On marketing

The focus the last few days has been on marketing our series. Of course, all we want to do is just keep making these. But until a broad enough audience discovers our series, we're restricted on how much we can take on.

I remember back when we made our first Liken in 2003 ("Nephi & Laban," or, as it was then called, "I Will Go and Do"), it took everything we had to get that movie made. Many miracles along the way. As we staggered to the finish line (release date), we were naively hoping that "if we built it, they would come." Well, some did come, and more keep coming with each episode. But it still feels like we have a long way to go before "they" have found us. We are so appreciative of all those who share the series with their friends and family. Without them, who knows if we'd still be going.

Our new marketing guru is working really hard on doing some cool stuff with the artwork for the new movies. I'll see if I can post an in-progress version of the Daniel and the Lions graphic. It's not done-done, but I like where it is going. The Samuel poster he has done is really cool. I'll try to post that one soon.

We did some more tweaking on the Daniel picture lock, and it is getting even tighter. So now we're on Picture Lock 2. Rod's been doing a great job.

I stepped into a couple ADR sessions yesterday, with Matt Bellows, who plays our bad guy, Asad, and Matt Dobson, who plays one of his sidekicks, Hamzah. It's fun to hear the audio elements being added to the visuals. In the rough cuts, we only hear the sounds recorded off the camera mics, so there's lots of distracting noises, like the camera's focus motor, people dropping things off camera, directors speaking over the loud speaker. As each distraction is eliminated, there are fewer and fewer things that pull you out of the movie as you watch it. And that makes me happy.

We've got some fun plans for marketing this holiday season. Still a lot of details to work out, but I'm hopeful that they will help take this series to a much broader audience.