Couple 3

Great news: after a successful festival run, Crude Independence is now available on DVD and for download on iTunes!

We appreciate your support through this entire process, and we’re so thrilled that the film is now available and ready to be sent out.

While we understand the convenience afforded by Amazon and iTunes, we urge you to order the film directly from us so that Couple 3 FIlms sees the most revenue from the sale, putting us closer to making the next film.

Click here to order the film.

We are thrilled to announce that Crude Independence will be available for purchase in under two weeks. You can now pre-order the film on the iTunes store– just search for “Crude Independence”. On Sept. 21 the film will be available for digital download there, and the DVD can be ordered from our site (which will be revamped in the next weeks) as well as from Amazon. By ordering the DVD you’ll get the special features that the digital download does not include: a 20 minute “Making of Crude Independence” piece exclusive to the DVD that features behind-the-scenes footage from production in North Dakota and interviews with director Noah Hutton and editor Alex Footman, and optional director’s commentary over the entire film.

Stay tuned and hope you check out the film on the 21st!

I’ve approved the final proof of our DVD graphics, we completed a 20 minute behind the scenes piece, and recorded my commentary for the special features, so the DVD is now in production for Crude Independence and should be ready within 2-3 weeks. We’re going to start selling it directly from our website because with the current state of distribution and sales, keeping a middleman in this kind of equation just doesn’t make fiscal sense. We will also try to get the DVD directly into stores where it makes sense and where there’s a natural interest, most likely in the state of North Dakota itself. For a larger project with a bigger budget, perhaps a middleman makes sense. But I’m confident that we can find our audience with direct outreach and through the email list we’ve built up taking the film around to festivals. We will probably pursue a digital rights deal with a company we’ve been in touch with, which will allow us to get the film on iTunes and Netflix and reach even a larger audience.

Now that the gears are turning on manufacturing the CI DVD, I am currently working on filming a narrative short by the end of the summer. Ben Ehrlich, a friend of mine from high school, is writing the script right now from a story we’ve been working on together over the past few weeks. We’ll probably shoot it in upstate New York. More on that project to come. In the meantime I’ve been working on various freelance video stuff around NY and also entered a synopsis for a narrative feature into the Ultimate Filmmaker Competition.

Crude Independence director Noah Hutton was interviewed on Connecticut’s most listened to morning talk show, “Mornings with Ray Dunaway,” on WTIC 1080 AM. The interview lasts about 7 minutes and highlights the upcoming screening of CI at Wesleyan University, sponsored by the Connecticut Forest and Park Association. Here’s the audio:

Noah Hutton Interviewed on WTIC 1080 AM

We finally cleared the rights to all the material in the film so we’re ready to move ahead with releasing the DVD. We are shooting for an early June release date– stay tuned here, we’ll be announcing a specific date soon.

As we move into the spring with Crude Independence, we’re nearing an important phase…

Distribution.

SXSW was a blast and it was a thrill to show Crude Independence there. We had two screenings and got this review after one of them. It was an interesting response that showed how valuable a Q&A can be. After SXSW we brought CI to the Cleveland International Film Festival. It was a really energetic festival and very notable for the enthusiastic audiences that came out day after day, even to our first screening at 9:30 am last Saturday. At our 5 pm screening the next day we had an oil worker and a Stanley, ND native in the crowd who both spoke to their enjoyment of the film during the Q&A– it was a real thrill for us to hear this. Director Noah Hutton was profiled in the festival’s daily newsletter– you can see the piece here.

We’ve still got a few festivals on the calendar for the next months (next two: K.C. FilmFest later in April and the CT Film Festival in early June) and we’re still sending it out and hoping to line up screenings over the summer and into the fall. We’re going to start submitting abroad as well in coming months.

But we’ve also began to think about how we’re going to roll out the distribution of Crude Independence. The festivals we’ve attended in the past months have been terrific in terms of seeing other outstanding work and getting a sense of the distribution climate we’re living in for independent film, specifically documentaries. We’ve been getting great feedback and requests for the availability of the DVD, and we can’t wait to make it available on our website in the near future. It’s not so clear that there is a working model for overall distribution of an indie doc, and we’re seeing a lot of people out there who are self-distributing and coming up with novel ways to get their project out there and perhaps recoup some costs and turn a profit in the meantime. So we’ve been in dialogue about a few options for distribution of CI, but for now our hope is to make a streamlined, 55-minute cut of the film for possible TV broadcast, as well as beginning to offer DVDs for purchase most likely in May or early June. Otherwise we will continue to pursue future screenings which we may be able to attend more frequently after we graduate from college in mid-May.

Also, Crude Independence director Noah Hutton was recently profiled in the Hartford Courant– check out the article.

Thanks for checking in and please send along any comments or questions about the project to info@couple3.com… We’ll be happy to answer them. As soon as we get the DVDs up for sale on the site we’ll announce it here, so make sure to stay tuned. And if you’re not following us yet, make sure to get at us on twitter.

We had a special preview screening of Crude Independence in Pleasantville, NY at the Jacob Burns Film Center. I started there the summer after high school (four years ago) working on the theater staff– selling popcorn, sweeping theaters, etc. It was awesome to bring my first film to the Burns and show it in their state-of-the-art theater with HD projection. It was the first time we’ve seen it on a big screen in full HD. I was thrilled to see a lot of friends and family show up for the screening; it was a very memorable night. The screening was followed by a Q&A between myself and NY Times critic Janet Maslin. Here are some photos from the evening:

Sam and I leave tomorrow morning for SXSW in Austin. We’ll be joined there by co-producer Sara Kendall and editor Alex Footman, as well as some friends who are making it down for the festival. We’re all very excited to get down there and we’ll be sure to update this blog during our stay down there. You can follow us on Twitter for the latest updates… yes, we’ve given in to the Twitter craze. Thanks for reading.

As the week went on at Big Sky, I got to know some of the festival staff and we all had a great past few days watching docs during the day and hitting the Missoula nightlife in the evening. I met some directors whose work I had the fortune of seeing at the festival, including Automorphosis director Harrod Blank (son of the great Les Blank), whose film is a fantastically entertaining tour of the art car scene across the U.S. Shot all on 16 mm, Harrod’s documentary is full of incredible characters and inspiring stories, as is Harrod’s own story of making this beautiful film over the past sixteen years or so and the journey it has taken him on. This film really ought to make it into theaters and be seen across the country.

On Wednesday I saw the International Documentary Challenge films—a selections of winners from the yearly open competition where participants are assigned a general theme and a specific genre, then have five days to shoot and edit a 4-7 minute documentary short. I had a chance to talk about the model of the IDC with its director, Doug Whyte, who introduced the lineup to the crowd at the Wilma.

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It’s day four of our stay in Missoula, Montana for the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival. We screened Crude Independence on Sunday afternoon in the historic Wilma Theater for a good crowd and got some great questions in the Q&A and some nice comments after the screening. It hasn’t been as jam packed as our time in Oxford last weekend, but nonetheless it’s been great to be part of such a prestigious documentary fest. The festivalgoers here are loyal doc fans and it’s a great environment to show new work and take in a ton of new documentaries, as well as two terrific retrospectives going on this week for legendary doc-makers Ron Mann and Joe Berlinger, who happens to have a film he’s bringing here called Crude that premiered at Sundance last month. Looking forward to seeing it on Thursday.

Sam and I spent the last three days planted in our seats on the balcony of the Wilma, taking in as many films as we could. Sam went back to NY today but I’m here for the long haul until Friday and looking forward to the panels and the rest of the films in the lineup. I want to mention the films I’ve seen so far… (more…)

We had a blast in Oxford this weekend as we showed Crude Independence for the first time to an audience in a real theater, and the response was terrific. The place was packed and we had people sitting on stairs and standing in the wings, and we got some great questions in the Q&A that followed (you can watch a full video of the Oxford Q&A with Sam and I here).

But the biggest news came later in the night on Saturday, when Crude Independence won the Jury Prize for Best Documentary Feature at the festival. Sam and I were totally shocked to win and stumbled through an acceptance speech, received the “Hoka” statuette and a cash prize and then had a great time with the festival crowd for the rest of the evening. Stay tuned for pictures from the weekend.

It was an exciting start to our festival run and we’re eager to get to Big Sky this coming weekend for our next screening.

Crude Independence has been selected for the 2009 SXSW Film Festival. We are really thrilled to be part of such an amazing festival as the journey of this film continues. We now have five festivals to attend in the next two months (another announcement coming soon) and can’t wait to bring CI to Austin, where we’ll be part of the Emerging Visions competition, highlighting first-time and up and coming filmmakers. 

Sam and I will fly to Austin on March 13th and stay for the duration of the festival, through the 22nd, which is conveniently over both of our spring breaks from college. You can check out the full SXSW program here, just announced this evening.

Also, here’s an interview that Sam and I did about the making of Crude Independence for Tim O’Shea’s blog, Talking with Tim. Thanks for reading, and stay tuned for more updates as they happen. Next time you’ll hear from us will probably next weekend, when we head down to the Oxford Film Festival.