IFH 818: From Setbacks to Festival Wins: The Filmmaking Path of Dawn Fields

Alex Ferrari 0:00
Enjoy today's episode with guest host Dave Bullis.

Dave Bullis 0:47
Hey everyone joining me today is Dawn Fields. Dawn is a Los Angeles based producer, writer, director, and owner of the feature film production company palm street films. She has been she has over 20 years of experience working as a producer, writer, director, assistant director, editor, and she has a background in acquisitions and development. Dawn has raised over $100,000 for her short films exclusively through Indiegogo. And she has also worked for such companies as Lucas, film, 20th century, Fox, Tristar, ABC, NBC, Aaron Spelling productions and Morgan Creek. Dawn how are you?

Dawn Fields 2:29
Hey, good morning, Dave. I'm great. How are you?

Dave Bullis 2:31
Pretty good. Thanks. It's actually snowing right here in PA.

Dawn Fields 2:33
Ohh, goodness, okay. Well, it's cold here too, but everybody just laughs at us when we complain about the cold in LA,

Dave Bullis 2:42
yeah, I think the high today is going to be like seven or eight.

Dawn Fields 2:45
No way, yeah. Oh gosh, okay. Well, I'm going to stop complaining then about how cold it is here.

Dave Bullis 2:50
So Dawn, just to get us started, could you give us a little bit about your background?

Dawn Fields 2:55
Yeah, sure. Of course. I started in the film business in Atlanta, Georgia, in the early 1990s when all of the Hollywood companies were coming out to Georgia to take advantage of the fact that it was a right to work state, the fact that, you know, people were more cooperative. They actually got excited to give you their location. And so there was a lot of a lot of good energy and spirit going on there. So Georgia really attracted a lot of big budget films that were coming through the South in the in the early 90s. Excuse me, and I started out as a production assistant, and it was funny, because how that happened was, is my dad growing up, my dad always told me I should be an actress. And so there was a film called Love Potion number nine, which was in town shooting at the time. That's the film that actually launched Sandra Bullock's career, and was written and directed by the wonderful Dale Larner. It was actually his directorial debut. He's a prolific writer and moved into directing. But anyway, I signed up to be an extra on that set, and I was just, it was my first time on a film set, and I was just, I was hooked. I was just blown away. And I'm like, This is amazing. And and I realized very quickly that I really didn't really want to be in front of the camera. I wanted to be behind it. And so one of the PAs that was in charge of the extras, I was just really taken with. And I said, you know, how did you get your job? This looks really fascinating. And he said, Well, it's it literally is who you know. And I turned to him and I said, Well, I know you. And he literally got me my first job in the business. And the first thing I got hired to do was go to Ann Bancroft. And Bancroft played madam Ruth, and my first assignment was to go to her hotel room and read lines with her, and that was really an amazing experience. And she was a wonderful, wonderful person. I'll never forget that. And then from there, I got assigned to extras casting, and I got a lot of experience in the whole world of extras casting, which is a brutal job, and I have mad respect for the people who do that work. And. Then from there, I just kind of worked my way up. I thought I wanted to be in the DGA as an ad. I was working towards that and trying to get my days. At the time, you had to have 650 days as a PA to qualify for the DGA. So I was working on my days. And I think I got up to like 350 days on various films throughout the southeast, including young Indiana Jones, the TV show where I got the opportunity to work with George Lucas, that was amazing. So I thought that was the path I wanted to take. And then after, after I worked all those pa days, I started, like wanting more and to move up the ladder. So I started being a first ad on some short form projects like short films and music videos and commercials and industrials and stuff like that, and I realized very quickly that I couldn't be that close to the camera without wanting to be involved in the creative decisions. So that's when I moved into producing with the, you know, realizing that being an ad wasn't necessarily the career path that I wanted to take, but it was definitely something I enjoyed.

Dave Bullis 6:00
So, you know, that was absolutely amazing. You got to, you know, read lines and Bancroft,

Dawn Fields 6:04
Yeah, it was, and it's, it's a it was very hard for me when I heard that she had passed. That was tough. I know I didn't know her that well, but still, whenever you meet someone and you kind of share a bond with them, you feel like you know them. And she was a wonderful, wonderful woman. That was, that was a tragedy for sure.

Dave Bullis 6:20
Absolutely, I'm sorry. Don't did I cut you off there? I'm sorry if I did. No, no, no, not at all. Okay, I do. I thought, yeah, I'm sorry. I sometimes have a tendency to do that just to interject.

Dawn Fields 6:34
No, please. I like that because I don't want to feel like I don't want you to feel like you can't get a word in edgewise. I don't want to just talk and talk and talk. But I tell you, I could. I have so many stories, and I have so much to say about this business, I I could talk for days, so feel free to cut me off anytime.

Dave Bullis 6:46
Well, that's good. Stories are good because I like, I always say people want to tune for the guests, not me, because I have a very nasally high, whiny voice, and I like your voice. Oh, thank you. When I'm playing these podcasts back, I'm like, Oh, my goodness, is what I sound like.

Dawn Fields 7:00
Oh god, I'm same way when I see myself on camera. I can't stand it. Um, so, so, anyway, so, um, once I started getting into producing, I realized very quickly that the there was no real money in Atlanta, you know, you could work on crew, because there was a lot of films coming through. But, you know, the all the big shows coming through were union, and I had decided not to go the DGA route and not to be a union ad. So I started kind of branching out on my own, doing my own thing, and tried to raise some money for a couple of Feature Ideas and a couple of scripts. And then I just realized, wow, there's just no there's no film at the time, there was no film business there. And I, and I don't think there still is a film business there. I think it's still just a lot of movies coming through and a lot of things being shot there. There's certainly not the industry that there is out here where all the agents and managers and distribute, you know, studio, studio heads and distribution companies and stuff like that, Atlanta still doesn't have all that, but it's blowing up right now. There's like, 1000 things filming there. But, um, so I realized very quickly that Atlanta was not really where I needed to be. So in 2000 I literally, I remember I was walking my dog on a Tuesday, and I'd been thinking about it for a long time, and I stopped in my tracks, and I just looked down at my dog and I said, You know what, it's time. And two weeks later, I was gone, and I packed up everything I owned in a U haul, and I drove out here with no job, no apartment. Had a few connections, friends that I knew, let me sleep on their couch till I found a place. But I really just took that leap of faith that I came out here with nothing. And the first, the first several years, well, I've had a lot, you know, I've been here 15 years now, and I would say 75% of that have been tough times. I mean, this is, this is a brutal industry, and for anybody who thinks that it who thinks that it's not, maybe some people have it easy, but most of us have to really struggle and fight for it. And it's, it's been a struggle almost every step of the way. But I think that just speaks to how badly you have to want something, because it's still something that I want more than anything, and it always has been. And so you just, you figure out how to make it work. So the the first job that I had when I moved out here was for a medium sized, kind of, on the small side, distribution and production company, where it was a really interesting position they put me in. I was the vice president of distribution, and I was the vice president of acquisitions. So that was really cool, because I got to go to all the film festivals to scour finished films for us to acquire. And I got to, you know, reach out to filmmakers for finished films, to see which ones we might want to acquire for distribution. But I also got to go to, like, pitch panels and meet with agents. I was wining and dining agents a lot and looking for scripts that our production arm could produce. So that was like a really great experience. And quite honestly, they paid me pretty well. It was a really nice base salary plus commission, which was real. So it's really kind of a nice job. But again, I found myself like I missing being in production. You know, I was working in an office all day, and I was helping other people with their films, but I wasn't being able to do my films, even though that was a great job, it lasted about three months. Excuse me. And then I left that job and decided I wanted to do my own thing. So I found a couple of scripts that I really liked. Was in development on those for quite a while, and before I knew it, like several years had gone by and I hadn't, still hadn't produced anything, I was ad in here and there, just for, for for freelance and helping people here and there with their shoots. But wasn't really doing what I wanted to do. So I remember, it was in 2012 I believe late 2012 I finally just said, You know what? I've had enough. I just want to make a movie. And by this time, I had acquired over 5000 friends on Facebook. Well, right at 5000 friends, because they cap it at that. But I had reached my 5000 limit of friends on Facebook, which was an account I created. Like I had a friends and family account when I first moved here, but my friends and family, I think they got tired of me only talking about film all the time, because that's all I talked about. So about five years ago, maybe it's been more now, I created a Facebook profile for myself just to interact and engage with other filmmakers. And that just grew organically out of my need and my desire to friend other filmmakers and other film companies, and just kind of keep up to date on what everybody else was doing. I was just fascinated. I simply wanted to know what everybody else was doing, and that, in a crazy way, just organically grew to the point where I now have almost 5000 friends. I have to keep it limited so I can add new people as I actually make friends, not just connections, but actual friends and people I know, so I have to kind of keep that limited. But several years ago, Facebook opened up subscribers, and people could follow you, even on top of friending you, and really quickly, I had amassed over 12,400 people as subscribers that are all in the film business. So Little did I know at the time how beneficial overall that was going to be for me in my career. Because as we get into discussions a little bit later on about crowdfunding and how I've financed all my films, it's almost exclusively come from that, that base of friends and followers.

Dave Bullis 12:41
So you know, that's absolutely amazing. And, you know, really quickly, I just wanted to ask you, you know, how do you decide who to delete on that 5000 friends? You know, because I'm coming through that cap too, when I'm just like, well, who gets cut here? How do you make that decision?

Dawn Fields 12:55
Yeah, well, you know, when I first started friending people, way back in the early day, I would friend anybody from anywhere. I actually had friended a whole bunch of you know, back then you could go in and do a search for terms like film, movie, film industry, those kind of though I was putting in terms like that, and all these suggestions were coming up, and I just friended and liked all of them, and a huge handful of them were foreign, and some of them were in foreign languages, even that I couldn't understand. But at the time, I was just like, reached out to everybody. Once I started getting close to my 5000 that's the first thing I went in and did, is I went in and started eliminating those companies and those people that were foreign where I couldn't even understand what they were saying. But now it's actually become quite a problem, because every film I work on I meet, you know, 10, 20, 30 new people, and I want to friend all of them. And as I go through, you know, various pre production and development and castings and all that kind of stuff, I'm always meeting new people. So I've had to go through many times and just make the tough decision of who to cut. And Facebook doesn't make it easy. Unfortunately, I wish that there was a really simple way to just go in and delete like people who haven't been active in six months to a year, because there's a lot of accounts that people create that they don't ever do anything with, but they don't really make it that easy. But I can tell you this if you if you have a well, there's a couple ways you can do it. If you go to hang on, let me just pull my microphone over here my other computer. If you go to your profile on Facebook and you click on the Friends tab. There's a couple of categories there. You can bring up your friends, if you'll notice, you can bring up recently added. You can bring up work friends, college friends, high school, current city. There's a couple of other followers following. There's several select. Comes there, it will group them by that. And Facebook's algorithms are such that the people you interact with most are going to come up first, and everybody else comes up after. So you could conceivably go into any one of those categories, or just look at your friends group as a whole, and just scroll all the way down to the end. And that's going to take you about 15 minutes, probably, if you have 5000 friends, but you can scroll all the way down, and you know you have to look at the people too and make sure, but for the most part, the lesser active people are going to be down at the bottom. And then you can click on each one of those decide if you want a friend or friend them or not or unfriend them.

Dave Bullis 15:35
You know that's interesting because you know it Twitter makes it a lot easier, because you can use different programs, like manage, filter or footer, I think it's called. And then, you know, you can actually just see who's been inactive for, you know, three months, four months, etc, and you can follow those people,

Dawn Fields 15:49
Don't we all wish Facebook would do that. I, you know, Facebook, I don't think wants you to unfollow people is probably their whole thing. But, um, yeah, I wish it were that easy. But, you know, I I think that you shouldn't be friending people you don't know anyway, but, but the truth is, it's kind of ridiculous that Facebook limits people to 5000 that's never made any sense to me how they want to control how many friends I have.

Dave Bullis 16:16
Yeah, what I've been doing is with close to my 5000 friends, a little bit I've started to realize, like, I think a lot of friends from high school probably, like, I don't talk to most of them anyway. I mean, most of them found me like, I, like you just said, I usually only friend request people that I know, or have met at a networking party or have met somewhere else, and then I'll firm request them or, you know, etc. But you know, a lot of and also, you know, I think some people too, like you just said, with all you talk about is film, like, oh, well, I talk about film too. My, my social media sites are very rarely anything political or religious or anything like that. So usually it's all film stuff, because that's all I want to talk about, you know, I don't want to talk about politics or religion online. You know what?

Dawn Fields 16:57
I mean, yeah, I know. And that's, there's, you know, you and I could be fast friends. That's one of the things that ties James and I together. James pipedon is a really good friend of mine. He actually started working for me in my production office a couple years ago as an intern, and slowly has now made his way up to helping me produce stuff. He's a producer now, and he's actually, in the next month or so, or in the in the month of March, I believe, is going to direct for the first time. So, and that's kind of what we have in common. And I don't, I don't think anybody else outside the business could stand being around the two of us for 10, you know, for any length of time, because it's all we talk about.

Dave Bullis 17:31
Yeah, I know what, to me, it's all my friends talk about, too, is, you know, we talk about a lot of film stuff. And, you know, screenwriting writers groups this and that, you know, it's just that way. You know what you're getting stuff into. So, so everyone, if you subscribe to dawn on Facebook, that's all you're going to hear is about film stuff, which, that's true, which I think is a great thing, by the way,

Dawn Fields 17:53
However, however, I will say, though, that the more I started engaging with my filmmaker friends on Facebook, the less I started interacting with my friends and family. I'm sad to say, I don't even use my friends and family account anymore. So what you'll find on my on my Facebook account now, is it's kind of a mix. I do talk about, you know, the foods I like to cook and the things I like to do for fun and I do and my opinions on things. So it has kind of become a hybrid. Because, you know, I do so many crowdfunding campaigns, and I do so many things like seminars now. I'm doing seminars now, and I have a script contest. I don't want people to think I'm just trying to, like, be a business and shove all my business stuff in their face. So, you know, I just, that's my own, my only account now, and that's where I share, really, my it's really become my personal and my professional profile, because I'm because I'm on it all the time. I just, I don't have time to go back to my friends and family more. It's very sad. They all miss me. But I keep you know, most of them are friends on my face. You know, my filmmaker Facebook as well. So I always tell them, if they want to know what's going on with me to, you know, click on that one and join that one. And most of them have, so,

Dave Bullis 19:05
Yeah, that's a good way to keep in contact too. Is, I mean, honestly, I tried to have multiple Facebooks and that that wasn't gonna that, that just I was, like, mine, this is a lot of work. So what I did was, if anyone was keeping contact with me, like, you know what I mean, like, I usually just post stuff, like, what I'm doing, this is what I'm up to. And there, that's it, you know. And we've caught up. So, yeah, I just, I usually post everything I'm doing so,

Dawn Fields 19:29
But yeah, and there is something to be said for you know, your friends and family you should be hanging out with and calling on the phone. So, you know? So, so I tell my friends and family, I'm like, Hey, if you miss me, pick up the phone and call me. You don't have to go to Facebook to go to Facebook to see what I'm doing,

Dave Bullis 19:49
You know. And just you know, speaking of, you know what you're doing, you know. Just to talk about, you know, all your projects, I really want to you know, because you have a lot of really interesting film projects here. You know, you started palm street films in what year?

Dawn Fields 20:08
I believe I started it in 2010 I had had an another production company before that, called Glass mountain entertainment, but we never really had any projects that we ran through there or had anything really happen with it. We were more in just development on things. So I don't even remember why I ended up closing that one and changing the name, but I did, I guess just rebranding, remarketing. Wasn't sure I loved the name, so rebranded and launched a new company. I believe in 2010 is when we started that.

Dave Bullis 20:38
So, you know, then could you talk about, you know, your first project with palm street films, which is bonds and lace

Dawn Fields 20:45
Actually, Dave, I will. I'm going to actually go more old school than that. The actual, there were actually three documentaries that I had in development and in production. Actually there. Some of them are as much as 80% shot that. That were the first things that I did through the company, but one, we ran out of money for the documentaries, which is one thing, but then I just started realizing that documentaries, it's a whole different style of filmmaking. It's a whole different set of rules. It's all it's completely different. It's really, truly apples and oranges from narrative filmmaking. And as much as I had these personal stories that I really wanted to tell, I just kept being gravitated back towards narrative. And so I still want to finish those documentaries someday. I haven't shelved them, but it's taking some time to figure out how to get those on autopilot. I would love to hire a documentary person into my company once we actually have some funds to do that with and high and have them help me finish those out. But the actual first project that we ran through palm street films was zombie elves.

Dave Bullis 21:52
Oh, that's right,

Dawn Fields 21:53
Yeah, it again. It came at a time where I'm like, I just want to shoot something. I'm tired of all this talk. I want to make a movie. And I started, you know, started thinking about, what could I do that I would enjoy, that would also be profitable, because for the last few years, I've also really tried to focus on, how do I make a living at this business? How do I not only pay my bills, but hopefully someday make enough money to have a savings account set aside, to have a retirement plan, to have a little nest egg, those, some some financial security, those kinds of things. So zombie else was really my attempt at creating a project that I thought would really succeed financially. And zombies were really hot at the time, and you just can't go wrong with the marketing power of Christmas. And so I thought, You know what would happen if you created a situation where there was a zombie outbreak on the North Pole and everybody just went crazy over the idea, and they laughed, and they thought it was hysterical. And we just had so much fun developing that project. And we did actually get a script written. The script kind of went in a direction that was not right. We sent it out for some feedback, and people just really didn't enjoy it. I don't think, I think we went too much zombie and not enough Christmas. And people really wanted that. There needed to be some Christmas spirit in there. There needed to be a lesson learned. There needed to be some some magic of Christmas. We kind of didn't put any of that stuff in there, and it turned out that it wasn't very satisfying for audiences. But zombie elves was actually my first crowdfunding campaign, and I made a ton of mistakes on that campaign. That's, that's part of where I start my seminars now is talking about zombie elves, and that's, that's really the campaign that I learned all my lessons on.

Dave Bullis 23:38
You know, I remember zombie elves. I actually donated and I still have that T shirt.

Dawn Fields 23:43
Well, here's the thing that's so funny. It's like, we we were so excited about the marketing power of this film that long before we even thought about crowdfunding, we wanted to set up merchandise, because everybody was telling me that horror films love their merch, right? And so we were like, Okay, great. Well, let's do these T shirts, and let's do this calendar, and let's do bumper stickers, and let's do all this merchandise that the horror films are and we, and I started, I created a Facebook account just to start interacting and engaging with horror fans. And I got up to 5000 friends instantly on that. There's a, just a there's a huge following database of horror fans on Facebook and Twitter. I mean, it's just a huge culture of horror fans out there. So we had started creating all that merchandise before we even decided to do crowdfunding. So that's part of the reason we were like, look, we have all this merchandise. We're creating crowdfunding makes sense, because we can offer all those things as perks. And some of the stuff wasn't finished yet. We hadn't finished the calendar yet. We were working on it. Some of the one we had done one, 1t shirt, but wanted to do more. So it just kind of made sense. So we had budgeted the film at $600,000 and we decided that if we could raise, like, $40,000 in development money that would, you know, get me through the six months or so that I needed to pay a writer get a script written, you know, start. Are tackling the very difficult task of casting, because there's the question of a movie like this, do you use little people? Do you use small actors? Do you use children? Do you CGI? It's like, how do you make How do you make the story happen? And at the time, I was a producer, not a director, so I didn't really have a terribly clear vision for it, yet. I knew marketing wise, what I wanted it to be. And from a producer standpoint, I knew what it needed to accomplish, but I didn't really have those director skills yet, so I still wasn't sure really what the film was going to be. So we did. We made the number one mistake that people make in crowdfunding, which is they feel like, if they put it out there, they will come and that's really not true, unless you take years and years to try to make that happen. But the reality of it is, for a campaign to raise that much money, we were looking for $40,000 for that much money, you have to have an existing fan base. You have to because 30 days, or 45 days, or how many ever long days, you can run an Indiegogo campaign or a crowdfunding campaign, you don't have time to all of a sudden whip up 10,000 fans or a million fans. You have to do all that in advance. You have to have an existing fan base to already go out and say to those people, Hey, here's what I'm doing. You've loved my work before. You love me now. Fund this project. I was under the bad assumption that if we put it out there, the horror fans would just glom on and all of a sudden we'd get all this money. And that absolutely didn't happen through my friends and family and Facebook followers and fans. I did manage to raise about $4,000 and since we already had all the merchandise anyway, I had two choices. I'm like, when we didn't hit our goal or come anywhere close to it, I'm like, Well, I can refund everybody's money and be back to absolutely zero, or I can use that money to go ahead and fulfill the perks anyway, and at least give everybody their perks. Because we do still plan on making that film. It's a very difficult film, and it's taking a long time to figure out how to make that film be what it needs to be, but it is definitely not shelved. It's very much alive and well, and we do plan on making that movie. And now that I'm directing, I'm actually very, very excited about the opportunity to direct it. So that's a whole nother development that's happened just in the last two years that wasn't in place there. But I'm so glad you got your shirt and your calendar, and I hope you enjoy it. Hang on to it, because it because it may be worth something someday.

Dave Bullis 27:24
Oh, yeah, I definitely keep hold on to that. I actually took a picture of that and shared it on some social media sites, and people were like, hey, what movies this? Where can I get this at? And no, and it was, you know, I was like, hey, check out this campaign. That's where I got it from.

Dawn Fields 27:38
It's a great idea. It's, it's going to be, you know, I always tell people, the more I talk to people in Hollywood, the more I find out it's the kind of movie that everybody wants to see but nobody wants to make, because it's difficult. You know, you have to build that world. You have to create a set. You have to build the North Pole. You have to envision it. Because, you know, you can have it be a different North Pole than we've seen before, which is my vision for it. You know, like I said, there's a lot of options in casting. None of them are cheap. By the way, all three of those options that I listed, little people, children, CGI, none of those are cheap. And, you know, everybody wants to make zombies for $200,000 and put it out on the market, and then just see if it becomes this cult classic. You can't make that film for $200,000 and so it's been a bit of a struggle that but the biggest challenge for me is, what is the film? Is it kind of a dark family film, like gremlins? Is it funny and over the top, like a Shaun of the Dead? Is it violent and gruesome, but kind of campy, like a, you know, leprechaun wasn't that gruesome. But is it kind of a leprechaun kind of thing where you have kind of the comedic element of these small individuals, you know, because that's kind of funny in itself, really, you know, or do you just take it really seriously and treat it like just this all out zombie survival story, which is what we did in the first draft, and that didn't really resonate with people. So the biggest challenge for me with this film is really just trying to figure out almost what genre to put it in. But more specifically, what do you want it to be to the audience? A comedy, a slasher film? You know? What is it that's that's where I'm hung up right now, and I'm getting really close to making that decision, but the choice I'm about to make is not cheap, and so that is its own problem.

Dave Bullis 29:38
If you ever want someone to bounce ideas off of dawn. Please feel free to always contact me.

Dawn Fields 29:43
Oh, sure, absolutely, I would love that. Oh, you know, I'm finishing up my last two short films now that are in post, and then the then we are moving into, what are we going to do for our first feature? I don't know if zombies is going to be the first feature, because it is difficult and expensive and complicated, but it will definitely be the second. I might do a. Our character piece first. But it's, it's definitely on the list, and it's definitely going to happen, excellent.

Dave Bullis 30:18
And yeah, so please keep me informed. What's going on, you know, I, you know, I again, I think it's a great idea. And honestly, I think, you know, the marketing, and that is so many different creative ways to make to market that film.

Dawn Fields 30:30
It's almost a no brainer, really. I mean, it almost is. And the reason I love the idea of it right from the beginning is because we, initially, we were going to do it for that $200,000 level, and just, you know, we because we were thinking, you know, even if this sucks, even if this is, like, the worst film, worst film ever made, it's still going to be a cult classic. You know, there's, you almost can't fail with it. And there was a movie called thanks, killing Yes, I've seen that, you know, kind of like that. I mean, they just went in so tongue in cheek, so campy, low production value, but they those guys were just having fun and, you know, kind of poking fun at the genres and all that kind of stuff. And it blew up, and it did really well, and they, they ended up doing a second movie, so, but, but I have now that my tastes have evolved, and I, I don't think I was ever really comfortable going that route with that film, because that's not my style as a producer or director. My style is high production value, high quality that was never really resonating with me to make the film that way.

Dave Bullis 31:26
Yeah, I did. You did mention shot on the dead? And I think that was that would is probably the best way to go, because I, when I heard the concept of the movie, I mean, even something similar, shot of the dead would be hilarious.

Dawn Fields 31:39
Well, it would. But honestly that, you know, the difficult part is, is, I've had the honor of working with several little people throughout this process. We did some castings. We we actually, in our Indiegogo video, needed someone. We did some zombie walks, where we had, you know, some people dressed up as zombie elves, and that was really funny. And people loved that, and they took a lot of pictures. But I have a huge amount of respect for them, and I just want to be very careful in this film that we're not poking fun at them. You know, it's like I want the care if we do go with little people as as the elves. I want to treat them with the utmost respect, and I want them to be serious characters and have serious storylines and character arcs and emotional conflicts and interactions with each other. And so it's, you know? It's like, I teeter back and forth on how funny do I really want it to be? There's some, you know what I'm saying. It's like, it's a challenge. It's a real challenge.

Dave Bullis 32:40
Yeah, yeah, I definitely know what you mean. And you know, you're always, you know, wanting to know that you don't actually make fun of them, but you know, I, honestly, I think you would, you would hit the perfect mix of, you know, humor and horror, and you know, without going over the top. But that again, you know, again, if you ever want, you know, bounce ideas off someone, please let me know

Dawn Fields 33:00
Absolutely, and I appreciate that. And as I've gotten more comfortable in my director's hat, I've I've realized that almost the thing that almost all my films have in common is an emotional intimacy. And I think, well, except for one comedy that I did that really was just kind of a straight up comedy, but all the other films really, have really a very intense, emotional thread to them. So I think a lot of people would question if I'm the right person to do zombie LS, and I would say I absolutely am, because I because I would bring that to the table.

Dave Bullis 33:35
Yeah, I know what you mean by you. Sometimes the comedies can just be comedies, because I've done that too. Like, I made a short film one time, and it was literally, I'm sorry, a feature film. And it was literally just, you know, going over the top every each and every time. And it was what I use as a student film. And literally, that's what I used to, you know, to cut my own teeth on. And it was just, you know, if you weren't in on the joke. Let's say Dawn people just like, either thought this was so ridiculous, some people actually got it, or, like, some people were like, I don't get this at all, Dave. And I'm like, you know, I completely understand. You know?

Dawn Fields 34:09
Well, I learned early on, when I was in development at that company I was telling you about I would get I would come across some comedy scripts that I just thought were gold, that I loved, and I would send them out to some agents who specialized in comedy, and they just wouldn't get it. They wouldn't think it was funny. So I learned really early on that with what they say is true, comedy is subjective.

Dave Bullis 34:27
Oh, absolutely. You know, I was actually just talking to Steve Kaplan today. Steve Kaplan, of you know, he does his comedy, excuse me, Kaplan comedy.com and he's all about, you know, these seminars, and he also has his own book. His book is probably the best book on Comedy I've ever read, and it opened my eyes to what people find funny. How come I find something funny, but you don't? It's kind of like that dress. Everyone saw a line. Some people saw golden, yeah. What color did you see? I saw, uh, golden. White. I.

Dawn Fields 35:00
Yeah, me too. Yeah, me too. That's kind of crazy,

Dave Bullis 35:05
But, but yeah, so not to segue too far, but talk about dresses, yeah. So what dresses and everything? Yeah, I was actually gonna go into color theory too, and that's why I was like, let me stop myself, because so you know. But yeah, if you ever get a chance to I highly recommend his book. And his name is again, Steve Kaplan, and he's actually been on the podcast, and he is absolutely phenomenal at this stuff. Oh, great. So okay, so after zombie elves, after you knew, you know, at that, you know, point in time you didn't have the, you know, the right amount of resources to make that, you know, what project did you move on to after that?

Dawn Fields 35:41
Well, it was interesting because I had built enough of a following on Facebook at this point where I'm like, You know what? I know a bunch of writers. Let me just see if I can find a 10 page script or less, something that's easy to shoot, that we can just do over a weekend for very little money. And let's just do that. So I put out a call on my Facebook for scripts, and I got over 300 responses. Wow. And yeah, it was incredible. And so we narrowed that down to the top 15, and we announced that on Facebook, and then we got it to the top 10 and announced that, and the top five, and then the top three, and everybody was so excited every time, you know, we made the announcement of who had made the cut, and the final three scripts, I kind of liked all of them. So I sent them out to about a dozen friends of mine and colleagues who I trusted. And hands down, the winning script was a script called fragment. And this was a short script written by a UK writer named Carly Street. And I can't really say what the script is about, because there's a there's a twist in it to this day that I still don't like to give away, but it was this very powerful script. You think it's one thing. You think it's like this horror film and this kind of torture porn kind of movie, and then in the end, you kind of realize it's something completely different. And um, but Carl Carly's script took place over like five different locations, one of them being a grocery store, one of them being a hospital, and many parts of the hospital not just a room, but a room and a hallway and a bathroom. So we'd have to have, like, a bit like a real hospital, not just a one room set. And anybody in LA knows that those are not expensive and not easy to get. So I'm like, Well, how am I going to do this? So I put my producer hat on, and I said, Carly, what do you think about, you know, she had won $150 cash for the script and that we were gonna make it. So it was pretty good deal for her. So we own the script at that point. And I said, Carly, what do you think about, do you mind if I go in and just kind of make it all happen? I'd asked her to do it initially. I said, you know, do you know, do you think you could go in and make this all happen in one location? And she said, yeah, yeah, I'll do that. So she went in, and she did a great job, but it's still, there were still some other locations in there. It still wasn't exactly what I was hoping for. So I said to her, I'm like, you know, do you mind if I go in and take a stab at it? Because I think I know what I want. And she said, she said, yeah, yeah, absolutely no problem, please. And I think this is the first time I started thinking like a director, and I didn't even know it yet, because I was still just producing at the time, but I went in and something I chance I channeled something. I don't know what came over me, but I just really started resonating with the story. And I went in and I made the whole thing happen inside the house. And once I started sending that script out to people for feedback, it was just overwhelming. People were like, oh my god, oh my god. And I'm like, You know what, guys, we're onto something here. This isn't this little no budget, two day weekend script with a bunch of volunteers. This is like a really powerful film now, and it kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger, maybe too big, honestly, in hindsight, but it just took on this massive life of its own. And then we started thinking, Well, what actors can we get in this? We started sending the script out to some agents, and some big agents, actually, and the response was unbelievable. There was all these actors that were dying to do it for free, and they wanted to be a part of it. And there was even an agent at the Abrams agency that told me it was the most powerful short script she'd ever read. And so we just started going, oh my god, we're really onto something here. And we changed the title of the script to shattered love. So this is the story of how shattered love got started. So we we realized pretty quickly that we needed some money to keep this going, to make this happen. So I took everything I had learned, because the other thing I learned from zombie elves is I did not factor in the ship, the shipping and handling and postage for all those perks. I sent out each one of those envelopes that had a calendar and a T shirt in it cost $3.50 to ship, and that was in addition to the envelopes, the labels, the time, the cost of putting it all together, the cost of manufacturing the shirts, getting the calendars printed. I mean, it took the whole $4,000 that I raised just to get all those perks of build. So when I did the next campaign, that was my the lesson I learned with that is no more physical perks. From now on, I'm only going to give like digital perks and things that don't have to be manufactured or shipped. That was a really, that was the second big lesson. The first is, have a fan base first. And the second is limit the stuff you're actually manufacturing and shipping out, because the cost of that will be 30% of what you're trying to raise. So what I did is, I'm like, Well, what do we have? Asset wise? I'm like, we have a really powerful script. So I created an Indiegogo campaign for two weeks, and I didn't have a director, I didn't have any attack actors attached yet. All I did was scan those script pages and post them as images on the Indiegogo wall. And I because I didn't want people to have to click on a link, I wanted to just be able to read the script as soon as they landed on the campaign page. And in two weeks, I had raised over $5,000 just based on the strength of the script. And the script, by the way, was only seven pages. So that was our first funding campaign. Then we got some actors attached. We got a director attached. We ran a second two week campaign and raised another $5,000 and then, but from that, from that point on, everything started growing. We wanted the best DP, we wanted the best location. We wanted insurance. We wanted to be able to pay people. We wanted all this kind of stuff. Next thing we know, we have a $60,000 budget. And I think in hindsight, honestly, it just got too big for its own britches. It just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And honestly, I think the film itself probably would have been better off in the long run if we had just done it really small and simple with unknown actors right from the start, it certainly would have saved us from the calamity that that happened shortly afterwards. Um, but anyway, so we had, we had, we had cast some name actors that we ended up not really being, not not really resonating with through the course of the rehearsal process and some other processes that we went down, we decided that we kind of weren't happy with the direction that the film was going in. I wasn't happy with the director I gone. I had gone through three directors at this point, and all of them had disappointed me. Had tried to change the script. The one thing we knew was solid was that damn script, and they kept trying to change it, and that was a huge sticking point with me. So we just kind of stopped the whole process. Let all the directors go, let all the actors go. I'm like, This isn't working. Well, we kept one of the actors. We kept the female lead actor, because she was we always really liked her a lot. So we shut everything down. We regrouped, and my team kept telling me they're like, Don you're not happy with these directors for a reason. We think you need to direct it. And I'm like, No, I gave up directing a long time ago. I didn't do so well my first time out, I realized I was a better producer than I am a director. It's like, I don't know if I want to go down that road again, but they're like, no, no. You have a vision for this. You have to do it. So I stepped up as director. We hired some unknown actors, cast some unknown actors. We raised about by this time, including the money we had already raised, plus the new batch of money to shoot on. We had raised about $50,000 so we rented a stage, we got our actors involved, we set everything up. I was so excited. I told everybody, I'm like guys, I'm an inexperienced director. I need a lot of support around me. I'm telling you right now I don't really know what I'm doing. You guys have to help me through this process. Well, unfortunately, I made some unfortunate decisions with the people that I hired, and the film shut down a day and a half after shooting. It was a three day shoot. It shut down at lunch on day two. The biggest problem being the art department really screwed up, and they could never get they started late day one, they never got caught up, and literally, by day two, we had no rooms that were dressed and ready to shoot in, and I didn't have enough experience as a director to deal with that and to figure out how to make that work. So it was really an unfortunate situation. I found out afterwards that the art department had been on two different shows at the same time, and the six days of prep that we had agreed to got done in the 24 hours prior to my shoot. They tried to cram six days of prep into literally 24 hours around the clock before our seven o'clock AM call time. And you can imagine the art department band didn't even show up to the set. So it was just, I don't know, it's like a comedy of errors. It was like, Oh my God. I'm like, How are all these tragic, horrible things happening to this beautiful script? I was like, How is this possible? And. And about 16,000 of that money had been crowdfunded. It was people who donated, and so I was heartbroken. I didn't know what to do because and 10s of 1000s of that was money that I borrowed, that I put in, that I had to pay back personally. So it was heartbreaking. It was absolutely the most devastating thing that's ever happened to me, and I blamed everybody else at first, because I was angry and I was upset at the financial loss and the fact that my film had gone through that. And I went to a deep, dark place for about three months, I crawled, I curled up into a ball, and I went to a really dark place, and I finally started accepting my responsibility as the director. Because the thing is, the thing about directing that people don't understand. It's one, it's a very vulnerable position. And two, you're responsible for everything that goes up on the screen, whether it was your fault or not. Other people can make mistakes and not do their jobs, but it's still your fault. Now the good news is, is that if it does go well, you also get most of the glory. So it's kind of good news, bad news. But on that particular film, I think people particularly pointed the finger at me, and that was really tough. And I thought about leaving the business. I had convinced myself that I wasn't right for this industry, and I was about to pick up everything I owned and moved to LA and move out of LA and just go do something else for a living. And that lasted about 36 hours. And then something clicked in me, something kicked out. And I don't know, the warrior in me stood up. I picked myself up, I dust myself off, and I've said, and I said, You know what? I'm not going down that way. This is what I want to do. It's what I've always wanted to do. There's nothing else I want to do, and I've got to figure out how to make this work. And so I went on this tear. I went on this mission to direct as many films as I could possibly get my hands on, so that I would have enough experience to be able to handle something like that better in the future, because mistakes always happen. Things always go wrong on a film set, and I just, clearly, I just wasn't, simply wasn't ready to handle it. I wasn't prepared, didn't have the experience so and I felt, you know, I felt an obligation to all the donors who had donated to that film. I mean, I could have just shut it down and not moved on and said, Okay, guys, you know, it's too bad this mistake happened. We had some people that screwed up. I screwed up. Are bad my mistake. You know that we're going to accept that loss and move on. But that's not who I am, and that's not what I'm made of. I'm like, I'm going to get this movie made if it kills me, literally, I said that, and I still to this day, mean it. I meant it when I said that.

Dave Bullis 47:48
So when you actually got with the art department, you actually found that out, did they actually admit it right away?

Dawn Fields 47:53
Oh yeah, oh okay, oh yeah, oh yeah. I had no idea, actually. And I kind of wish he hadn't told me, because when he told me, I went ballistic. I was, Oh, my God. I've never been so angry and so upset in my life. This one he, you know, he admitted it,

Dave Bullis 48:11
Wow. I mean, that is, you know, you know, one of the pretty bad story. Because, you know, some of the people have been on to it. They've had, you know, share their their war stories as well. And you know, it is all about, you know, putting together that team. And sometimes you do hire people who just, they project themselves as one way, and then you find out they're, they're either lying, or they just, you know, or just maybe a sociopath.

Dawn Fields 48:42
Well, here's what I've come to realize with a little bit of hindsight, this is a tough business, and the economy is really bad, and they really all they're guilty of. And I hate to sound like I'm condoning it or even forgiving it. I guess I have forgiven it at this point, but in this industry, it's called double dipping. And what he had done was the show he was working on prior to that ran long. And I think he truly, honestly, I think he was coming from a good place. I think he had to. He wanted to be loyal to them and finish out that job, but he also wanted to be loyal to me and not quit or leave me hanging. But, and I honestly think he thought he could do it in 24 hours. But to some extent, that was disrespectful to me and my project, to think that you could cram six days of prep. You know, we decided and agreed on six days of prep for a reason. It was a big show. It was a huge art department show. We were working on a set, and everything had to be built and set dressed from scratch. It was a huge job, and he had four people on his team to make that happen on the day, but he it just, I don't know it's I'm trying to try to understand the situation. In hindsight, he really should have just told me his job got extended, then I should hire somebody else. In hindsight, that's what it should have happened. But, you know, he was trying to satisfy me, trying to satisfy the other, the other production he was working on, and unfortunately for him, it just it didn't work out. Now, with was he the only reason the show was troubled? Absolutely not. There were other problems. There were other issues the but the show didn't shut down because of that. Look, I wasn't doing a very good job as director because I was rattled by the whole art department thing. We had to, we had a very specific shooting schedule that we had to do so the art department could keep up, because it was very ambitious. And when all when art department arrived on the set that morning with with no van, it screwed up the whole schedule, and that threw me off my game, and I was just flustered and rattled the whole time. So would the film have probably turned out poorly and had to have been re shot anyway. Probably, I can honestly say it probably would have, but at least we would have finished it, and maybe something would have been salvageable. But the way it went down, it it shut down because there was, there were no rooms available to shoot.

Dave Bullis 51:17
So, so you know, when you went on to your next project, did you ever use even any of the same crew, or was it a completely new cast and crew?

Dawn Fields 51:26
Um, well, no, it was a completely different I mean, I have my core people I hate, you know, James and Debbie Rankin, they, they've stayed with me as part of my, my core team, but no, not and there's a couple of crew people that I enjoyed working with. It wasn't their fault that I have worked with since, but no, for the most part. 209, was our next film after that, and that was a whole different cast and crew.

Dave Bullis 51:52
You touched on something too with the experienced director. You know, I actually think it's good that you said that, because I think it's, you know, there was somebody once told me, when I first started that, you know, the director is the only person on set who doesn't need to have any experience. And they said, No, the cinematographers got to know how to do all his, his or her work, the actors, everybody else. But really, the director doesn't have to have a certain X amount of experience. And, you know, I think that's good in a way, because when you actually mentioned that, like, I need support, I think it really, at least you upfront and honest with the crew, and that way, at least you're on the same page there. So, you know, they're not too many expectations.

Dawn Fields 52:36
Well, it's, it's not so much that I was afraid of expectations. It's just, I literally needed the help. It's like, you know, it's like, honestly, it's like, I, you know, I've never, I haven't done this in 20 years. And, you know, I know the importance of a good dp and I know the importance of a good production designer. Those are the two people that you lean on the most. And unfortunately, in this situation, you know, those things didn't work out so well. You know, it's unfortunate, and I went to a really bad place, and I almost didn't recover from it, quite honestly, but it's interesting how something deep inside once i It's funny once I made my peace with it. And, you know, I debated and debated, once I made my peace with it and decided I was going to leave LA and where am I? What city am I going to move to, and what job am I going to do now, once I made my peace with it and kind of decided that's what I was going to do, that's when that little thing, that little warrior deep inside me, finally was allowed to come back up and say, Oh no, you're not going down like that. But it wasn't till I made my peace with it that my true desires and my true nature kicked in. And I wonder if some people don't wait long enough, or if that doesn't happen for them soon enough, and then they end up giving up on something and moving on to something that they're not happy with. It makes me wonder, but it took me about 36 hours before that little warrior stood up and said, That's not going to be your that's not gonna be your history. That's not gonna be your your bio,

Dave Bullis 54:00
Yeah, you made a good point there. I was just in a seminar yesterday with Corey Mandel. He was just on the podcast too, and he actually mentioned about this where, if you have, like, a minds theater, and he said, You know, there's all sorts of people in the audience. And he said the people in the front row are the ones who are really controlling the show. And he said, you know, if you have too much negativity, and he goes through this whole thing, and he's eating this book, but he says, go too much negativity. And those people always in the front row. That's where you start getting all these doubts, and that's where you start getting all these you know, you can't do this, you can't do that, and and basically, you know, and part of it is, you know, you know, not only just our self doubts and self sabotage, but it's just, you know, almost like our body's natural way to react sometimes is almost like a fear a fear response, yeah, so, you know. And he says, you know, these things all tie in together, and which is why, you know, sometimes we're writing, you're saying, Oh, this sucks. And we just some. Some people never come back. I mean, I've known screenwriters who they started writing a script, and they started before me. And I, you know, run into them nowadays, and it's just they I'm not in it anymore. I'm, you know, doing whatever now, as you know, I always find that kind of interesting,

Dawn Fields 55:17
Yeah, you know. And I, like I said, it makes me question, Do people wait long enough sometimes for that warrior to kick in or they just give up? I don't know. Maybe some people don't have it, I don't know.

Dave Bullis 55:28
So, you know, so after, you know, shattered love and you finally were to pull yourself together. You know, what project did you work on after that?

Dawn Fields 55:37
Well, I was determined at that point to prove that the film didn't shut down because of me, would it have been poorly directed, probably because I didn't know what I was doing and I didn't have the right support around me, but I really wanted to prove that I have 20 years of experience in this business. I've worked on big budget movie sets. I know my shit. I was trained by some of the best ad's in this country. I know how movies work, and I know how a film set works, and I know how to get a movie made. So I just, I just became hell bent on proving to people that that I was capable, and I was, I was able to do this. So I was inspired by a workshop that I took one day to write a script called 209 and 209 was a very simple story, two guys in a hotel room, and my theory was, what's the worst thing that could happen between two dudes in a hotel room who have come together for some very dramatic reason? And I came up with this story about a childhood friend who had, 10 years prior, accidentally murdered his best friend's little sister, and he's come back 10 years later to confess. And so we cast our actors, we raised about $7,900 on Indiegogo for that one, and that one reached. That one exceeded its goal. We made our goal on that one, and we had a set built, and we were all ready to go, and we shot it. And you know, there were some issues still. I was still trying to figure out how to work properly with the DP, how to communicate, how to get my vision across, how to command and control a crew. And by the way, I do not agree with the statement that a director has to be the least experienced person on the set. That has not been my experience whatsoever. Mine has been the opposite. My experience has been the director absolutely has to know every single thing that needs to happen, and they need to know how to tell the crew to do it, and how to express their vision and how to communicate that vision so that everyone can execute it. That's been my experience, and I still hadn't really gotten very good at that. So there were some struggles on 209 it didn't really turn out the way I wanted. The story, I think, was still smaller and more contained than I had hoped, and it just, it just wasn't the P it wasn't the redemption piece that I wanted it to be. And I was very much seeking redemption at this point. I was hell bent on redemption. At this point, it meant everything to me. I was determined to build up a good director's reel to prove myself. So James and I had many, many conversations about, do we? Do we attempt it again? What do we do? Do we just let it go and move on? And at the end of the day, we both agreed that the kernel of the 209, story was good enough where if we embellished it more and really took that little seed of an idea and really fleshed it out, it could be like this, really moving, impactful film. And so we made the decision, even as tough as it was to rewrite, to not rewrite, but to embellish the script, make it longer, build more character arc, more character background, more character history. Really tell that whole complete story, not just a moment in time, but build this whole story and raise the money again and shoot it properly. So that's what we did. And 209, became found, and I'm extremely proud of found. We just submitted it a couple months ago to the 2015 Idlewild International Festival of cinema. It was the first and only festival that we had submitted to at the time. It was my first time in competition as a director, and I'm thrilled to say that we won Best Short Film, best a Best Director Award, and we were nominated for Best Cinematography and best score. Oh, wow, congratulations. Thank you, and it changed everything I mean, that redemption that I was looking for and that success that I was hoping would launch me and kind of make me relevant and make people take notice that film did that, and that was exactly what I wanted it to do. I wanted a I wanted a film to do that, and if it wasn't going to be that film, I'd have to just put all my efforts into the next film and make that film the film that did that. But fortunately for us, the very next film that we launched after shattered love shutdown ended up, even though we went through a lot of trials and tribulations and quite a bit of expense with it, ended up being a huge. Huge, phenomenal success, and Yeah, it's just it's blown me away. It's exceeded all my expectations, and it's finally giving me a little bit of sense of confidence that I can do this, even though I know I still have so much to learn.

Dave Bullis 1:00:27
So, when did you actually make fragile storm with Lance Hendrickson?

Dawn Fields 1:00:33
Okay, so, um, what had happened was, when so, so we had done because, because here's there was a time where I'm like, oh my god, this is like crazy. You know, shattered love didn't work out. And then 209 wasn't the film I wanted it to be. It's like, Oh my God. It's like, do I really even need to be doing this kind of work? But what I realize now is I'm a fighter, and I'm a survivor, and I will do whatever it takes to make my films the absolute best movies that they can be. It's not about me. Maybe it's a little ego driven. I think everything this business is, but I really I'm hell bent with every project I work on to make it the best film it could possibly be. And we never intended on not shooting shattered love. Re shooting shattered love. We I just needed to put some time and distance between me and that project. You know, I needed to clear out all the negativity. I needed to build up my skills. So basically, what I did is I spent the next year and a half after shattered love shut down. I spent the next year and a half directing as many films as I could to get ready to reshoot shattered love. It was all about. Everything I did, every step of the way, was 100% designed to put me in a position where by the time we were ready to reshoot that film, I was ready, and I was going to make it a good film. And I was fortunate enough during the whole time that we were doing 209 and found during that whole time several other opportunities had come up. There were some volunteer groups, like the all women cine ladies group. I got the chance to direct a film for them, and that was bonds and lace that mentioned before. That was done for no money, all volunteer group. That was a script I wrote and directed, co wrote with Lucy de lot, that film. You know, it was okay. It turned out okay. We did it all in a day. It was a hugely ambitious, ambitious project, all in one day with with no money. But I'm still very, very proud of it. And then there's another group of all independent filmmakers that I actually organized and created, called the Los Angeles Film collective. And I did one short through that group called better with friends. That was another one that was done for no money, all volunteer. So I got the opportunity along the way to do some other projects. And then there was a specific lull where nothing was going on, where James and I are like, Oh, we just want, I just want to direct again. I want to shoot something. And so we wrote and created touch, and touch was literally conceived and shot in like three weeks time. And while I still felt like I made some mistakes on that one, I wasn't quite where I wanted to be directorially, the film still turned out extremely well. I'm very proud of it. It got huge response online. That film actually had its world premiere at dances with films this past year, and that was a huge success. So very proud of that one. So, you know, I was just, my problem is I love directing. So now that I've started doing it, and now that I've had got a little bit of confidence in myself, I just love directing, and I want to move on to the next one. Before I even finished the first one, it's like, what's next? What's next? I want to direct something else. Get me on set. Get me on set. So that's caused a little bit of a problem, actually, in that we shot way too many films back to back, and then they got bottle necked in post, and we're actually still dealing with that a little bit now, but getting found out the door was a huge accomplishment, and that was, I guess, a huge catalyst to moving forward with everything else. But to answer your question, there were all these other projects, including a short film that I really wanted to do, but I felt like shattered love was still still had to get done, and it was still there. And I realized that part of the problem was there were some casting decisions that we made when we used those unknown actors that when I looked at the dailies of the stuff that we did shoot before we shut down, I just it just wasn't working for me. There was some physical resemblances that were supposed to happen for one of the characters that wasn't really quite there. We were trying to work around it with some makeup and effects and stuff like that, but contact lenses, things like that, trying to pull some tricks, but it just, it just wasn't really working for me, and I was having a hard time imagining raising another $50,000 for this project, relaunching this whole thing after the massive loss that we took on the first one for actors, I wasn't absolutely thrilled about and I realized that that was holding me back, and it was paralyzing me, and it was keeping me from moving forward with the project. So again, James and I have much debate. We had many, many discussions about. I had become friends with these people. I was loyal to them. I love them to death. But it just came down to I had to do what I had to do that was best for the film. So I made the calls. I pick up the phone, and I told the actors much to their heartbreak. Unfortunately, this was so tough to make this call that we were going to recast them. And I at this point, I'm feeling like such a loser. I'm like, Oh my God, I've had to recast all these actors. One of the films shut down. I fired three directors. Like, oh my god, this is such a mess, but it's amazing, because once I hung up the phone from those phone calls, that little warrior jumped back up again. And I made those calls the end of August, and by the end of September we were shooting, that's how fast it happened. Because once I was unburdened from the things that were really kind of holding me back, I was like a locomotive, and everything just went on hyper speed. And so while I initially wanted to use unknown actors for this film, I started thinking at this point. It's like, you know, what, we've invested so much money in this film at this point. It's like, we need an actor. We need a name at this point to just really, you know, give the film some credibility, to kind of raise the bar. It's like, you know, it just felt like the right thing to do. And as we were researching actors in that age range, Lance Hendrickson came across our radar, and as soon as I looked him up, I mean, I knew who he was, of course, but I hadn't like, as soon as I looked him up, like what he looks like. Now, I was like, That's it. That's the character. That's Norman. And I'm like, There's, and we were still talking about some other names, but I'm like, no, nobody else makes sense. Nobody on this planet makes sense but Lance Henriksen. He's our guy. He's the one, and he's and I literally told my people, if we don't get Lance, we're not doing the film. And so we picked up the phone and we called his manager, and she loved the script, and it was a tough negotiation, because, you know, these guys don't work for free, and they very rarely do short films. So it was a tough negotiation, and we ended up not being able to negotiate. I tried and tried and tried, but, you know, basically at the bottom, at the end of the day, you have to give them what they asked for. And we did. And you know, the other thing that we had to do as a pay or play, which is very typical, and that was very stressful on me, but in a way, that's what helped it happen so fast, is because once we have to lock into a shoot date, you know, paying his fee and being locked into a shoot date, that'll motivate you. I'm telling you right now, if you're having trouble getting the film made, just lock yourself into a pay or play date with the big actor, and you'll get your film made. And that's what happened. So you know, 30 days later, we were on set and we were shooting, and Lance Henriksen is so amazing. It was my first time working with the name actor, and he was, he's so passionate, he's so dedicated, he's so talented, and also just a beautiful spirit and a beautiful person. And everybody on set just fell in love with him. And the girls were all like, these, you know, crushes on him. And they were like, you know, it was just like, it was, it was wonderful. And the chemistry between him and our actors with other other actors was was amazing. And unfortunately, because of the rate we had to pay, we could only have him for two days, and the film was never scheduled for less than three and we we even wanted four at one point to shoot it, so I unfortunately had to go back and shave back the script a little bit, make it a little bit more lean, and so that we could, so that the scenes we did shoot in two days weren't really compromised. But I have to, I'll be the first to admit, you know, we were, we were pushing it to shoot this film in two days. So, you know, there, I think there's a few things that got sacrificed along the way, story wise. But I think to have Lance Hendrickson in our film, and to still have the film tell the story, the amazing story that we were trying to tell, it was completely worth it. And so that film got shot at the end of September, and we're currently in post production,

Dave Bullis 1:09:16
Awesome. And you know, excuse me, you know, it's great that you were able to get Lance Hendrickson. I've heard nothing but amazing things about him from people who've worked with him.

Dawn Fields 1:09:24
He's unbelievable. He really is an amazing person. And we were totally blessed that he agreed to do our script. He we really feel very fortunate.

Dave Bullis 1:09:35
So, you know, just, you know, and again, you know, congratulations on everything with found. And I'm glad you know you're able to get, you know, your redemption, and you're able to, you know, actually prove to yourself you can do this. And you know you forget those negative voices that we all face sometimes. So you know, recently, you've started your own fund, your own short film seminar. And this is what I want to talk to you about with terms of crowdfunding. You know, I saw you actually, you know, did a live event of this, so meeting in person. So if you could, could you just give us, like, a brief synopsis of we know what you go over and things of that nature?

Dawn Fields 1:10:24
Well, yeah, teaching has always been something that's been a goal of mine, because I really, truly enjoy, enjoy it, and I find it extremely rewarding. And ever since I've moved to LA, as you've heard from my history, I haven't really gotten the credentials, you know, to teach and to justify charging people for seminar, you have to have a certain amount of credentials, and that's what I was working towards and trying to build up these this past decade. And it was just a real struggle, finally, with found being made and winning awards and doing as well as it did, plus the fact that I've crowdfunded now eight short film projects, actually eight, actually, eight, eight of them, we crowdfunded. I feel like I have some knowledge now and some credentials to speak knowledgeably about that particular subject. So I'm very clear about I'm only teaching raising money for short films because I have not raised money for a feature. And I think that is different if you're trying to raise more than, like 50, $60,000 $60,000 and I've never used any other platform other than Indiegogo. So in my classes, I'm very specific, and in my marketing, I'm very specific, to tell people this is a specific class on how to raise money for a short film on Indiegogo. And the amounts of money that I feel like I can specialize in helping people raise is between 5010 $1,000 that's a real sweet spot with me. I feel like I could raise that much money for film like every time where I've gotten into trouble. And I'm also very honest about this in my seminars where I've gotten into trouble, personally, is trying to raise money in the amounts of 30,000 or more. I raised up to 25,000 but not in one single campaign. That's where I have a sore spot, and I think part of this because it's for a short although there have been several people who have raised more than $50,000 for their shorts, and I can speak to that, and I can tell them what I think they need to do in order to make that happen, but it's a different process, because there's raising money inside your circle, and then there's raising money outside your circle. And to hit those high numbers of 2030, 40,000 or more, you have to go outside your circle. You have to get communities and organizations, and you have to get press and publicity and marketing, and that's like a whole nother animal. But I can't, but I can speak to that. I do understand that. I've just never actually done that. In the two campaigns that we did try to run that were 30,000 or more, there were various reasons those campaigns didn't succeed. But what I like to do in the seminar is I use those as an example, as examples to show what does not work because I because it didn't work for us, and I know exactly why it didn't work. So I think sometimes you can learn from people of what to do, but I think you can also learn from what not to do, like I could tell people all day long with my experience with shattered love, I'll tell you what not to do.

Dave Bullis 1:13:08
You know, so Dawn now that you, you know, you've had some of these live seminars, are you playing on, you know, having any online seminars for people who couldn't make it out to LA,

Dawn Fields 1:13:19
Yeah, it's really funny. When I posted the first live one on Facebook, I was like, Oh, yeah. Hopefully all these people in my area will come but what happened was everybody started sending me emails and messages going, I don't live in LA, but I really want to take this class. And so I'm like, maybe I need to do an online version. And everybody was like, yeah, yeah, do an online version. So I'm like, Okay, well that might actually even be more popular, because a lot of my followers aren't in LA so I've been working real hard on an online version, and I'm actually launching tonight, as a matter of fact, my very first webinar. It's secrets to funding your short film on Indiegogo, and it's going to be tonight from 630 to 830 Pacific Standard Time. So that's Los Angeles time, 630 to 830 live, live webinar that you can sign up for and interact and ask questions and all that are kind of stuff. And I will be that's posted on my wall and on my on my website.

Dave Bullis 1:14:18
Okay, excellent. And, you know, I'll make sure to link that in show notes as well.

Dawn Fields 1:14:22
Yeah, that would be lafilmseminars.com. You can register there. Or palmstreetfilms.com. You can register there as well. Awesome, cool. Yeah, go ahead.

Dave Bullis 1:14:32
I was, I'll make sure link those in the show notes, by the way. Oh, that'd be great. And, you know, speaking of, you know, you know, palm films, by the way, you know, is there, you know, just to get to your short script competition, I know you This is, you've held this for a couple of different, excuse me, held this for a couple of years. You know, is, is there an impetus to, you know, why you started this? I mean, I know you kind of touched on that earlier. But is there, you know, have you really, sort of, I. Evolve this meaning, like, Is there, like, you know, any other reasons why you may have to these competitions?

Dawn Fields 1:15:06
Oh, yeah, absolutely. There's a very specific history with these. The first script, the first script contest we're calling, the one with that callerly One with fragment and shattered love, where I just put out a call on my Facebook, that's we're calling that our first palm street films contest later that year, we got access to a series of standing sets in Orange County, where it's a stage, where they filled a couple of standing sets. A standing set is like a pre built living room or hospital room, or it's a set. Everybody knows what a film set is. It's like. It's pre built sets that all exist in one space, and it's a series of them, like all spread out throughout the space. And we were, we were given access to use one of the standing set space where they had a house, the house where we actually shot shattered love. Actually, it's the same stage. The they had a house, they had a jail cell, they had an executive boardroom at the time, they had a hospital set, and they had an even an airplane thing. It's called Silver dream factory in Orange County. If you haven't heard about it, it's fantastic. It is within the 60 mile zone, 30 mile zone. Sorry, asked for Roland kanemar. He's good friend of mine. He's treated us very well every time we've shot there. But we had access to the stage and we wanted to shoot something last minute, so I put another call out to my Facebook, you know, no submission fee, nothing like that, just because of an informal call for scripts. And we told people we need, like, a five page script, something we can shoot in one day that's set in one of these locations. And we listed all locations. And John Whetstone was one of my Facebook followers who sat down and actually found this really brilliant way to utilize two of the sets, and that was the interrogation. And so shattered love was the first script contest, and that film got made, eventually into a film starring Lance Henriksen. And then the second contest was the interrogation, which ended up getting made. And actually, in my seminars, both live and online, I show the interrogation even though we never actually released it publicly online, that one's still because, because virgin produced is still considering showing that on their airlines, so we haven't, and that's a deal that we got through dances with films, because the interrogation had premiered at Santa Barbara internet International Film Festival. That was its world premiere, and then it had its la premiere at dances with films. And through dances with films is how we made the connection with Virgin produced. So we're still waiting to hear about that, so we haven't released that officially, but I do show that film in my seminars, which is really great. People love seeing that. I also, in my seminars, I show the original zombie elves campaign video, which a lot of people thought was like at the time, it was like, people thought it was like, Oh, that's a great hook. That's a really cute video. There's been a whole lot of really great videos since then that have kind of eclipsed that. People do some really great and wonderful and creative things with their campaign videos these days, but we still thought it was kind of a fun little thing. So I show that in the seminar. But and then last year, we were starting to think about our first feature film and what we were going to do. So last year was the first time we decided to launch an official script contest where there was a submission fee and a cash prize, a significant cash prize. So we launched a contest, charged a submission fee. We got just under 100 submissions total. So the good news about this festival is you're not competing with 1000s of other scripts. So I really encourage anybody listening to this, if you have a short film and and we open it up to both this year we did short films and feature film scripts. So I really encourage you. We're about to launch the fourth annual palm street films contest. You guys should really enter your scripts, because you're not going against 1000s of other scripts. You may not even be going against hundreds of other scripts, because we're a very small, intimate kind of in, you know, contest, but the prize is $500 for winning short and $1,000 for winning feature. So that's that's pretty groovy, also, and this is announcement I just made last last week, we've decided the winning short film script from last year was a really wonderful script called five days in Calcutta, which was written by Fred Perry. That script not only won our contest, but I didn't realize this till after we had awarded it has also won, like a dozen other short film script contests. That's how good it is. It won Houston comedy fest, and it also won DC shorts. And we love that script, and we love Fred, and so we've decided that we're going to produce that one, and I'm directing. So every single script contest that we've had, the films have gotten made. Oh, wow, that's amazing. That is huge. That's to some people, that's more important than a cash prize. But this year, as in last year, we're offering a cash prize and the chance for your film to get produced. But this year, I'm specifically looking. For features, because I'm looking, I'm looking to direct my first feature.

Dave Bullis 1:20:13
So basically, it kind of ties with my next question, which is, you know, what is your next project that you have?

Dawn Fields 1:20:21
Uh, well, um, I'm in post production on fragile storm right now, and one other short film that we did earlier this year. This a small, smaller film. We're trying to get those two things wrapped down in post, and then we're going to shoot, once that's done, we're going to shoot five days in Calcutta, and we hope to do that in the summer. It depends on how long it takes to actually get fragile storm finished. There's a lot that still needs to be done on that, and we want to focus on that exclusively before we move on to anything else. But five days in Calcutta is up next. And then, like I said, after that, I'm looking to jump into my first feature, and then after that, I want to do zombie else. So that's kind of the, I guess, two, two year plan.

Dave Bullis 1:20:59
And you know, I really wish you the best with zombie elves and everything else too. I think, I think, honestly, Dylan, I think zombie elves, when you come and revisit that, you're going to have a whole new, no pun intended, but a whole new life to it.

Dawn Fields 1:21:12
Yeah. Well, because I look at, you know, since I started directing two years ago, I look at everything differently. I look colors seem different. People seem different. I see movies differently. I have literally a whole new perspective, not on not only on life, but or not only in the film business, I guess, but also on life. But I see movies differently now. I see them in my head, and I form visions more quickly, and I and it comes everything comes to me more quickly, and I'm super excited about all the visual possibilities of zombie elves,

Dave Bullis 1:21:46
Yeah. And also, also I meant to was, you know, just the market is changing too, and, you know, I just think there's gonna be even more opportunities in me. Because, you know, when you first started that, I don't think Amazon Studios was around. They weren't looking for new stuff. But now, if you look at it, everyone's looking for new material. I mean, I mean I, as I was talking to, you know, Richard bato from 632 he has, you know, he never gone back and forth, which is all of the new content streams out there that are just looking for that that need content. So honestly, I think you will have, you know, more of an opportunity with zombie else?

Dawn Fields 1:22:23
Yeah, I think so too. I'm excited. And, um, you know, it's just that film has so much potential on so many levels, but it's also an awesome responsibility, because you, you know, you have to be loyal and true to Christmas. You have to be loyal and true to zombie fans. It's, it's quite, you know, it's, it's a bit daunting, to be honest with you, but I am excited for the challenge. We were even we for a time, we were even thinking about doing it in 3d but I'm not sure if that makes sense these days, it doesn't seem like 3d is taken off the way people had hoped it would.

Dave Bullis 1:22:52
Yeah, it just seems to be in certain movies that 3d is accepted, obviously, anything that James Cameron does, and a few things here and there, but yeah, 3d i don't think even the 3d TVs that they released, I haven't seen much for them.

Dawn Fields 1:23:07
Oh gosh, I got a 3d TV for Christmas three years ago, and I watched maybe five movies on it, and now it's collecting dust. It's like, you know, and it's a great experience. I love stuff in 3d I'm a total fan, but it's just, you know, putting on the glasses and charging them up, you know, I have one of those systems, and it just, you know, it just, I don't know, it's just not the experience that that I think people were hoping for and and finding content in that you could buy for your home system was a huge challenge at the time. You know, like three years ago, when I got it, you couldn't buy anything for less than 50 bucks. That's true. It was. And there was very little content available in the stores. And that became really frustrating.

Dave Bullis 1:23:51
Yeah, and a lot of the stores, too, are even getting rid of their blu rays. I mean, it's just, you know, if you're like a Best Buy, they sort of consolidated. They've bumped out all the DVDs. And now, you know that's that whole entire area is getting smaller and smaller, basically, right? Yeah, no, go ahead. I was gonna say basically, they want you to go online, or they assume you're gonna buy a digital copy. But I'm sorry, what were we gonna say?

Dawn Fields 1:24:12
No, I just remember a couple years ago, I bought a Blu ray burner, and I went out to like, Office Max and Best Buy and all these places I couldn't even find, like, blank blu rays. Yeah, it was like, what's happening to the blu ray market and why? Yeah, you had to special order online. You can't even just walk into a store and buy blank blu rays. Like, really?

Dave Bullis 1:24:31
Yeah, it's, I mean, it really depends too. I've noticed on like, the area and whatever they seem to stock. But I even had trouble getting black blue rays before I actually had to order them from online from somewhere. I think maybe the Amazon I ordered them from.

Dawn Fields 1:24:46
Wow, yeah.

Dave Bullis 1:24:49
So you know, don't we've been talking probably close to two hours now.

Dawn Fields 1:24:53
I told you, I'm a talker,

Dave Bullis 1:24:54
So what I might have doing is I might end up splitting this into. Not sure yet. I'm gonna, when I push this together off I can, you know, have a better picture of everything. But just, you know, in closing, is there anything you want to discuss that we haven't touched on?

Dawn Fields 1:25:08
There's 1000 things I could talk about. I have so many stories. I have so many thoughts on this business, so much in my head I want to share with people. I, you know, I could go on for days, but, you know, just to, just to give people some ideas about the script contest, I believe we're gonna launch that sometime this month, sometime in March. And if you follow me on Facebook, it's facebook.com, forward slash, Don fields, producer. I tagged that name when I was producing. I wish I could change it to Director, but if you just follow me on that, you'll see all the announcements. Also, if you go to palm street films.com and join our mailing list, there's a subscribe button there where you can join our mailing list, you'll also be notified. But we're hoping to launch that in March, and we're super excited. And I'm hoping that my next feature film, or my first feature film, is in that group of submissions.

Dave Bullis 1:26:04
Awesome. So again, everyone, I will link to Dawn's all of Dawn's websites that she's discussed in the show notes. So again, if you're a screenwriter and you want to, you know, have an opportunity to, you know, have something produced, check out Dawn's new opportunities. I mean, the contest sounds amazing. And, you know, like I was just saying Dawn, about all the different, you know, conscious content streams. I mean, this is another opportunity for people now, and it's just, it's amazing with everything else. I mean, everything's coming up to all at once. You know, you got the Nicole fellowship coming up, and you got, I mean, strip the blues, I think, is coming up. I mean, there's just so many, you know, but yeah, everyone. You can find me at Dave, boss, calm. Twitter, it's at Dave, underscore bullets. And Facebook, it's at Dave, dot bulls, but again, in the show notes, you can just click on that and friend request me and stalk me. So Dawn, thank you very much for coming on.

Dawn Fields 1:26:55
Thank you, Dave. This was awesome. I really enjoyed it. You are you're an awesome host. Thank you so much.

Dave Bullis 1:26:59
Oh, thank you very much. Hey, I'm gonna come back on. Let me know you me know.

Dawn Fields 1:27:03
You know, I feel like with all the trials and tribulations that I've been through, I always like to say from one of my favorite movies, Galaxy Quest, never give up, never surrender. Because this business is hard and it will tear you down if you let it, but if you want it badly enough, and if you work hard enough, you can accomplish any filmmaking dream that you want to accomplish, and you can be anything that you want to be. And it's funny now that people are telling me that I'm an inspiration, I always felt like, oh my god, I'm doing everything wrong, and I'm making all these mistakes and nothing's going right. But things never go right in this business. It's the nature of it, and whether you succeed or fail is going to be determined not by how many failures you have, but how many times you pick yourself up and make it right.

Dave Bullis 1:27:50
And then you know that that's a great piece of advice, Dawn.

Dawn Fields 1:27:55
And that's what I always try to do. I just try to keep pushing forward and try to do the right thing as often as I can and do the right thing for my films, and never give up.

Dave Bullis 1:28:06
And that's, that's amazing, you know, there, there have been other people in the podcast too, who have you know, mentioned that you know, it's it is something we have to just keep going and you know, once you you know, you've done a project, just try to move on to the next one you know. And the, you know, if some of the other stories that I've heard too, and yours included, I mean, even if some people can use these stories to avoid these pitfalls and sort of learn from everybody else's experience, I think, you know, they would be it would behoove them to actually, you know, make a game plan. Actually listen to these, these podcasts and stories like yours and something like, you know, Kelly Baker's and piece together, you know, how could I avoid the same, the same the same instances, the same scenarios playing out and, you know, and the steps they could do to prevent those,

Dawn Fields 1:28:50
Yeah, it's, it's a tough business. It'll tear you down. It really will. And I feel like, if I can, if I can direct, anybody can direct, because it does not come easy to me. Does not come naturally to me. I've had to learn it. I've had to practice it. I've had to hone my craft. And I still feel like I may be 25% there. I have not done my best work yet.

Dave Bullis 1:29:13
And, you know, and I wish you the best, because, I mean, you know that that's we're always looking to improve. We're always looking to evolve. So, you know again, Dawn I wish you the best with everything.

Dawn Fields 1:29:45
Thank you so much, Dave. I really enjoyed this. Thank you so much.