Episode 12 will be our final episode. It will be 30 minutes long. We’re in production right now, aiming to release in April.
We’ll post more info and thoughts soon, but just wanted to get you that information for now.
Something interesting happened a few months ago.
It starts on a random Friday night. I went to see a movie called “Safety Not Guaranteed” with my brother and another friend. I loved it. It’s a film made for only $750,000, a very modest budget by typical movie standards.
Now, my personal dream is to make a feature film and see it in a movie theater, and I definitely don’t need a million bucks to do it. Whenever I walk out of a great movie, I get inspired. It fires me up to keep doing what I do. What I do is make “The Vault,” a micro-budget web series on YouTube. Not exactly a million dollar feature film, but very fulfilling for me nonetheless, and the closest I could get to that dream.
A day or two before this particular day, my Vault partner Mario and I had a big argument. I was frustrated by the lack of results our show was having. I felt we weren’t on the same page as far as how we were going about our business. It’s hard enough for two people part-time to make an entire show, but I felt as though we still had to do more. Just because it was a ton of work doesn’t mean it was a guarantee of any sort of success or progress. Things just don’t happen magically. That’s my philosophy. You have to make things happen.
I get home and I check our YouTube channel to see if we gained 6 or 7 new subscribers, which was a typical day. We were up 500 subscribers. Confused, I hit refresh, It jumped 20 more. What the hell is going on, I thought.
It took me 30 minutes, but I eventually traced the traffic surge to a simple post on reddit. It wasn’t anything magic. Somebody simply posted a link to the show there. People were seeing our web series and liking it. Of course, I always hoped that would be the reason we’d get traffic, meaning the episodes being good, but it was still a pleasant surprise to see it actually happening that way.
After a few days we had gained 10,000+ subscribers and had half a million new views. It felt good. It was good to see some tangible results. Suddenly it wasn’t just a good web series, it was a good web series that had a respectable amount of views.
However, from the start of this project I knew that all we really needed was the right single viewer. If the right person saw “The Vault,” it could mean everything. To me, that was more likely than us getting 50 million views. Amazingly we had that happen early on. Billionaire Mark Cuban saw the first episode only days after it was released and invested in our production company. A high-risk investment, which although relatively small, is not one most people would have made, especially in two young guys so early on in their careers.
It had always surprised me up until this point that people in the entertainment industry hadn’t taken any interest in what we were doing. Not that I thought people were scouring YouTube for up and coming filmmakers, but when Mark Cuban invested I thought someone out there would say “hey, maybe I should look into this.” Maybe these guys are onto something. If he believes in them, maybe there is a reason. Didn’t happen.
I look at “The Vault” very simply. This is a show made by two guys, part-time, in a living room with very little money. I thought people in the entertainment industry would respect that. I thought they’d say, “damn, that’s pretty impressive.” I thought they might ask “imagine if those guys had anything to work with.” They didn’t. It was depressing. It made me feel like people didn’t respect what we do, or they simply didn’t care. I felt like what we were doing was important, and it was really hard to learn that maybe I was alone in that feeling.
Fortunately, one person in the industry did see the show through that reddit post. Suddenly we had our first entertainment industry meeting. We were in a door. That’s all we wanted. Just let us in the door. The meeting went great, and suddenly we had a 2nd meeting. This time with a management company. When they told us who their big name client was, we were sold. I won’t say who, but if I gave you 3 guesses based on what you’ve seen from us so far you could figure it out.
At the time I didn’t really know what having a manager or an agent meant other than it sounded impressive and it seemed to be what everyone in the business did, but I learned very quickly what a difference it made. Suddenly we had five meetings. Then 10. Then 15. Meetings with big name people and companies. It was a bit shocking. These people were being shown “The Vault” and other information about us for the first time, and they liked what they saw. I was relieved. I felt like there was hope.
I’ll cut to the chase. Several opportunities are in play. That’s where we’re at right now. We feel very good that one or several of these things will happen in some form. Some of these are Vault-related, some aren’t. The future is definitely bright.
We will update you with specifics as soon as we know. We just wanted you to know that good stuff is happening for us, and if you like “The Vault” and you like what we do, you should be happy.
VAULT MEGASODE UPDATE: The Vault Megasode fundraiser is still going on right now at http://www.indiegogo.com/vaultshow, so please check that out if you haven’t. Thanks!
Help us make our 30-minute Megasode.
Check out our Indiegogo fundraiser below. You can buy “The Vault” DVD set, props from the show, and more. Thanks!
