The Art of "A Kiss From Tokyo"

This is an article on the making of a movie trailer for a book that is a volume of marketing materials for a movie that has never been made.

(Read that sentence over several times. I wrote it and even I'm not sure that's all correct)

A non-fiction art book about a fictional movie that was never actually made, but has a trailer.

(There! Is that clearer? Maybe? Okay toss me a bone here!)

I JUST KNOW IT'S COOL.

And then there's this:

ATS: Where do you want to take the character? You’ve done the book, which details the world. You’ve done the trailer detailing one of the films from that world. Where else do you see this going?

Kevin Dart: I’m kind of hoping the character takes on a life of its own with people picking it up and talking about it. More books, a graphic novel perhaps. I’d like to involve more people with the project to help expand the universe. I’m hoping to pitch it around to studios as a feature idea or something along those lines.

ATS: Are you suggesting something more open sourced?

Kevin Dart: That’s been one of the most fascinating things about this project. I was always very attached to the character but never so attached that I wouldn’t let others input their ideas. Through every step, when I contacted different artists to contribute to the book they would ask “What can I do with this character? Is it okay to do this?” I didn’t have any rules because I was interested to see what they would do. To me, this is a kind of big playground that is open to all these different ideas.

And it was the same with Steph. I didn’t really have notes for him on the stuff he was doing because I saw it as something he would inject his own vision into. I never worried that Stephan would come back with something that was not in line with what I was trying to do. It was amazing to me to see how it all came together.

Bottom line. This one is worth studying kids. Hard.There's a lot of good stuff in here about marketing, trailer design, and working backwards toward the book itself. It all fits together in a way that makes the best kind of crazy sense. Bravo.

And to cap it off:

ATS: What inspired you on this project?

Kevin Dart: I think a lot of it was the collaborative aspect of it, seeing the stuff my friends did for it and seeing how excited they got about it, kept me excited the whole time. There were a lot times I got pretty bummed out about how it was going but then something would always happen, like one of my friends would send me a piece of artwork that they’d done and it would get me excited all over again. I’d say that my friends inspire me more than anything.

I May Have to Start Twittering...

Seriously.

(For those of you who are a bit slow on the uptake: Wherever it says "indie musician" in the blog post, just substitute "Mad Pulp Bastard". Wherever it says "t-shirts" substitute "books, toys, DVDs and other pulp paraphenalia that pays the bastard's salary.")

H/Tip to Warren.

You Need Some Kindle-ing to Start a Fire

Many of you have been reading John August's posts lately about his short story, "The Variant" that was released by John via several online download portals including Amazon's Kindle.

It's an important step forward, just like Whedon's DR. HORRIBLE was for video and reinforces several precepts we hold near and dear here at Pulp 2.0:

1. You can do it yourself.

2. Branding is important. John says he wouldn't have been as successful if he hadn't had a rep as the screenwriter of (insert Tim Burton or McG movie here).

3. More and more opportunities are happening every day that allow you to make money with your creative content - stories, books, comics, video, audio, merchandise...

4. This is where the industry(s) is (are) transitioning.

But also - let's talk about what this means as it relates to the future forms of media. There's a lot of cool nuggets buried underneath this release...

Note how John released a short story online and people bought it. Not a book or a magazine, but a byte-sized chunk of content. If one were to look back at the music industry you could see this falls right in line with what people are consuming via the web - singles. It's one of the things that has made Itunes so successful as a business model.

For the longest time people were saying the short story market was dead...I think perhaps its resurrection is all-digital.

"Magazines" will simply be areas on the web where similarly themed stories will be stored. People will pay for stories they like based on the logline and a preview and the reputation of the writer/artist (I'm definitely including comics in this scenario, gang) and the tastemaker editors and publishers.

But most importantly there's a revitalized market for self-contained short stories where there was a bloated print corpse in the traditional markets.

This isn't new, I and several others have written for Astonishing Adventures. Other publishers have original genre fiction online...

But right now, based on the numbers that August has and where the bulk of the money comes from, it looks like the economics of it are beginning to catch up to our vision.

Thoughts in the comments, please.