How To Embarrass Every Marketing Department in Hollywood
Why Mark Toia's 40:1 return on his ad spend with Monsters of Man makes a lot of entertainment marketing look like amateur hour
A Digital Marketing Experiment
I’ve been fascinated by Mark Toia’s Monsters of Man movie and digital campaign since I came across it about six months ago.
Mark Toia, a reasonably well known ad director (at least to those who shoot with Red cameras, since he often promoted them) shot a film as a calling card as a movie director. Reasonably wealthy, he funded the $1m production himself. The small-ish crew all got paid, he had a tight VFX team for effects and cut it himself. This wasn’t a miserable quick shoot where people worked for free. He shot it like an extended commercial with his commercials crew.
The other interesting thing is that he wasn’t looking for much return on the investment beyond getting more jobs directing movies.
However, being an ad guy was deeply unimpressed by the distribution offers and what value they provided. The value was low and the return was next to nothing for several years.
So he took on a wild an experiment and decided to self distribute. It seems mainly out of curiosity since having no return on the production was not a financial disaster for him. He’d already got interest from studios which was the main return he wanted from his $1m investment.
He was already well versed in advertising from his connections to the mainstream ad agency world, so he expected he could work that out. Also, as a director with a lot of post-production knowledge he took the film to distribution platforms himself. He cut out as many intermediaries as possible.
I’ve posted featurs films myself. Going from rushes to locked cut to DCP and through QC and it’s not that hard if you know what you’re doing. The DCP- QC bit is annoying but the tech is now good enough that it can be done in DaVinci Resolve on a laptop, though you should have proper monitoring.
With Monsters of Man’s delivery to consumer organised through an aggregator, he focused on his marking campaign. As I understand it, he had originally set aside another 250k to push the film with using surgical targeting and quality strategic thinking, heavy testing and good PR.
Flash foward: he got breakout results and he didn’t even spend the 250k.
The first step in his plan was a Kickstarter campaign for $25k to energized his core superfans that were built up during production. So this is likely to have largely been his friends, family and extended contacts known from the ad world.
The plan was to use the kickstarter money for his marketing spend test. He cut a large range of trailers and tested them with paid placements, honing in on the engagement rates until he hit really good numbers. I believe he then he scaled with a 7k test. This blew up, getting 70:1 return on his test ad spend (ROAS). For comparison typical entertainment marking ROAS is 4:1. His targeting and advertising asset fit was more than an order of magnitude better than typical movie marketing.
This is very much the video game free to play testing model. Often free to play video games are tested in small markets, tweaked for performance, then released to large markets.
It’s also like doing a broadway show. You don’t just open on broadway, you work it out in Boston, New Haven or Philadelphia. You rewrite, you recast until it’s polished.
With the trailers and key art tested he extended the campaign in the first 2 weeks before release. He spent the remainder of the 25k, eventually settling on about 40:1 ROAS. He made his $1m in 3 months, and didn’t bother spending the 250k.
That was his biggest mistake.
Beyond the headline numbers and success, this still required exceptional focus and exceptional luck. Monsters of Man may be an inspiring indie story - but it’s not a magic solution. The movie business has always had hits and always had bombs.
“Nobody knows anything.” Right?
Well. No. We do know some things.
Mark Toia absolutely MoneyBall-ed film distribution by following ad agency strategic thinking, making good creative assets, and executing the media buy well on a good product. He knocked it out of the park.
Toia’s project demonstrates:
it is possible to create and self distribute a quality product at a non-starvation budget level that can give you a good return
most large entertainment companies are not very good in their marketing (with some obvious notable exceptions) - regular ad agencies have been saying this for decades
the technology is there, but there are still gatekeepers and bottlenecks; product discovery is the core issue
But it leaves the big question:
If you can MoneyBall movie distribution; how lucky or how good do you have to be?
This is the question I’m trying to answer while designing the campaign strategy for my film Ibsen’s Master Builder. I’ve been distracted in the weeds of the digital campaign and the path of Monsters of Man.
What are your chances of breaking even on a project if you execute at the Mark Toia standard? 1 in 1000? 1 in 100? 1 in 2?
Some History. Why Is This MoneyBall?
“It’s hard to get someone to understand something when their job depends on not understanding it.”
Ahhh… LA… apologies to those who live there.
So ego. Plus a preference popularity over financial returns. Plus a groupthink susceptibility to the latest fads. Plus a suspicion of new technology.
Now, there are plenty of people doing excellent work in LA (and around the world) in entertainment advertising - indeed some of them are good friends of mine!
But it’s pretty obvious when you look at the general quality of movie marketing it’s not up to scratch, and it’s not been for some time. And it’s not just out of LA.
Recently around substack there have been many posts and notes about bad trailers, dumb marketing stunts and cringe digital campaigns (
shared some “authentic” moments from the underground - and an awful aspect ratio explainer for One Battle After Another, - and Swabreen - rightfully bemoaned the quality of trailers, skewered dumb pre-roll and logos, not to mention notes from and also on the same page to name a couple of others. highlighted a good campaign recently (Weapons), but for the most part bad movie marketing seems to be having a moment around the FilmStack neighborhood.I suspect some of this budget related; everything really goes into media buy. Some of this is people ticking spreadsheets because they want to get home at night, and some comes from a core lack of understanding about advertising, and advertising history - which makes them susceptible to the fads.
Still, this is a business built on selling entertainment, and they can’t make their own product entertaining enough to sell. Hire Mark Toia for sales, and pay your entertainment agency to support performance art.
The basic truth is that advertising hasn’t changed in a very long time.
If you understand the fundamentals, new media are simply new ways to run the same psychology.
Human psychology doesn’t change very quickly. The current “3-second attention span” stuff is the same moral panic about channel surfing in the 1980s. Sure cable wasn’t algorithmically controlled, and it wasn’t amplified… but doomscrolling is not particularly psychologically different to channel hopping. Or take Tupperware parties that demonstrate the same social proof and viral marketing effects. Or the Gillette razors that are the same as mobile free to play games.
Sure, scale, network and powerlaw effects are more central now, but the base should not be: XYZ CHANGES EVERYTHING! The base should always be: How is XYZ structurally the same as EVERYTHING BEFORE and what are the shiny new surface features I can use to improve what I was doing before!
The world would be a better place if Ogilvy on Advertising and Confessions of and Advertising Man were required reading before working in advertising.
I know how I sound.
Kids get off my lawn!
But fear and loathing of new technology (or “the Youth” as Halvard Solness would put it) mainly leads to misunderstand that technology. Change is usually just a faster way of doing the same thing with different tools.
Seriously, we’ve been doing this since… well… Plato at least (King Thamus in Phaedrus: “Writing is a bad idea. It’s makes the youth lazy.”).
And New York was always much cooler 20 years ago.
The phrase I remember knocking around in the late 80s that captures this was: every generation thinks they invented sex.
Anyway. Back to today.
The scientific psychology of advertising was sketched out in the 1920s, and developed through the mid century with famous names like Lasker who started more persuasive copywriting and Reeves with the Unique Selling Proposition, Burnet brought in branding - drama and iconic characters (Tony the Tiger/ Marlboro Man), Ogilvy married creative brilliance to research from his background in direct response. Bernbach kicked off the creative revolution with a focus on personality and authenticity, Lawrence brought in lifestyle, Jones looked at frameworks - defensive ads vs offensive ads - are you brand building or converting a sale.
That’s a good reading list. And on the topic of reading lists we should throw in Luke Sullivan’s Hey Whipple Squeeze This. And Cialdini’s Influence.
The evolution goes from: treat advertising as a science to: a unique proposition sells better than the rest to: find the real drama in the brand and that allows you to expand beyond the specifics of your product with symbols and research to: creative stories, lifestyle, culture and style improve performance to: the meta analysis of what do ads actually do.
It’s really not much more than answering the question: How do I explain the best thing about this product in the most effective way? The medium defines the contours of the message - so you need to apply the aesthetics of the medium to the psychology of persuasion.
Today, we all live in David Ogilvy world. He loved direct advertising. In his day it was through the mail. But now direct advertising is dominant in its newest form: digital marketing. Six seconds on TikTok or six minutes with a newsletter - his most famous aphorism is still relevant (and he had a lot of good ones):
“The customer isn’t a moron, she’s your wife.”
People are not getting more stupid, they just don’t like crappy products.
Monsters Of Man and Mark Toia
There are two key sources of information on the Monsters of Man campaign on the Indie Film Hustle podcast:
Episode 407 and Episode 612.
It’s worth listening to them to get a sense of Toia, but the transcripts are great sources of information too. Both the audio and the transcript is available on those pages. There are other good resources there too. Toia liked Alex Ferarri’s book so much he did an ad for it.
This book. I read it too and it’s got a lot of good attitude orientation in it. The audience is definitely for the interested and uninitiated. But if you already know the lay of the land, his best advice is a little buried. Still very much worth reading.
My interest is not in killer robot movies. (Ok. Sometimes I like killer robot movies and yes, Blade Runner is one of my favourite films). However, I’m more interested in making films towards the arthouse end. I like Bergman, Kieslowski, Rohmer, Antonioni… I also like Paul Verhofen and Joe Esterhaaz - those mid budget thrillers… Are any of those kind of films viable any more? Has the audience changed? Or has the distribution environment changed.
I personally think the problem is the distribution environment. Discovery is the issue. There is an audience for these kinds of films and while that audience is technically more available than ever before - everyone has a phone and could watch a film on YouTube in seconds so you have a potential audience of billions. Of course, potential is different from achievable.
So bringing it back down to earth. What is the actual addressable market and how can you reach them?
The Indie Film Hustle Interviews
This is a quick (ish) summary of their discussion, extracting the relevant parts.
With a $1M budget and advertising expertise, Toia quickly recouped his stake within three months of TVOD release. In addition he achieved top-5 Amazon Prime positioning, and created a sustainable long-term revenue model across multiple platforms.
Marketing Strategy
Heavy Content Testing
Trailer optimization. A/B testing, 40+ trailer variations created and tested over 4-week pre-release period
Outcome-based selection. Cut a hero trailer you like, but tailor to each market.
Performance metrics: Full view-through rates, demographic engagement, platform-specific optimization
Accidental PR and Social Proof assets. At a free IMAX screening they filmed testimonial marketing content. This wasn’t planned but serendipitous last minute execution.
High-conversion content. Testimonial trailers “really worked hard. One with (only name actor) Neal McDonough was particularly successful.
Facebook, Instagram, YouTube analytics correlated with sales data
People with 30+ seconds engagement on the trailer - you can see demographic info and target
Paid Strategy
$25k on IG FB and YT some others. 50 million trailer views on Meta and Google only. After testing in small markets and honing ads, 2 week intensive push leading to release.
Demographic targeting. Males 25-35 was biggest market.
Genre expansion targeting. Multiple audience segments identified including “horror genre”
Precision targeting. When you see success in specific areas eg. female 14 RED CAR lives in Minnesota, you can really drill down on your market
Organic Amplification. YouTube. 3d party amplification, helps a lot. YouTubers are looking for revenue re-post your trailer for views. 7m views within 24 days of release.
ROI Analysis:
Micro-testing. 1k tests - when hitting targets even tests can be very successful (70:1 return)
Generally 40:1 return with sustained performance. They put money in, they got spikes in sales. This suggests massive undersaturation.
Scaling. Regrets not going big early. Needs to reach over 500m people before he’s near maxing out.
Mistakes. “I didn’t spend enough in advertising. I should have spent a lot more” “I spent a million dollars on my movie, I should have spent a million dollars on advertising” “25 grand 50 million views is nothing”
Distribution Strategy
TVOD is the core revenue stream.
Platform Performance Hierarchy:
Amazon TVOD (70% of revenue): “Amazon Was probably 70%”
Apple TV (significant secondary): “Apple is a big apple and a big earner. As much as Amazon Amazon is the machine Apple is next”
Google Play/YouTube (strong tertiary): “The Google Google Play SEO / YouTube sales were very good as well”
Microsoft (surprisingly effective): “Microsoft was amazing”
Gaming platforms: “Xbox PlayStation, whatever it was that no, not PlayStation, new Xbox. That’s one”
Fandango/Vudu (negligible): “Don’t waste your fucking time. Nobody. I think we got like $14”
Technical Implementation:
Aggregator necessity, and quality control barriers: “it’s very hard for individuals to get a movie up” on iTunes or Amazon without an aggregator. You basically need to use one now.
Timeline requirements: Two to three months for that process to happen
Revenue:
Peak performance: First 3 months generated budget recovery
Ongoing performance: “the movie is still making money. Now. It’s, it’s still ticking away nicely. It’s like a, it’s an apartment building in the corner just ticking away rent”
Relaunch capability: “you can read remarket It read, put it out there, and see what happens”
SVOD Amazon Prime Analysis:
Top 5 in the US for four weeks on Prime. 2-3c per view. Even with top-5 performance it’s not worth it.
Amazon Prime SVOD. “I might as well just fucking given it to them...no economic sense to put your movie on Prime.'“ He then pulled the SVOD deal.
TVOD vs. AVOD economics. You need 50:1. 50 AVOD sales for 1 TVOD sale.
Premature migration. Moving to Amazon Prime while TVOD momentum continued was a bad idea.
Revenue impact. Massive audience reach but minimal revenue per view
Lesson. Maintain TVOD exclusivity longer. Use SVOD views to drive ancillary purchase. Use as advertising not a profit center.
AVOD (Advertising Video on Demand)
Good but studios now there - “You’re going to be forced down the bottom of the pile again”
UK performance was good.
AVOD positioning. Volume-dependent but sustainable, shifting landscape with the studios discovering AVOD
Aggregators
Give you Granular Data. Amazon shows aggregators high detail with realtime tracking of every cent.
Technical standards variance: Different QC requirements across territories. Pain in the ass. Aggregators can help with this.
International Distribution:
Total reach: About 140 Different countries. Sold to agents bundled by region. Kept English language for himself.
Germany: High-paying but complex QC requirements
France: “The French paid well”
Individual territory approach: Direct sales to regional distributors. Kept English language for himself.
Complexity assessment: “international is such a pain in the ass”
Testing and Modeling
To attempt an answer to the question of if Monsters of Man is a 1 in 10 or one in 10,000 campaign, I thought I’d build a quick digital marketing model.
This is based on my own agency strategy work, plus some extrapolation from data on digital platforms and what we know about the Toia experience. It’s super rough and back of envelope since it’s really based anecdotes.
Digital marketing is just direct marketing, with a technological twist. That means you want to think like David Ogilvy and direct mail. However, you want to consider the important new elements: the cost of distribution, the targeting, the tracking, and the way almost frictionless network effects that lead to virality.
The trick is targeting highly connected individuals in your target audience and converting them to superfans who will advocate your product - because the cost of distribution is effectively zero - they buy social standing with your marketing message. They then convert the broader audience which also drives the conversion of more superfans. Superfans are kind of the engine of direct marketing (Tupperware ladies!).
Again, this is nothing fundamentally new - it’s just Tupperware influencer marketing logic.
Toia described stopping at 25k on budget and dripping in later was his biggest mistake? He felt he should have dropped his full 250k at the start or more media buy - to go as wide as possible when he knew the product was getting such good word of mouth spread. If you’re going viral, you throw fuel on the fire and you’re off to the races. You can then watch your ROAS numbers and keep putting money in until you reach the target ratio you want to quit at.
The issue is that most movie campaigns are closer to broadcast campaigns than are generally admitted, even by the strategy and media buying agencies. There is good reason for this. Virality works ad different levels differently. Broad campaigns still do a lot of work due to effects in the network: a lot of viral nature is through weak effects and weak social links not close social links.
That is, if you hear of a film through word of mouth - it’s not usually your best friend that introduces you to it - it’s usually someone you have only a light social relationship with. Ultimately - due to the difficulty of targeting, broad marketing campaigns still hit their targets and help create viral spread.
So, if you have all the money in the world, you can save yourself the risk and hassle. Let all the intermediaries take a cut, you still do some targeting, you reach people anyway, sometimes get viral breakout and you you’re just 4:1 efficient not 40:1 efficient.
However, you’re working for a massive corporation, it’s someone else’s money, you get paid much the same anyway and if it all goes wrong you won’t get fired for taking some insane risk by doing things differently on a fraction of the budget.
Basically you’re doing this:
Mark Toia was doing this:
This is a lot of work, and really guerrilla warfare stuff. He was constantly drilling down into detailed engagement metrics and tweaking his aim, not just attaching a firehose of cash. There are a lot of factors that make it an unknown how much of an outlier Monster’s of Man campaign was.
I have suspicions that if you know what you’re doing it’s closer to 1 in 10 than 1 in 10,000. And all the advertising in the world, can’t make people buy something they don’t want.
And who doesn’t like a reasonably entertaining killer robot movie?
I will post the model soon for everyone to play with and see if they can improve it. I’m a dilletante at this so hopefully there will be some real digital marketing people who have a better sense of how to model viral spread relative to engagement and cost.
A Good Campaign, Run Well
Monsters of Man’s success is in the interaction between laser targeting and viral outbreak. It’s about building your core audience - your fans and superfans - and giving them good stuff to share and sell for you. It’s about tested and targeted trailers, good key art, other social proof. Then it’s about driving the broader audience to the best storefronts with the least friction to a product that people want.
In context (to trail the post about the model), Monsters of Man had breakout metrics in some areas, but probably could have been better in others with some more optimisation and media buy (he does actually say in the interview). Sadly Mark Toia died in 2023 so the Indie Film Hustle interviews are the most detail that is available from him that I have found.
Finding the audience - as ever - may still depend on the specific film. Does it have an exciting enough “fantaisie” that is: is it an enticing enough world of story to draw you in from the quick pitch. Predator with killer robots is an easy movie to grasp. Does low budget, unusual success require some sort of high concept or hook? Could this work for an arthouse film; a 500k arthouse-thriller or 50k drama?
If you can MoneyBall movie distribution; how lucky or how good do you have to be?
This is The Empire Strikes Back post. I don’t have the answer here. You’ll need to wait till the sequel.
But I think the technology should be there to find the audience if production is cheap enough, the campaign is good enough and the film is entertaining enough.
A lot of devil in those details.
But that’s for another time.
You can see the movie Monsters of Man here.
You can see most of the main video assets here.
Further information on Mosters of Man
Leveraging his background as a commercial director, he pulled in some good PR in the filmmaking community (and as a good ad man, he almost always has the trailer for the movie playing in the background of video interviews).
Edit was done on personal laptop, working in HD ProRes files. Compositing was done mainly on iMac Pros and, on my laptop. 2K ProRes proxies for editorial.
Three RED Dragon cameras, a Helium 8K. Super 35 sensors, 6K and 8K. Canon ZOOMs and stills lenses, mainly because we wanted short throw lenses for the operators, as they were pulling focus for us as well. They were also cheaper and more replaceable. We were working in mud and rain in very rough locations and I didn’t want to comprise on angles that would have made us worry about losing an expensive cinema lens. Optically, these lenses resolved very well at 4K, the resolution at which we finally finished the film.
Shooting in REDCODE RAW at 11:1 compression. 10 500GB RED MINI mag SSD cards. Shooting about 200 to 500GB per day. 72 TB overall.
NO DIT, or offloading on set, but classic 3.2.1 data safety. Backed up each day on set or in the hotel, each night they backed up to two hard drives, plus some LTO tapes. Hard drives taken off site and delivered back to base in Brisbane. Any real on-set DIT management was going to be too hard, given the nature of our sets. As some locations were quite tough, we just made sure the cameras and the cards never left our side until we had the three copies backed up. Mainly used an Apple Mac Pro laptop for backing up the data onto multiple drives, and we also had a tube-style Mac Pro onset, burning out and transcoding dailies, which we dropped onto a timeline each night to check every single camera, shot and scene, just to make sure we had everything in the bag.
Two months in Cambodia. 45 days principal photography. A few days in New York City, including a helicopter shoot for the opening.
Transportation, wardrobe, local camera assistants, boom ops—probably about 80 percent of the crew was local. Everything local is much cheaper - including beers and crew.
Toia estimated he made the movie for a tenth of what it could have cost. Savings from the depth of experience and hands-on approach that he did. “If you don’t have to pay someone else to do the work, it really adds up over the long term,” he says.
“I thought well what’s better than doing a more of a big budget looking genre film rather than a small drama of someone with health issues in the back of Sydney or doing drugs or whatever... I just couldn’t get my head around the commercial aspects of doing a little Aussie drama that might never be seen.”Instead, he “thought I’d just go out on a bit of a limb and just make myself something... with robots and explosions and you know a big action film something that we could sell to the world.” The self-funded nature removed pressure: “It was completely self-funded so we haven’t had any real stress making the movie, and selling it’s not a big stress for us either.”
While “we had a lot of people wanting to buy the movie off us a lot of those contracts are fairly difficult... terrible situations in fact, a terrible time.” “You don’t really get paid straight away, it might take you years to see a dime.”
“I’m a new filmmaker, I’m sure the world’s taking advantage of me... ...They’ve got no transparency essentially in terms of you being able to see what’s happening with the dollars and so they can say ‘oh yes well you know you’re going to get a check for a thousand, you know this month but we spent that on marketing money or that went into your overheads here and there.’”
“I’m not saying that all distributors are crazy, you’re going to rip you off. Now that we’re doing stuff, a self-distribution model, we now know the amount of work involved to do so. To get your movie in 60, 70 countries around the world at the same time on multiple platforms, it’s a lot of effort.”
“The marketing that we’re putting ourselves through is very intense. I think we’re doing probably a lot more marketing than what a normal distributor would do but I really want the movie to be successful and I don’t want it to fail from lack of trying or at someone else’s hand.”
“I thought well I might as well go for more bums on seats.”
“I don’t really have a big name actor in the film. You know we’ve got Neil McDonough in there who’s been in you know Minority Report and Captain America and all that sort of stuff but he’s still probably not enough to pull big numbers but he at least gives the movie some real street cred. So a lot of people go ‘I really know I like that guy, I know that guy’ but they might not remember his name but he’s been in 200-something films, that’s right, and he’s got a great following and a lot of people like him.”
“The reality is the robots are probably going to be my biggest draw card, the action, so it’s going to be a big draw card. The trailer does a lot of the work, the marketing does a lot of the work.”
“We’re going to sell it ourselves. We’re pretty much going to do exactly what the distributors were going to do, right? They were literally just going to dump my movie over multiple platforms around the world and sit back and get the money. And so we’re literally doing exactly the same thing.”
Taking it to markets, pre-selling to investors, selling to territories worldwide including domestic markets (US, Australia), attempting to recoup costs through these deals. “Tthe odds are you won’t really get much unless it’s got Chris Hemsworth in it or some giant star.”
LGG has a deep dive int the Color grading process also here on Warren Eagles site:
Total project duration: 2 years from edit completion to premiere (December 2020)
Flat fee equivalent to 12 days work to conform, tech grade for VFX, final grade (no deliverables included)
Actual breakdown:
Conform and trim: 3 days
Tech grade: 7 days
Final grade: 5 days
Final review: 1 day
20 hard drives with RED R3D files. Two-disk eSATA drive dock
Copy and trim R3Ds with 24-frame handles for every shot using FCPX (XMLs conformed “pretty well”)
FCPX reference movies with burnt-in timecode, clip name, and original camera code for missing/wrong shots
MacPro Trash Can, EIZO 3146 4K, G-Tech 8TB external drive, Advanced Resolve panels
Colour reference was Star Wars Rogue One
RED IPP2 with soft roll-off applied for highlights during de-bayering
Rejected ACES and Resolve Color Managed (chose to match Mark’s TVC workflow - “all very visual”)
Each camera slightly different in color temp and exposure (resolved using RAW R3Ds). Men in blue suits for robot replacement - required very close match across multiple cameras per compositor’s request (Raoul Teague)
70% of final look applied during tech grade
ProRes422HQ at UHD used becuase best quality/file size for remote work via Frame.io
Final grade was 7 reels of ProResHQ
EDL from FCPX
VFX ProResHQ clips sat above original R3D grade
Could promote R3D clips to visible track when needed for non-VFX shots
Often avoided noise reduction - preferred organic RED noise aesthetic. Tested film emulation digital grain but rejected - added no value. Only noise applied to robot shots to match plates
Very soft power windows throughout, never intrusive
Final format was Rec 709 graded on 32” monitor
Premiere was on an IMAX screen
Mark Toia created the DCP.
Reviewed on iPad Pro for viewing composited clips with Look applied. Monitor checking: EIZO for tech checking rough robot comps
Look established early with one-day session in Brisbane grading suite. Central concept locked in to minimize late surprises. Tech grade front-loaded the heavy matching work, making final grade “easier than originally envisaged”
Toia had a strong idea of the coverage he wanted and there were no storyboards for the film. He created a system for his operators that allowed them to respond to the emotion that the coverage needed. Before each scene, he would brief each operator and go through the coverage he wanted from each camera, which gave him more time to work with the cast.
“We had four styles of photography, and I used to call them out to the operators,” he says. “The first one was locked off, don’t move the head, purely locked. The second was still locked off, but you were allowed to pan and tilt, and the third was hand held, soft hand held or on the shoulder, it had to be fluid and nice. Then the fourth one was ‘fuck it’ you know? When shit was blowing up, you could go nuts but I didn’t want any rocking.”
Toia would call those numbers out, from one to four, in the middle of a scene or tell the operator to change on a specific line, knowing that there were many elements to come in CGI for the cast and the camera to react to.
The operators pulled their own focus, again keeping the production costs and crew down, and slates were made unnecessary by all cameras running jammed timecode from the sound recordist and also recording sound to all cameras. Toia started by operating A-camera, but after seeing Tony O’Loughlin ACS SOC was nailing the dialogue coverage, he quickly gave O’Loughlin the reins.
“We graded it to look like 35mm,” says Toia “When I started shooting digital, I started to grade so you could see everything, but then I realised, just because digital is giving you more information, doesn’t mean you need to keep it. I liked 35mm back in those early days, if it was a bit crushed, fine! I wanted the focus of the viewer to be on what I wanted them to look at.”
Toia made his own digital cinema package (DCP) and, at a cast and crew screening held at the IMAX Brisbane in late 2020, a projectionist commented that the image and effects were seamless and held up better than many of the action films that had been through the cinema lately.
Toia was hands-on at every level and even mastered his own DCP master for the premiere in Australia last week. He used the open-source software DCP 0 Matic, commenting that “making my own DCP was better than the one I paid for. On the IMAX screen with the 4K projector, it was literally exactly the same as what I see in P3 on my Apple monitors, – almost exactly the same. I was so impressed with the image when I had a professional DCP done, it was crushed and dark by comparison.”
Toia has not modified his TVC workflow based on his experiences, but he did ask himself the question. Toia extolls the virtual of doing meaningful post-mortems on his professional jobs. ” I debrief myself all the time. Right after each job go. Where did we make a mistake there? Where can we do better?”
He concluded that if he did this again he would have, “brought along a proper dedicated key-grip, to help us in certain things. But from a post perspective, I think with the tools we had when we started, – two or three years ago – to do this movie, I think we did exceptionally well and we literally saved $2 or $3 million doing it this way.”
ProVideoCoalition Podcast Interview
Really interesting. Thanks for all the detail!