Reaper, Inc. Part 1 — Winning

AKA Moon Shot

I haven’t talked about this pubicly. I didn’t share it on my social media pages nor did I really tell a lot of people — till now. Much to my surprise I won the “Web Series Competition #7” on Filmaka.com.

Before we get into it — heres my elevator pitch for Reaper, inc.

Reaper, inc. is a dark comedy about every day people working in a call center for the Devil. Season 1 is centered around Jessica, who forgets to turn her phone off after hours and is faced with a problem she has never had to deal with before — resurrection.

In the first installment of this series I’m not going to get into the characters, plot, story, etc… about Reaper, inc. I’m sure that will be covered later. Part one is about my experience winning a large web film contest. With all that aside lets get into it!

The way I found out was amusing to say the least. Midway through a preproduction meeting for another film (02/25/2020) I got a friend request from Filmaka (on Facebook). I accepted becuase I figured why not? They are probally building their audience base and wanted to friend everyone who submitted. Not a big deal, a lot companies are trying to build their social media presence and because I’ve started to venture into the realm online video contests (again) accepting their request would be a good way to see what they are doing.

Like any rational person right after I accepted their request I instantly went to their page to do some good old fastioned stalking only to discover two things:

1: They had a very low friend count.

2: Every single person who was a friend of theirs had won or placed in a contest they had done in the past (go go social media stalking).

Suddenly I had begun to wonder had I won this? There was no way a (largly former) freelance DP who just ventured into writing/directing could write something strong enough win a contest such as this. I quickly opened my email to see if I had won this and if there was a congratulatory email there. There wasn’t. I checked my spam. Nothing. Nada. Ziltch.

Dejected I closed my email. Closed Facebook and went back to focusing on the meeting and film at hand. The Skype call ends. I shower and decide to check Instagram only to discover I have a notification which is strange because I hadn’t posted anything in ages and hadn’t worked on a film in awhile. I click on the notification only to see:

My first response was holy shit I had actually won. My second was to check my email — again nothing. Nada. Ziltch. My third was to call my parents who (wisely) advised me not to post or share that. My fourth step was to take down my website (for now). My fifth was to text all the people I was dragging into this with me.

I spent the next few days impatiently waiting an email from Filmaka, which came about 3 days later (02/28/2020) with a bunch of paperwork and a number to call if I had any questions. I set up a call with them around 1:00cst on a Tuesday (03/03/2020 I think) with my dad (accountant/lawyer).

I won’t lie, that morning at work was rough. All I could think about was that call. What would I expect? How it would it be? Would they be strict? Would they be laid back? Something in between? Better yet — What did I even want? What did I hope for?

Well, truth be told, I had no idea. At rougly 12:55 I walked out of my job to take lunch. I went to my car, turned it on, and waited. My dad called me at 1:00, asked if I was okay with signing over the IP to Filmaka, and what we wanted to talk about. We talked about for a couple minutes before conferencing them.

The phone call was breif. Jana answered our questions and seemed really laid back and hands off. That evening I signed the paperwork, had it FedEx’s to them the next day, and headed off to the races!

So what is this series of blogs? What’s it about? Whats the point?

1: I’ll be honest here — A lot my reasons are marketing it. If enough people read the blog hopefully they’ll watch the series and share it with friends.

2: There really isn’t any content out there about producing something in this budget range. I hope that my successes, failures, and process can help other budding filmmakers out there.

3: I want to.

Stay tuned for more blogs about this journey I find myself on.

See you in the next installment!

You can follow me on Instragram here.

You can follow Reaper, Inc. On Instagram here.

P.S. Filmaka didn’t directly sponsor this blog other than giving me 35,000 to make a webseries.