The press release for the studio affirms positivity as a core tenant. What experiences led you to realize that many indie filmmakers don’t have a space that can or will uplift them?
Filmmaking is rejection for about 99.75% of the time. An filmmaker will receive a “no” everywhere, about everything, constantly. While intellectually, a lot of us understand that and can cope with it, the reality is that all indie filmmakers (and filmmakers at large) are human beings and are susceptible to letting that get to them.
Also, filmmaking is the most restrictive and cost-prohibitive art form on the planet. So if you’re born with that passion, fire, and drive to be successful (by your own definition) in the cinematic arts, you will be facing a difficult battle. I’ve found myself endlessly badgering myself, hating myself, and creating a devastatingly negative mindset a lot of the time. Eventually, I managed to drag myself out of it.
Life is how you react to things. Your choices and your decisions dictate everything, and your mindset controls that. If you constantly focus on the negative aspects, you’ll think and react negatively and make poor decisions. On the other hand, if you train your mind to focus on the positive and come at everything with solution-based thinking, it’s incredible what you can achieve. It’s incredibly important to me to spread that in the indie film world. What we can accomplish is amazing! Indie filmmakers need to hear that there’s a place they can get the support they not only need but deserve.
“…filmmaking is the most restrictive and cost-prohibitive art form on the planet.”
New Animal Motion Pictures clearly has many moving parts: film development, distribution, marketing, a podcast, and even offering classes. Can you go into more detail about each of these elements and how your studio will tackle them?
Absolutely! You can find our press release with our slate (which will be added to soon with several more features) on our website, but we are actively in development on a slew of titles that I can’t wait to share with the world. We are hyper-focused on bringing quirky, important, different, and eclectic cinema to the world.
NAMP also has a commercial arm that will help companies create any content they need, whether it is training videos, marketing materials, advertisements, etc. One of the loveliest parts of filmmaking is the people you meet along the way, and I’m incredibly lucky to have met scores and scores of fellow artists in every field of filmmaking who have chosen to team with New Animal to produce all of this content.
Our podcast will tackle a whole slew of topics, but its primary function is to address much of what I spoke about above: we will be having a guest on (almost) every episode from every department of filmmaking to discuss how they live, how they’ve made a career, and talk about the pitfalls to avoid and the avenues to chase. We’re also going to be rolling out various online and in-person talks and educational classes that will cover multiple topics in specificity.
New Animal Motion PIctures already has a few titles in the pipeline. What, if anything, can you tell us about those?
You Can’t Be in Here is actually a project I’ve long been obsessed with that I’m beyond thrilled to be in active development on, finally. It’s a comedy in the vein of Albert Brooks and Fawlty Towers and has a very bizarre, warm, and fuzzy vibe to it.
Up next for me after that as writer/director is We’ve Dreamt of Demons, a horrifying thriller about a mysterious visitor that descends on a family’s dinner and peels back layer after layer of normalcy to reveal a horrific cover-up and dangerous family secret.
I’m also so excited to be producing several films, including Between the Earth and a Cloud, written by the amazing Gabrielle Hawkins, and Han, written by the wonderful Luke Shin. The former tackles a high school/lead-up-to-prom story of four unpopular teenagers with a funny, fresh voice. The latter is a very intense, honest, and poignant drama that explores the complicated relationship between a Korean Mother and her Son, who lives in Queens. I’m intensely proud of both of these scripts and am flattered to be a part of them.
The studio is based out of two suburbs of New York. What is the rationale behind splitting it in that way? And going along with that, what support is in place for filmmakers the world over given time zones, etc.?
Aside from being where I shot Strawberry Flavored Plastic, Peekskill, New York is also where I grew up. I love it there with my whole heart, and I will be shooting several projects there in the coming two years or so.
Poughkeepsie is another metro area that has a ton of resources as well as talent, and I want to make sure that I can keep one shoe in each location. They’re both wonderful places yet offer different things, so we’ll have an office in both cities. It also helps that they’re not terribly far away from one another.
We are here for everyone, everywhere! You can follow along with us on all of our social media, you can submit questions from anywhere in the world, you can follow along with the New Animal Podcast, you can read our blogs and site postings, and you can watch our films!
Truly, we welcome correspondence from everywhere in the world. Anyone is more than welcome to engage with me or with New Animal Motion Pictures on all of our social media, or they can submit through our website! Our socials are @colinbemis on Twitter and @newanimalmopi on Twitter, and the New Animal Podcast is available anywhere you get your podcasts!
