Longship Films produces highly engaging and consumable feature films through a process we call ‘Seat of the Pants Filmmaking’. Independent filmmaking is all about the story and the experience. We bring human stories to the screen. Lean start-up is a methodology which allows teams to focus on value producing activities, and not waste time and effort. Longship Films uses lean filmmaking tactics to c
reate and market wonderful human stories. Typical industry film making is based on forcing the Universe into a script, a shooting schedule and a marketing plan. Seat of the Pants filmmaking puts the Universe in the lead and the rest follows. The Universe plays a direct part in writing the script while the shooting is underway…
The creative process is essentially a small team of highly adaptable and capable film professionals embarking on a week long journey to shoot the story. We have three weeks of pre-production, however there are only story concepts and character ideas ready before the boat sets sail. We do not have a full script when we start shooting. Flexibility and responsiveness are key, and the writer is on the team to adapt the concepts and characters based on whatever the Universe puts in the teams path. The post-production is limited to two months, so the full creative window is only three months. Each of the team members is a volunteer and covers their own costs. However, should the film be sold, each team member will receive a higher percentage of profits than they would on a typical industry production. There are a set of rule which each team member must comply to in order to join. These rules are designed to achieve the objective in the most creative and efficient way possible. The marketing process is based on a rapid testing approach with the market and waterfalls quickly to next concepts. We will pitch the finished film to a select group of distributors and agents while submitting to a few select festivals. If this first round does not respond, we will quickly pivot and release online via pay-per-view platforms. Sometime after that, we will release it for free viewing. This approach allows us to create high quality stories with essentially zero costs. This is the sharing economy applied to filmmaking. There are no assistants. We all do our part and come up with a viable story on film, and give it a chance to reach various audiences.
