In a similar way to how musicians share a video of a bridge or chorus from a soon-to-be-released song to drive pre-saves, that is how the 'Americano' production intends to use stills and dailies on Instagram and TikTok to drive the audience to the YouTube channel or the podcast.

The longer that an audience is engaging with the content and following the social accounts the more attractive the project becomes to potential sponsors and partners.
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The modern entertainment landscape is an eyeball economy that operates in a clockwise fashion where output and engagement lead to countless revenue streams beyond just the box office. As filmmakers, especially now during this moment in Hollywood history, we should be running toward a world where creators have negotiating power directly with their audience. In an ideal world, all creators own their intellectual property and have the ability to sell it directly to their fans if they want to.

What would drive you to pre-save or pre-buy a movie?

In February of 2005, the website YouTube began in San Bruno, California by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim as a place where anyone could upload, watch, share, and actively engage with videos posted by other users. While the early days looked more like home videos, the content matured with the platform.

On February 3, 2011, a young creative named Issa Rae uploaded the first episode of The Mis-Adventures of Awkward Black Girl, a show that followed the life of Rae’s characters as she interacts with the world around her and the uncomfortable positions she is put in as both a woman and an African American. The show was shared through blogs and social media creating a buzz that scored Rae interviews with traditional media platforms that allowed her to leverage the attention into a Kickstarter campaign that funded the rest of the show’s first season. The show’s second and final season was produced by Pharrell Williams to award-winning acclaim. The final episode aired on February 28th, 2013. In August of that year, Rae began working with Larry Wilmore on a series pilot with a similar concept. The showed would be called ‘Insecure’ and the pilot would be picked up by HBO in October of 2015. The show would run for 5 seasons and propelled Rae into being a household name. 
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One of the biggest factors for Rae’s success is filling the void in an industry that had a scarcity of content that captures the black, female experience in a demographic that was exploding. Seeing that hole and calling the audience to action built an unbreakable bond and proved to key decision-makers that growth lay in the audience Rae built a fanbase in. YouTube proved to be the perfect platform to grow for Rae because distribution and advertising costs were minimal so most of her budget went into the product and there was no barrier to entry for audiences such as subscription fees or ticket prices. Rae’s ability to capitalize on a hungry audience with accessible content and a call to action built a community that is actively rooting for her success which translates to growth for whatever distributors partner with her on her creative endeavors.

What other filmmakers followed a similar path?

My list hasn't changed too much in 2024, but it's still early.
 
1 Past Lives
2. Oppenheimer
3. Barbie
4. Killers of the Flower Moon
5. The Holdovers
6. No Hard Feelings
7. Air
8. Nyad
9. A Good Person
10. Quiz Lady

What did I miss?

Let me introduce you to my company. We are Palomino Productions, and so we've been an audio and digital entertainment company. But with 'Americano' coming out, we need a logo and a color scheme for our film division.

So here are the finalists...

Which one do you like the best? 

My philosophy for the marketing angel of this project is that everything about the production should be used for content. That starts with a narrative podcast telling the story of getting from script to screen.

YouTube is a big catalyst for podcast audience growth in 2023, with sharing clips from longer-form content being a key part of subscriber growth. The goal here is to build a decent subscriber base ahead of dropping the first trailer.

These episode clips will be posted during pre-production and will allow the audience to build an interest in the journey of the project and eventually buy movie tickets. After posting the first full episode, we will schedule two to three clips to publish every day. The podcast series will be a week behind physical production to lay out the whole process in a 7 day narrative.

The clips from the podcast will also be edited to fit the TikTok and Instagram Reels aspect ratio. In the same way, we are posting on YouTube 2 to 3 times a day, we will be posting the same clips on TikTok and Instagram to reach the audience on all platforms in an effort to create a social media groundswell.

What part of making a movie would be most interesting to you?

​When I started writing ‘Americano’, I was on vacation with my now-fiancé’s family.
 
They vacation very differently than my family did growing up, and I was admittedly a little homesick. (Which is insane because my then-girlfriend and I were living together at the time.)
 
But more than anything that time allowed me reflect and look forward.
 
Being in that position allowed me to write my traditional outlook, the fish-out of water outlook, and multiple different female perspectives. (And if you didn’t guess, yes, it was me with my fiancé, her sister and her mom. A far-cry from the two boys, my dad and my mom house that I grew up in) But it also allowed me to think about my experience in my 20s, next to her sister, who was just about to graduate college. Combine that with the emotional attachment that I assign to the coming-of-age movies and sitcoms that brought my own family together and I was primed to begin a journey that is now going on two years since the initial idea was written down.
 
The concept came together because I put everything that I was and experienced under a microscope. The desire to create a sitcom that morphed into a drama that morphed into a heist movie set next to the tropes that took on spiritual meaning to me growing up.
 
But the most surprising element of writing ‘Americano’, was writing the character of Mak.
 
For the first time in my life, I attempted to write sweet. But not pushover or corny sweet. Like hold-a-community-together-with-kindness sweet. Like fearlessly-loyal-to-almost-the-point-of-personal-neglect sweet. You get the point.
 
I mention this to say, sometimes writing characters is putting on the page a version of you that you don’t show to anyone publicly or feeling inspired by a person or multiple people in your life to create a singular being of aspiration.
 
For young writers, it is hard to get outside of your own perspective. And I firmly believe that opening yourself to others and new experiences will help you find a truer version of yourself.
 
Sure, some of the best of elements of Mak are also the best elements of my fiancé, but it was the way she opened up a part of me and a view on others that helped form a character that is so much more than her, mine or even our family or friends’ perspective. It’s something new. A voice that helps guide others through a journey even if she doesn’t have the answers herself. (Try telling an actor to capture that on film. And yet somehow the talented Lei Nico was able to)
 
And as I sat editing our film on a gloomy spring day in Brooklyn, I realized how much allowing myself to be vulnerable in my own life let me be vulnerable on the page. I hope that makes any sense.

​Among the industrial confines of Roselle Park, New Jersey, a small crew of talented lighting artists, camera magicians, and set-organizing maestros put the finishing touches on the final shot of a feature film.
 
As the make-up artist removes any-and-all blemishes from the faces of the film’s actors, a joy and melancholy mixed with pure exhaustion wash over me as we cross the finish line of our 11-day sprint.
 
For better or for worse, this film had to be shot in 12 days total. 84 pages up. 84 pages down. That was the task for a project with greater ambitions than the budget would allow.
 
The location for the day was a non-descript building that housed an indoor basketball court and a dentist's office nestled between a Meineke Car Care and an H&R Block. With only a red sign next to the steel door marking the entrance to the court, it was the perfect place to conclude our story.
 
‘Americano’ is the story of Jack Armstrong, a college basketball standout who gets injured in the final game of his college career, putting his pro career in peril. With nowhere to turn, he goes back home to work at his family’s coffee shop where he is reunited with his friends from high school who are also beginning their own lives after college.
 
The journey of this story from pen to page to screen was one of reflection. Even if none of the characters in this story look like me, I had lived a version of the same truth that our actors captured on camera.
 
If you’re a recent college graduate with a healthy dose of humility, chances are you’re fighting an internal tug-of-war between standing out and blending in. (I’ll let you guess which location between the coffee shop, with its large outdoor backdrop and even larger lighting rig, and the hidden basketball court I preferred) It was this internal conflict that brought me to make the film in the first place.
 
It was never a dream of mine to make a movie.
 
Growing up in New Jersey, I was primarily obsessed with sports and becoming a sports journalist. There was something about it that seemed to be an obtainable dream. The men and women on television and the radio were relatable. If you went to a sporting event, you saw the broadcasters, the reporters, and the cameramen. Some of them were even the parents of classmates at school. It’s also important to note, that this was 20 years before the film industry would come back to New Jersey. Sure, the Sopranos was in the middle of its historic run, but that seemed more like an anomaly than the regular occurrence it is in New Jersey today.
 
With my eyes on the sports media world, I set out to figure out how to break in. In high school, I attended seminars on the business in New York City, and by college, I landed internships that eventually led to my first job.
 
Those early jobs required working all hours of the day and night, which I had no problem with. Every great movie where a character beats the odds has a montage scene of hard work. This was mine. However, where real life differs from the movies is that you don’t always get out what you put in. Oftentimes, promotions or raises are carrots that are dangled in front of entry-level employees to ensure productivity beyond a role’s pay grade.
 
The infancy of what became the story for ‘Americano’ stemmed from this period of frustration. The realization that graduating college is joining a world, to borrow a phrase from cable television, already in progress.
 
After seven years of climbing up the world of creativity at publicly traded companies, working alongside many of the athletes, broadcasters, and journalists I grew up watching, I realized that the only way to make the life I wanted to make for myself was to go out on my own. At this point, I had fine-tuned a script for ‘Americano’, and began to raise money to try to make a feature. This was the other lesson I learned during my career as a producer, the best way to try to achieve wealth is to own your content. Let the market decide if the package that you put together has value.