Mar 152014
 

Factory_Interior-Press-Kit.resized

We started making Ghosts With Shit Jobs in 2009, released it in 2012 and screened it in 25 cities thanks to a Kickstarter campaign through 2012-13. We’ve learned a ton and recently applied what we know now to a proof-of-concept trailer for a new project — it’s called Haphead, and features the infinitely stretching electronics factory pictured above. And bunny-ninja fights.

But before we move on we thought we’d talk frankly about the numbers behind our lo-fi sci-fi feature.

We attracted attention to the project by being up front about our original $4000 production costs, and now we want to do a final accounting in the hope that it’s useful and/or interesting to other indie filmmakers. There’s a certain amount of pressure to not talk about this stuff when it’s not super-impressive — that somehow it hurts our credibility — but we think it’s useful to show people what very minor success looks like.

Ghosts With Shit Jobs cost $20,180.97 to create and promote and earned a gross of $39,317.18 $40,917.18 $51,675.12 $52,252.74 (as of Aug 2022 — mostly from iTunes sales).

Update: Thanks to being part of the Otherworlds Vodo Bundle, we saw an additional $1600 and 640 viewers after this was posted.

moneyspentbyphasespecificpromophasecosts
To date we have made a small profit of $19,136.21 $20,736.21 $31,325.49 $32,071.77.

profitfromdifferentchannelsCorrection: The “iTunes and Amazon” label above should really read “iTunes and Xbox”, as these were the dominant channels (each accounting for approximately half of the views/profits).

Happily we had a contractual agreement in place (read about our egalitarian model here) so it’s been a fairly straightforward disbursal. 54 people contributed a total of 7309 hours to the project, and the amount of hours they worked decides what percentage of the profit they receive — regardless of the role they played. We have issued cheques between $24 and $3,873.

Update: After the profits were distributed, we did a survey with the volunteers on how they felt about our method. Approximately half of the volunteers filled it out and the results are here.

Hour Division by Phase

hourdivisionbyrole

Since $2.62/hr $4.39/hr is a terrible wage, even compared to the characters in our movie, we prefer to think of it in a different way. We estimate that 6857 people saw the feature film for a total 10,286 hours of viewing time.

audiencenumbers

If you count the time people viewed the trailer (150K+ views) and the webisodes, that adds an additional 7130 hours. By this metric for every hour we laboured we created 2.4 hours of entertainment!
labourtoenjoymentcomparison

Some notes

  • Volunteer power allows passion projects like this to exist. Paying everyone on a similar  project in the future at $15/hr would cost $109,635 — and it’d be below scale.
  • We needed a lot of hours in post, mostly because we did way more effects shots than we should have and did an inconsistent job of location sound capture. We needed 20 ADR sessions (where the actors come in and lip sync to picture) to improve the audio as a result. Both of these things needed us to find technically experienced and like-minded individuals who were willing to donate their lucrative skills — quite difficult.
  • Time logging works well with certain types of personalities, but you need a variety of personalities to make a movie. We ended up estimating a lot of the production time amounts based on an (Hours on Set) X (Prep Time) equation. Also, we had pros and amateurs helping out with VFX, and 1 hour from an expert took someone learning 5 hours of work. As a result we needed to manually adjust for experience in some cases so that people didn’t get less of a profit percentage because they were a more efficient worker.
  • It’s harder to track hours watched when people aren’t in a theatre. There’s a chance people will buy a DVD or rent it on iTunes and only watch half, or not at all. But there’s also a chance they’ll watch it with a friend or two. So we’ve figured it’d even out, more or less.
  • A small amount of audience members — the Kickstarter backers — accounted for a very large portion of the profits.
  • The flights cost a lot of money, and it’s hard to gauge if our attendance put a lot more bums in seats. Or, for that matter, if it was a big factor in why people backed the Kickstarter campaign.

Ghosts With Shit Jobs is available on iTunes and DVD.

  5 Responses to “Ghosts With Shit Jobs: The Final Numbers”

  1. Thank you for the numbers! I appreciate that very much!

  2. […] Unlike any Hollywood film, Jim breaks down the numbers of Ghosts With Shit Jobs for everyone to check out. It falls inline with Jim’s mandate of his organization, No Media Kings, to give resources […]

  3. […] tier or “unlock” our movie on the second tier. (I guess we’ll have to update our profit-reporting post after this!) Incidentally, this is the first time you can buy a DRM-free version of our movie since […]

  4. I know it was a huge amount of work, but far better to make $20,000 than lose $20,000.

    e.

  5. My god, this awesome movie was made for so little?

    Shows how much can be achieved through concept, script, acting, and tight direction.

    I just looked up the “metaverse janitor” segment, from dim memory. Still great.

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