Hey patrons, wanted to continually say thank you for your support, as I'm conscious to try and add the best value to what you send my way yet feel that doesn’t necessarily mean robotic consistency of output of short form content. Since my goal is to die being known more as a documentary filmmaker and street photographer who’s secretly maybe a spiritual philosopher who also wrote hundreds of essays in their life, the podcast conversation episodes are in a temporary seasonal wintering as we shift our current focus in the second half of this year towards continual writing of both essays and the next future feature documentary project.
Since feature documentaries can take years to make, not to mention a lot of money, the typical stat is that high end feature documentary work should be budgeted at $1000USD to $4000USD per minute. That’s if they have real budgets like HBO or Netflix. Which we’ve never had for any of our projects. This is the sole reason (along with now Covid travel restrictions) why we haven’t made more episodes of Shamans of the Global Village. As the first episode was made for around $10,000USD and the second episode was literally made for like $3500USD! That’s when each should have cost somewhere between $60,000 to $240,000USD for a 60 minute documentary. We made Transmutation for like $8500USD in travel and food budget when it should have cost $360,000USD for a 90 minute feature. And since all my work has constantly struggled to not be in complete obscurity, I currently make about $350/per month from you nice folks but should be making 10x more than that for the quality of the work. If not 100x more if we wanted to make documentaries with proper budgets so it’s not just scraping by.
So along with the responsibilities of having other primary sources of income and, much like we all have to do, daily management of mundane life, let alone the type of more sophisticated philosophical and esoteric leaning occult films we want to make, what a monumental challenge wall we are up against budget wise to try and actually make films. As documentaries take time for research, writing, travel, and all the many other aspects of filmmaking, with my current resources I have to be very practical about what I can really actualize. So here are some of the feature ideas currently incubating that can be done in the $5000 to $10000 range which simply entail travel and food budget, not to mention a year or two of our side time which puts other aspects of output like podcast conversations on pause.
In terms of future projects, its good policy to have many brewing in the hopper as a larger percentage of them often don’t make it across the checkered finish line. There’s a running joke in Hollywood when asked at networking events or meetings what you’ve got going on to say “I have multiple projects in various stages of development.”
BLUE HOURS
The main script we’re currently working on is called Blue Hours. It’s about a lone street photographer who’s visiting Tokyo who goes out to shoot night street photography at “blue hour”, which is that last hour of the evening between dusk and night. As he strolls solo initially feeling somewhat blue, the whole film would be us hearing his introspective / philosophical thoughts regarding isolation and loneliness in the big city while taking photographs of strangers. The filmmaker Richard Linklater did something similar with his early film Before Sunrise which followed two young people for a single evening walking around Vienna Austria.
This one is makable because we would basically write and record all the voiceover before hand and could ideally shoot it with just myself, who would be the street photographer on screen, with a single cinematographer friend.
As Neil Kramer wrote Transmutation and Rak Razam is the writer for Shamans of the Global Village, we ourselves have never both written and directed a feature yet, so this has long been a main goal.
DOCUMENTARY WITH THE FREEDOM PLACE
I’ve chatted with Greg Kaminsky several times about doing a feature film with him and his teacher TK at their esoteric buddhist temple in Michigan. It would feature the two of them and basically be about how authentic spiritual information is transmitted 1 on 1 from student to teacher. Not from a stage to an audience. Reminder Greg and his teacher did a very short run podcast called The Freedom Place which was amazing and is showing signs of being on indefinite pause but is very much worth a listen - http://www.spreaker.com/show/the-freedom-place
DOCUMENTARY WITH RUBAPHILOS
Rubaphilos and I are planning to make a feature documentary together basically on what an authentic alchemical path is in the modern world. With my current plan to have it be done in a similar way to the Michael Ruppert documentary Collapse https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAyHIOg5aHk with simply footage of him being interviewed on camera, along with footage of him working in his alchemical lab, alone with drone footage of landscape and nature to highlight the four elements. With my secret hope of course being to capture a real physical transmutation occurring on camera.
He’s starting to write the script and I would visit New Zealand for a couple weeks in 2022 or 2023 to shoot it. I lived in Wellington New Zealand for 7 months in 2008 when working with Weta Digital on Avatar so am no stranger to NZ and stay tuned for more details.
OCCULT ANATOMY OF MAN
This would be a zero budget doc consisting of our voice over narration of Manly P Halls’ book (which we’ve privately shared in a previous post for patrons) along with esoteric and occult images. Stay tuned for future updates.
TRANSFIGURATION & TRANSMIGRATION
A couple years back Neil Kramer and I were chatting about perhaps making two more features together. One entitled Transfiguration which would highlight differences of exoteric half truth "saviors" within orthodoxy + the church vs real esoteric powerful Gnostic / Christian doctrine of self being your own savior and how that is relevant in our lives today.
With a third feature documentary idea entitled Transmigration which would go into the half truth concepts of reincarnation from all Eastern + Western pop occultism and religions throughout the world and then real spiritual esoteric elements of growth of the soul through many lives, and how that is relevant in our lives today.
TERRA INCOGNITA
My other project with Rak Razam. So much footage shot over the last 5 years which is so bonkers. Nothing further to report at this time.