up with a really good plan on how to do this."