[poll id=”2″]
TL;DR summary: Jim and I want to start doing one movie review a week, and are wondering if the listeners would be willing to pay $1/to listen to the resulting cast. Read on for details…
So, Jim and I started talking last night about things we could do to take Bald Move to the next level. How we can do more casts, more shows, and maybe have time to get back into the kind of critical writing we were doing on Breaking Bad and to a lesser extent The Walking Dead. The problems we always come up against are lack of time. With working full time jobs, relationships, kids in the mix, it’s hard to expand on what we’re doing.
As an experiment, over the winter there were times I did four casts in a week, more often three casts, and of course I’ve done two casts for the whole run of Game of Thrones and Mad Men, and it’s pretty grueling. I don’t think I can do that again without making changes. Allow me to explain. Each cast requires the following effort:
- Watch the show. (1 hour)
- Watch it again and take notes (1.5 hours)
- Watch it again (1 hour, and optional, but I find the optimal number of watches that = a good cast is 3).
- Read critical reviews, and relevant reddit/forum/facebook threads (3-4 hours)
- Read and compile feedback (varies greatly, from 30 minutes to up to 2+ hours on a fat finale cast)
- Record (1.5 hours)
- Edit/Post-production (1 hour)
As you can see, that adds an approximately 8-10 hour work load per television show we cast about on any given week, and that represents us working at maximum capacity with our present schedules. Some of the work gets divided, and we’re a 3 man operation at this point, but the actual viewing and note taking and casting doesn’t work like that. The point of this isn’t some “woe is us” guilt trip, because we enjoy doing it. The point is to explain why it is so hard for us to just start up “Homeland”, or “Boardwalk Empire”, or why I can’t just get around to banging out “The Wire” and why it’s difficult to fill in all the seasons of “Breaking Bad”. There’s only so much time, and we’re not interested in doing more and sacrificing quality. Right now it’s our hobby.
But what if we could scale back some of our paying activities and make some more room? At that point it starts blurring the line between a avocation and vocation. And we’re wondering if that’s something you’d be interested in helping to make happen…
We want to start doing weekly movie reviews. Our idea is we post a poll, either here or on Facebook, and we put all the movies that are opening that week on it. You guys and gals all vote for which movie you want us to see. You can pick a good one you’d like an honest, thoughtful, critical evaluation of, or you can punish us with a shitty one that we’ll get liquored up and skewer. You can be the Dr. Forrester to our Joel.
Here’s the plan: We get up Friday morning, catch the first matinee, cast around lunch time, and have it out by early afternoon. You can get our take on it before you get off work, and go into the weekend confident that your entertainment choice will be sound. I feel like we’ve earned a rep for a no bullshit, honest review, and you know us well enough that you can take our individual tastes to the bank and feel confident that we’re going to shoot straight when it comes to our opinion, and not pander or bitch/nitpick where it’s not warranted.
The catch is, these bonus movie casts will be $1/episode. And depending on how hard it is to support other outlets, they might only be an iTunes/Zune market kind of deal. We don’t know the details on that just yet.
Our question to you; is this something that your’e interested in? If enough people express intereset, then we”ll try it out. If we make enough to be worth it and everybody is happy, we’ll find a way to make it work long term. And this will hopefully lead to bigger and better things.
Why movies, you might ask? Why don’t we tackle some other awesome TV series? Certainly that’s the goal to work towards, but Jim and I are both budding cinephiles. And pace our last Mad Men podcast, we are both committment phobes. We honestly don’t know if we can make this work with our schedules for a 13 week season. But we’re confident we can give it a trial run over the summer. The eventual goal is to make more podcasts, cover more topics, and to continue to do a better and better job at building this little community of like minded individuals that all enjoy smart television. We’re covering our expenses so far with what we’re doing, and in recent times we’re actually making a bit, but at the rate we’re going it’s going to be a long time before we can really expand.
I want to make it clear, that we always want to provide the bulk of our material for free. Whether you donate, support us on Amazon, etc is always up to you. I promise this will NOT be the gradual slippery slope towards a pay site, so please don’t think if you throw us a dollar today you’re putting the cruel yoke of capitalism on your shoulders forever more. And again, this is just an idea, we have a few others we’re working on. But the first step is opening up the conversation to those that got us to this point. Let us know what you think!
