The Art of Film Funding
Discover the secrets to funding and creating successful indie films with The Art of Film Funding Podcast. Join Carole Dean, President of From the Heart Productions and author of The Art of Film Funding, and Heather Lenz, director of the award-winning documentary Kusama-Infinity, as they chat with top film industry pros. Get practical insider tips on crowdfunding, pitching, saving on budgets, marketing, hybrid distribution, and the latest in A.I. filmmaking. Whether you’re funding your first project or navigating new trends, this podcast has everything you need to succeed. Subscribe and let’s get your film funded!
The Art of Film Funding
Accelerate Your Video Editing Flow with a New Program for Indie Filmmakers
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SPEAKER_03Hi and welcome to the Art of Film Funding. I'm your co-host, Claire Papan. Along with Carol Dean, author of the best-selling book, The Art of Film Funding, Carol is also the founder and president of From the Heart Productions and the host of this show. Our guest today is Larry Rosenwig. He's the co-founder and CEO of Sequence, a video editing platform to dramatically accelerate all types of filmmaking. Before starting Sequence, Larry worked in technology and ran a small video production company for the past decade. He's a filmmaker who wanted to improve the editing process and has achieved that with Sequence, which is a tool to accelerate your Adobe video editing workflow. And Carol, this sounds like something filmmakers really need.
SPEAKER_04Absolutely, Claire. It can cut your time in half, Larry says. So for creating your rough cut, that should make everybody really happy because that is the hardest part of the editing is that first cut. So, Larry, thank you very much for joining us.
SPEAKER_00Thanks for having me, Carol and Claire. I'm excited to be here.
SPEAKER_04Oh, good, perfect. Because we want to learn all about sequence today. Anything that cuts the time for the rough cut will revolutionize editing. So first we want to know more about you. I understand that when you were in high school, you created a feature film for$100. Now that's the first time I've ever heard anyone doing a feature for so little money. So tell us about your passion for the film industry.
SPEAKER_00For sure. Uh yeah, Carol, you know, it was a long time ago, back in 2009. I'd always been creative, but I really had no idea that you could just write a script and pick up a camera and make a film. So I grew up watching the classics uh and the new films all-on-cable, things like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, all the way to Little Miss Sunshine, and you know, movies like that uh to me were an escape, and I felt like I had stories to tell as well. So really what I recognized was nobody gives you the permission to start making movies, but for some reason I went to a couple friends uh in our senior year of high school and said, hey, um, we have some time, we should take advantage of it creatively. So we started talking about a couple episodes of a potential TV show we would make, and we realized that instead uh those episodes as an outline looked better as a film that we could shoot around our high school and our town, and we said, hey, let's make a movie instead.
SPEAKER_04Fantastic. That's where it starts. So you would be a natural producer for putting that together. That sounds wonderful. So uh so first you started in film, and then you found that the industry gave you so much room for your creativity. Now, tell us about uh how you came upon the idea for sequence.
SPEAKER_00For sure. So, really, you know, just like uh the majority of your listeners, um I spent years painstakingly watching back all of my footage for every project I was working on, whether it was a film or a web series or a documentary, commercial, whatever. I was spending all this time reviewing file after file, systematically taking notes and spreadsheets or just memorizing what I saw in the footage or what I heard in the footage. And then I'd manually organize and review and slog my way through all of it just to assemble the first draft or the rough cut of the story. And I recognized over and over again in the past decade that this was not creative, and I even dreaded starting the editing process because I knew how much it would take out of me, both emotionally and physically. So in my heart, I knew there had to be a better way, and that's why we started Sequence.
SPEAKER_04Wow, that's a very good reason, because that's the perfect reason looking at it as a filmmaker, and why can't I make this better? So tell us then what Sequence is and what it does.
SPEAKER_00For sure. So you you guys gave a pretty good uh explanation at the top of the broadcast. Basically, Sequence is a rough cut video editing platform that dramatically accelerates the video editing workflow. And we currently have a seamless one-click integration with Adobe Premiere. Eventually, we'll be rolling out integrations with Final Cut 10 and DaVinci Resolve in the near future. At the end of the day, what a filmmaker or a video editor uses Sequence for is really the first half of uh every project's workflow where they'll be able to search for the things that they see and hear, and then very easily uh basically edit the best moments from their footage within our rough cut editor.
SPEAKER_04Wow, that's marvelous. Well, um tell me, uh give me an example uh of editing and how you can just take a word and then find all of the uh areas that that word comes up.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, for sure. So basically, um, you know, let's see. Like at the end of the day, um I understand you know your audience is mostly filmmakers, which is really great. Uh Sequence has been huge for filmmakers, you know, from shorts all the way to features. Uh really what people do is uh they import, say, 10 or 50 or 100 hours of footage into Sequence, and they use our platform to search for specific quotes, uh, specific interviews, people. Um so it could be as specific as a word like um or and or a quote like uh you know, from the Heart Productions, if somebody said that. Um but visually we also offer you the capability to search for a specific object or a location. So if you want to search for all the coffee cup shots, all the mountain range shots, uh, we'll be able to find all those relevant clips from a visual perspective. And then once you find the moments that you want, you're able to seamlessly drag and drop that over to our rough cut timeline inside of sequence.
SPEAKER_04Gosh, that sounds really great. How long have you been working on this?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, um, we've been working on it uh for the past two and a half years at this point. So it's been a while.
SPEAKER_04So, and you have a team helping you? How many uh people are involved?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so it's a team of three of us. Uh we're a combination of filmmakers and technologists, and uh we've been working together uh on films or engineering projects uh over the last uh decade. So we we go way back and you know we felt this problem personally, like I mentioned earlier, and we were very excited because we felt that we were uniquely positioned uh from an engineering and a product development uh capability as well to solve this problem.
SPEAKER_04Right. And then you had to go out and raise the funds to cover your expenses for the two and a half years. So how did you do that? Is it was it similar to film funding?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's a really funny story. So um the first year uh we all worked part-time when Sequence was still a prototype. We were uh uh showing up to meetings uh and you know, communicating with filmmakers at meetups, uh at coffee shops on a weekly basis. When when basically the first week was when I went full-time uh for a year building sequence uh in the beginnings of you know, showing, selling sequence to folks. Uh the way it worked from a fundraising standpoint, we had bootstrapped our way and saved our own uh money from other uh work just to survive uh long enough to get to our first fundraise, which we did a little over a year ago. And yeah, I I you know I can't speak specifically to film fundraising, even though I'm a filmmaker and I've done fundraising uh because I've always uh bootstrapped my way through my you know films, uh, would beg, borrow, and steal uh like the typical filmmaker had to survive and create their work. But but I think what's important to highlight for you, Carol, is the principles are the same. If you know you want to go out and raise capital to create anything, you have to be insanely passionate about your project. You have to show the investor the future, the why what you're working on is worth investing in, and specifically why are you the one uh to do it?
SPEAKER_04Of course, that is brilliant. I mean, that's the whole uh pitching class in a nutshell. So well done. And why you're the one to do it. I because in our grant that we give, this is what I want to know. Why are you willing to put all this time into raising money to make the film? And uh what's so important, and why you above everyone else? So you you've hit it right, and you've been very successful in raising money to support you, right?
SPEAKER_00Oh, yeah. It it's it's definitely been a journey. And anyone out there listening to this now and thinking about fundraising for their film or or frankly for anything, um, you know, what's really important is go into it with a plan and also uh with as much focus on it as possible. Something that I think a lot of folks um have made the mistake on when they fundraise is they're kind of doing it, you know, halftime or part-time. But I think it's better to say, hey, the next three months, I'm going to, you know, as full-time as I possibly can, focus on the fundraise and time box it so then if it doesn't happen, at least uh you had a clear start and end point. And then you could do a retrospective and figure out what things did you do well, what other things could you have done better.
SPEAKER_04Oh, that's very wise. Well, let's get back to sequence. First of all, it's spelled C Q U E N C E. So what is your website address?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's it's a great uh it's a great note. Folks definitely uh sometimes uh look for the uh S E Q U E N C E. Uh that is not us. Uh we are www.c u e-n-c e dot ap. So saying it out loud, sequence.app.
SPEAKER_04Got it. Sequence.app. Uh and so uh who is it valuable for?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so today sequence is most valuable for filmmakers, video editors, video producers, and this could be for doing scripted or unscripted work.
SPEAKER_04And that can be anything that you're doing uh from a short to a web episode to a featured documentary, right?
SPEAKER_00Totally, yeah.
SPEAKER_04Okay, and the benefits. Can you outline those?
SPEAKER_00Oh, of cour of course. Um so basically there's really a lot of huge benefits to using Sequence, um, and I'll highlight a couple of them. So uh you know, at the end of the day, Sequence accelerates the video editing workflow. So what does this mean? Uh we enable filmmakers and video editors to focus on higher order thinking and creativity again. Not only do you save significant time using Sequence, but you can increase your revenue by having more time back to focus on bringing in clients to go fundraise to make more projects. And Sequence makes it easy to repurpose and repackage your footage into social promo and trailer content for you to share across all of your social channels. And just to you know, uh expand on that last point think of Sequence as a searchable archive for every project uh that you have. And we make it really easy uh to use footage even from a previous project in your next project because it's already uh available. Uh, not to mention folks are already using Sequence's early collaboration capabilities. Say, if a filmmaker and a video editor want to collaborate together, uh we are able to replace the traditional uh filmmaker having to mail uh a hard drive or upload terabytes of footage to uh some sort of uh cloud storage uh sequence essentially replaces that piece of the workflow.
SPEAKER_04Okay. Um so you're talking about the many uses, one of them is a trailer, and that is always something very important for documentary filmmakers, because that's how they get their money, is the trailer. And the interesting thing is that you're asked for so many there are so many uh different requests when you go after grants. Some say ten minutes, some say six minutes, some say three minutes. So I think you would this could shorten your time, right?
SPEAKER_00Totally. Um not only that, it's also like you know, filmmakers and creative folks usually get into doing uh the filmmaking, the video work for the the the big project, uh like the vision of what they had, and oftentimes leaving things like distribution or fundraising or promotion uh to the end, or it really just can fall easily by the wayside if you're not focused on it. Um so because filmmakers and video creators uh often are working by themselves or with a small uh tight budgeted team, they are tasked with promoting their own work. And because it's historically been very tedious and exhausting to do this on top of the actual filmmaking and the actual video editing, uh Sequence has uh definitely provided a tremendous amount of help in this area, and it's one we'd like to continue uh providing value for.
SPEAKER_04Right. Uh that that uh takes me to the next thing where you say that uh right now you can save 30 to 50 percent of your time in editing, but you won't stop designing until you've got that number to 90 percent. That's that's a lot to ask for.
SPEAKER_00We we we we have a big vision, um for sure. You know, the product's never done. Um, the product is available today. Uh we have a lot of filmmakers, uh video creators of all uh types of projects and uh sizes of you know teams, also a lot of individuals working on sequence. Today it saves folks 30 to 50 percent of their time depending on the project. Um but as you mentioned, uh Carol, our goal is to save 90% of the time it takes to create a rough cut.
SPEAKER_04Bravo. You'll make everybody happy. That's for sure. So now how does that integrate with the video editor's existing workflow?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's a great question. So as filmmakers and video editors uh on our team, uh so personally, and also now having spoken with hundreds of filmmakers and video editors at this point, we knew that we had to build Sequence to easily just get right into the existing workflow as seamlessly as possible. That's why Sequence is available for both Mac and Windows today. We have an integration with Adobe. So you can download the Creative Cloud plugin as well. And you can easily export your rough cut from Sequence, which is on your desktop, into Adobe Premiere, which is also on your desktop, to continue editing and then finish your film, your story uh in your existing workflow as you have always done previously.
SPEAKER_04Okay, so um, can you give us another example of editing with Sequence?
SPEAKER_00Sure. Uh so for example, um as a filmmaker myself, I continued to work on more projects, and I was actually using Sequence to edit a documentary web series uh I had shot a couple years ago, but frankly was sitting in a hard drive because I had 40 hours of footage and I was overwhelmed to even begin editing. So what I did was I took the 1200 files from this project, uh, imported all of it into sequence. The import is as simple as take a whole folder on your computer and drag and drop it into sequence and then walk away. Let it run overnight, get coffee, do other work. Uh you don't have to sit there while it's running. We're tagging uh all of the metadata that you can see and hear in your footage behind the scenes. So this took about 10 hours uh to import and analyze everything overnight, which you know, 10 might sound like a lot, but when you're dealing with 40 hours of footage, uh it would take significantly more time to have to watch all that footage back over and over again. Once ready, I searched for all types of things, like baseball fields, which gets me back the 60 baseball field clips, or Apple, and that gets me back to one clip with me eating an apple. Or a quote There was a guy I interviewed on a bus on this docuseries, and he was telling me uh about this deepest freshwater lake. Now, I don't remember his name, I don't remember anything else he said, but that was the little bit I had recalled because I recorded this documentary footage a while back. It would have taken me forever to find that specific quote. It would be like searching a needle in a haystack without sequence. But with sequence, it took half a second to retrieve the correct file with that quote. And Carol, I'm even going to download today's uh radio show uh after we're done, and I'm gonna edit a recap video on Sequence as well.
SPEAKER_04Oh, wow, that's exciting. Great. Great. Well, um tell us about your website and what your current price plans are so people know how reasonable this is.
SPEAKER_00For sure. So uh I think what's important to highlight right off the bat is uh, you know, I come from uh 10 years of filmmaking, uh running a very small production company, just the two of us, uh, and I know what it's like to not have a big budget or a big team, and it's very resource intensive as a filmmaker and a video editor. So we wanted to make sure that we built a product uh in Sequence that was available for uh anyone who's creating meaningful uh video content and filmmaking and maybe can't afford to hire an assistant editor or doesn't have the time to do all the work him or herself. So you can go to sequence.app. So once again, spelled c qence.ap, sign up there. You can start using sequence for free, up to 10 hours of footage. Imported and we also have a standard plan for$24 a month and a pro plan for$48 a month. Both of these plans give you a lot more footage and a lot more export options like automatically generating subtitles. And also worth noting, we're going to give your entire audience a discount, Carol. So for the first three months of any of these plans, your audience can use the discount code SUMER21 on checkout, and that expires at the end of the summer.
SPEAKER_04Oh, that's wonderful. How kind of you. And what is the discount?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so basically the discount is your first three months free on any of those lands.
SPEAKER_04Oh my goodness. First three months three. Oh, that's so kind of you. Oh, we will love that. Now, is summer, is that uh upper lowercase, capital S, or how do we put that in?
SPEAKER_00Sure, let me spell it. So all caps is S U M M E R 21.
SPEAKER_04All caps. Okay, great. Oh, what fun. Uh that's going to be so exciting for us. And then all the instructions are online, or what if you run into a snag? What do you do?
SPEAKER_00For sure. So you should be able to uh follow the steps on our website once you sign up in order to get started. Uh if you know any of your listeners out there uh have any questions, uh you can always reach out to me. Uh my email is Larry L-A-R-R-Y at sequence.app Okay.
SPEAKER_04Oh my gosh, it's really kind of you. Sequence.app. Got that, Larry. Okay, that's just what we'll do. We'll get the word out for you to all of our filmmakers. And thank you, thank you so much for sharing this information, for spending all these years making this application, this app, and for sharing uh how been how many benefits there are. This sounds wonderful. We sincerely appreciate it.
SPEAKER_00Really appreciate Carol and Claire for having me today. And yeah, I think like to your point around the benefits uh and the time it took for us to build it and our time as a filmmaker, we we really want to emphasize that this is a platform built by filmmakers, built for filmmakers. We understand what it takes to create something that's meaningful, and we recognize it's very challenging to do this uh in a timely and cost-effective way. So uh what we've set out to do with Sequence is democratize the ability to uh make films and create meaningful video content. And I really hope uh everyone listening today can get a chance to check out our site and hopefully accelerate your video editing workflows immediately.
SPEAKER_04Exactly.
SPEAKER_03Larry, I have a question for you. I I do have a quick question for Larry. For people who work strictly with audio editing, how would this apply for them? I I know earlier in the conversation you mentioned that you can find certain words or phrases. Um is this something that would work for audio editors as well?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's a great question. So the short answer is yes. Um what is important to highlight is first we are focused on integrating with Adobe Premiere, which you can export uh audio from as well. So as I mentioned, I'm gonna take uh the file from today's uh talk and create a recap uh video out of it. Um I could also create a recap audio uh file and stream that as well. So if you do audio editing, you're definitely able to use Sequence, but you would still need to integrate with Adobe Premiere. Most people who use Adobe Premiere, though, are using it for video editing. In the future, we will uh add capabilities for you to directly export into an MP4 or an MP3 file from Sequence. So you don't even necessarily need to integrate with an existing video editing app either.
SPEAKER_03Gotcha. Great, good to know. I'm I'm excited about when that happens. So please keep us posted.
SPEAKER_04100%. Yeah, because that we would be able to use that with our recordings and oh, that just opens you up to a huge world. A lot of people take their shows like this or their information blogs blogs and cut them up into sections and just put out a small blog. So that will expand your uh potential customers a huge expansion, wouldn't you think?
SPEAKER_00A hundred percent. Um what's worth noting though today is we really want to focus first on solving the problems for the filmmaker and for people who are working with video content. Um because video is more challenging than audio, we felt that this would be the right place to start. But correct. Um ultimately we want to make it very easy for you to edit and export your video or edit and export your audio from Sequence into uh shareable format without having to rely on other programs. But because a lot of filmmakers use either Adobe Premiere or Final Cut or Da Vinci Resolve uh primarily to uh do their uh indie films uh short feature, we felt that that would be the right place to start for us today.
SPEAKER_04Yes, you you're absolutely right. That is the place to start and expand from. Well, this is wonderful news and congratulations on this. And it's available now so people can go get on using the summer the all caps twenty-one and have uh discount for the first three months. Everything's free. This is brilliant. Thank you so much.
SPEAKER_00Thank you for having me today, Carol.
SPEAKER_04Okay, we'll talk to you again in a few months and see how things are going.
SPEAKER_00Sounds great. I'm looking forward to it.
SPEAKER_04Okay.
SPEAKER_03Bye for now. Thank you, Claire. Bye.
SPEAKER_00Take care, Claire. Welcome.
SPEAKER_03Be well, everyone. Thanks. Okay. Bye-bye. Bye. Now, in its second edition, Carol Dean's popular book, The Art of Film Funding, has 12 new chapters to cover all areas of film financing and how to avoid expensive pitfalls. Learn how to start with an idea and end with a trailer, how to make an ask for money. Create your story structure and your trailer, legal advice, fair use, successful crowdfunding, how to ask for music rights, and what insurance you can't shoot without. Available on Amazon under Carol Dean and at FromTheHeartProductions.com. I want to remind our listeners that David Rakelin is a brilliant and talented award-winning musician who scores films and can compose music for a trio or for a full orchestra. David is a very good friend to the independent filmmaker and comes highly recommended by From the Heart Productions. If you need music to help tell your story, please contact him at DavidRakeland.com. That's david R-A-I-K-L-E-N.com. And Carol and I want to thank you for tuning in to the Art of Film Funding. Please visit our website at FromTheHeart Productions.com. You can also find us on Facebook and Twitter. Good luck with your films, everyone.
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