College student Theda is a pill addict who elects to undergo an experimental sleep treatment. When she's finally awakened, she discovers that her treatment has left her on the verge of a psychic breakthrough… or a psychotic breakdown.
If the forking paths of your future unfolded before you, would you know which one to take? Would you have analysis paralysis? Would you question your sanity? Does it even matter? These and other dorm room debates lurk in the heart of the independent feature film Pill Head, an irreverent “art house psychodrama,” that confronts addiction, psychoactive drugs, and a quantum quandary as a young heroine asks “Is this real or is it Memorex?”
An expansion of the darkly comic universe of writer-director Daedalus Howell’s “Lumaville” novels (Quantum Deadline; The Late Projectionist), our locally-set feature film boasts an award-winning creative crew eager to add a dab of noir and a dash of the French New Wave to this stridently independent exploration of art and cult cinema.
Pill Head makes a unique and personal statement on a universal theme — redemption — while interrogating the very concept with questions like “Does it count toward my major?” and “Is it habit-forming?” Our motivation to make this film is not merely to scratch a collective aesthetic itch — we hope to galvanize our local film community, employ local artists, and add fuel to Petaluma’s creative economy while capturing this particular moment in its history. To this end, your support is vital to Pill Head — with your participation, we have a prescription to make something special.
The Story
Theda has OD’d – again. She awakens to find herself alive at her college campus medical facility facing a dilemma: Either be expelled or undergo an experimental drug therapy. Theda opts for the latter and begins treatment with Dr. Ashe, a woman whose reputation for dangerous therapies precedes her. Theda is put under and awakes nine months later with the unnerving ability to see branching possibilities in reality.
Unsure of Dr. Ashe’s mysterious intentions and her own footing in reality, Theda seeks out a dodgy metaphysics writer to help her fathom the forking paths she perceives. His council leaves her ill-prepared, however, when the machinations of Dr. Ashe and the spectre of her own addiction begin to wreak havoc on her sense of self.
To break free, she switches identities with another young woman and, as her possible fates unfold before her, she ventures to the brink of sanity to make a solitary choice. The path Theda finds herself on could lead to redemption but it may also cost her life. The question is — which one?
Our Cast
We have a brilliant cast that includes Emily Ahrens, Alia Beeton, Kalin Robbins, Christophe Parker, Pascal Faivre, Dmitra Smith, Ryan Lely, Jaia Foster, Maxime Simonet, Josh Staples, Steve Jaxon, Karen Hell, Lukas Hess, Desmond Howell, Dave McDonald, Shotsie Gorman, Jaia Foster, Brandon Cook, Pepi Morel, and Daedalus Howell.
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Our Crew
Producer-Writer-Director Daedalus Howell
Howell has created over 40 short films, music videos, and branded entertainments that have appeared on MTV, IFC, HBO, and BiteTV. He’s created original shorts series for Universal that aired on Showtime. Howell co-produced the feature film The Aviary and was the publicist on Deep Dark Canyon. He’s the author, most recently, of Quantum Deadline (“...a noirish, sci-fi-lite detective story with a heap of self-parody that's by turns poignant, witty and comic…” – North Bay Bohemian), which establishes the “world” in which Pill Head takes place.
Producer and Production Designer Karen Hess
Hess is a lauded designer and conceptual artist known (under her nom d’artiste “Karen Hell”) for successful collaborations including Stairwell Video, Le Drama Clüb, and Airport Bar). She is also a graphic designer and the founder of the local dialect natural fashion label.
Director of Photography Raymond Daigle
Daigle, a longtime collaborator of Howell’s with whom many of the aforementioned shorts were created, has produced documentary content for and about Bay Area baking juggernaut, Semifreddi's, Gloria Ferrer Caves and Vineyards, and Sharfen Berger chocolatiers among others. His narrative short films have been official selections of the Sonoma International Film Festival, the Windsor Independent Film Fest and Film Fest Albany.
Composer & Sound Design Shannon Ferguson
Shannon Ferguson creates original music for a global roster of projects and clients. Recent productions include music and audio content for national advertising campaigns, feature films, podcasts, web serials and episodic television. Clients include Google, Pillsbury and Nickelodeon. His band, Longwave (RCA/Chrysalis/Sony) is presently recording a new album this Fall.
Casting Director Lori Laube
Since 1999, Laube has worked with producers, photographers and advertising agents from across the U.S.A. including New York, Los Angeles and all over the San Francisco Bay Area. Projects have included feature films, television, commercials, music videos, print, voiceover, industrials, live shows and conventions. Her company, AE Casting, is based in Santa Rosa, CA, and has had hand in such Bay Area projects as the 2010 Sundance Film Festival hit The Violent Kind, Investigation Discovery network crime series sensation I (Almost) Got Away With It.
Assistant Director Ben Staub
Staub boasts a diverse skillset, having firsthand experience with a broad array of media projects including videos for such brand name clients as Adobe, Yahoo, and Salesforce.
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Creative Community Opportunity
Pill Head was developed for an art house audience and intended, ultimately, for release online. The film seeks to catalyze our film community and create a space for local artists to exercise their talents. As such, we regard this project as a work of art as well as entertainment. Your financial contribution benefits a community.
An array of contributor tiers span the gamut from social media shoutouts and digital products to filmmaker dinners and executive producer credits, and are available here.
Any revenue realized by this project goes back into seeding additional local creative ventures via Culture Dept.’s collaborators which could include subsequent films, publishing projects, and other forms of narrative art wherein the talents of area artists can be deployed. We are a for-profit venture in a low-profit industry that believes art can be a pay-to-play experience wherein everyone wins. Your contribution to this project enables up to 30 individual, local artists to practice their craft and respects their professionality by paying them to do so.
Distribution & Marketing
Video on Demand
Pill Head was conceived as a niche, direct-to-audience project with no need for traditional theatrical distribution (thus avoiding the inherent expense and failure most indies experience). Instead, the film will “live” online and its marketing and distribution will likewise be optimized for the online space. Paramount to this strategy is the selection of a platform that will serve as the film’s online home. After extensive research and evaluating case studies, we’ve isolated a few possibilities:
Amazon Video Direct
Arguably the most trafficked destination for online retail, Amazon now offers a distribution solution for independent filmmakers — Amazon Video Direct. With no upfront fees (Amazon retains 50% of earnings from rentals, sales, and Amazon Prime viewings), Pill Head can be made available to the world’s most trusted media retail brand with only a modicum of effort. Likewise, the film will be available in the same marketplace as Howell’s related literary oeuvre, which may ignite synergies between the respective works.
iTunes and Netflix
Of course, iTunes and Netflix are also natural homes for films like Pill Head. To achieve distribution to these channels, however, it’s necessary (at our level) to work through an aggregator. Our research points to two viable options:
Recently purchased by crowdfunding site Indiegogo, Distribber is a popular aggregator for filmmakers despite upfront costs ($1600) and annual dues ($300) to remain in the catalog. Similarly, TuneCore, which is already known for gaining indie musicians access to online markets like iTunes, now offers solutions to filmmakers with an upfront fee of $1300.
VHX
Recently acquired by and integrated into upscale video platform Vimeo, VHX is affordable, scalable, and has a number of features that ease the friction of marketing direct-to-consumer. Key among these features are options to rent or purchase films and the collection of audience email addresses for continued outreach. VHX’s baked-in embeddable sales form also enables any website or Facebook fan page to become a point of sale. For example, PillHeadMovie.com could be fully integrated into the VHX platform. Likewise, our Facebook fan page and personal sites and social presences of cast and crew (DaedalusHowell.com, for example) can also become points of sale thanks to the embeddable nature of the VHX sales solution.
Film Festivals
The most direct means of gaining organic press coverage is via feature stories and reviews pegged on film festival screenings. Prospective festival submissions include SF IndieFest, Sonoma International Film Festival, and Napa Valley Film Festival among others.
Alternative Venues
From museums like The UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (a.k.a BAMPFA) to college campuses (The Sonoma Film Institute comes to mind), there are a surfeit of screening opportunities both locally and internationally. Libraries represent another opportunity to showcase the film and share the story of its inception.
Public Relations
To spur online sales, we’re launching an online public relations campaign. Fortunately, both producers have worked as professional journalists and have an innate understanding of press release protocol and the relationships to boot (see their previous success promoting conceptual art, of all things). To wit, we’ll leverage existing relationships with local media (North Bay Bohemian, KSRO, KSVY, etc., entities where Howell regularly appears) to generate buzz.
National Media
To penetrate media markets outside of our local sphere of influence, we’re launching a public relations-oriented campaign predicated on newsjacking existing trend stories to push the film and its corresponding themes into broader media conversations. Topics du jour might include “prescription medication addiction in college” or the 75th Anniversary of LSD in 2018, which are both germane to the Pill Head experience.
Bloggers
The surfeit of film bloggers who specialize in reviewing art house films only keeps growing. Among our targets are 366 Weird Movies, Art House America, Art House Convergence, and Wonderful Cinema.
Social Media
We’ll also continue our ongoing social media campaign, which commenced prior to pre-production and last the lifespan of the film. The official hashtag, as seen on all collateral and media interactions is #pillheadmovie.
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Schedule
Preproduction
We began breaking down our script, budgeting and scheduling, and assembled our production team through May and June of 2017. Locations have been sourced, props and costumes are in progress, and our performers were cast in late July. We are on target to begin principal photography on September 28, 2017.
Post-production
Post-production (editing, mixing, composing) begins in early November 2017 with the film completed and ready for film festival submissions by the end of February 2018. A private cast and crew screening is tentatively scheduled for March 2018.
Budget
The total budget for Pill Head, which includes paying (and feeding!) the creative and technical talent, post-production, and marketing and distribution, is $28,000, of which $20,000 is being sought by this campaign. To provide context, the Screen Actors Guild “Ultra Low Budget Agreement” is for films budgeted at $250,000. Accordingly, our film is “Ultra Ultra Low.” But that’s all we need.
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A Transformative Time
This is a transformative time not only for filmed entertainment (binge anything lately?) but for the city of Petaluma itself, which is going through unprecedented change as it embraces its place on the national stage (Petaluma was recently ranked as the top Fall travel destination in Harper’s Bazaar). Pill Head also marks a rare occasion in which the entire creative and production staff will be from the Bay Area.
We intend to capture and preserve this twilight moment (“before Petaluma was cool”) and insert our movie into the auspicious timeline of Petaluma’s cinematic history. It’s impressive when one considers how the following, partial list of locally-shot films have contributed to the culture at-large:
The Birds, American Graffiti, Peggy Sue Got Married, Phenomenon, Basic Instinct, Scream, Lolita, Inventing the Abbots, Pleasantville, Mumford, and the recent Netflix hit 13 Reasons Why.
As much as we esteem the above films (including major works by Hitchcock, Lucas and Coppola — Oh, my!) none had their creative germination in town. Pill Head marks a rare occasion in which the entire creative and production staff will be from the area.
Your Contribution is Meaningful
By participating in this creative economy, you help make this particular creative moment a milestone for our town and our artists, and while making a meaningful contribution to local culture and the world of cinema.