Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Cam Marshall. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Alright, Cam thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.
The most meaningful project I worked on is my latest feature film title “Blackwoods”. What made this movie meaningful was that it was a film I wrote to honor my Dad, Bradford Marshall who passed away from a heart attack in march of 2022. My dad and I were very close and this was the first parent I lost. Losing him left me with a lot of grief I didn’t know how to process at the time and I was struggling to pull myself away from my work. I had just finished my first feature film “Freaky Profiling” so I was in full marketing mode getting that project ready to release on streaming services. My older brother reached out to me that fall and invited me on a black male wellness retreat in Asheville NC. Asheville is a city that I have always wanted to visit and doing it with my brother felt like a great way for us to spend sometime together because I hadn’t seen him since my father’s funeral. I’m really glad my brother invited me on that trip because I experienced the healing I needed from losing my father so suddenly. The retreat was ran by other black men who were willing to pour into each other, hike with one another, meditate together, and do yoga as a group. These are things I had never done alongside other black men before. In the past when I hiked mountain trails, meditated, or practiced Yoga it felt like I was intruding white spaces to be where I was. This time I didn’t have to prove I belonged, I didn’t have to worry about judgement from others. Instead I could let my guard down and fully embrace where I was at in the moment. This experience felt powerful, it felt rare, it felt unique and like something I wanted others to experience. That’s when the script idea for Blackwoods came to me. A story about brotherhood, featuring 5 black male friends coming together in the wilderness to help each other overcome the personal struggles they’re facing back home. It wasn’t until I started doing research on this topic that I realized the shocking numbers of suicide for black males have risen to 60% since 2014. That males are 2x more likely to commit suicide than females are. That 3 our of 4 men when asked by Males mental health magazine said they don’t have one good male friend they can call if they’re in a crisis. Men are losing their purpose for life and men are losing their sense of community. Most men don’t belong to any type of group, club, organization or friend group outside of their family anymore. I soon realized that this was a topic that was beyond just my own mental health journey as a black man who recently lost his father but that this was a story that all my friends could benefit from. First I poured my heart into writing that script, then I found 5 actors I trusted to play the group of friends well and we filmed the film over the course of two days at Red River Gorge in KY. Looking back on it I am proud of how this project came together. We’ve now screened the film three different times and won best screenplay at the Catalano film festival in Dayton Ohio. As I accepted the award for best screenplay I was reminded that this film was inspired by the grief I felt after my father’s passing and now there I was celebrating his memory with a story that was inspired by the father he was to me.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
My name is Cam Marshall. I am a filmmaker from Cincinnati OH. I was born in Chicago IL where I study film after attending Ball State University in Muncie IN. After spending my early years in Chicago, my formative years in rural Richmond In, and now my adult career in Cincinnati Oh I have mixture of midwest city and country values I try to bring to my work. I started my production company Hear and See Productions in 2018 as a way to create video productions for churches that needed creative faith based content. After two years of providing video services to various clients I pivoted my company into solely film production. To date we have produced two short films and two feature films. Our first short film Holy Zombie is currently streaming on Vimeo and Youtube for free. Holy Zombie won 22 awards in 14 different film festivals around the world. Freaky Profiling was our first feature film. It is currently streaming for free on TUBI and on Amazon Prime. Freaky Profiling won 10 awards from 7 film festivals around the world. Our latest feature film Blackwoods is currently set to release on streaming this fall and won Best screen play at the Catalona film festival in spring of 2024. My goal as a filmmaker is to tell stories I am passionate about, find the right platform to share my stories with a growing audience and to try my best to be profitable in order to make my next movie. The best way to support my films is to watch them online, review them at places like Internet Movie Database (IMDB), Rotten tomatoes, Amazon, and Letterboxd. The more reviews we get the more views we get and the more views we get the bigger our profit margins are to keep making more films.
Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?
I am still building my audience on social media and trying to grow on all platforms at the moment. My strategy from the beginning has been different then a lot of indie filmmakers. One big mistake I see people do when they are indie films is make a social media account for every movie they make. In theory that sounds good to grab the attention of an audience for the movie you’ve created but what happens when the news cycle for that movie ends? On average most indie films will gain around 200 to 400 followers per film. That’s if you market the social page well, get the cast and crew to follow the page and gather some of their followers to get excited about the film too. However after the film premieres, goes on streaming, is done with festivals, and theres no more content to post about the film now what do you do with those followers? I’ve seen filmmakers do this time and time again for every short film or feature film they create and it always leaves me wondering why not just make one social media home for all your films. If you capture 300 followers with one movie, and then bring on another 500 followers with your next movie, before you know it you’ll have a couple of thousand followers all waiting to see what project you put out next. If one of your films is more popular than the others then you’re able to expand your audience even faster while also bringing the fans you had from your previous films along for the ride. I think building a central hub for all of your film content is an essential tool for building momentum as an indie filmmaker.
We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?
When I first started making movies I thought the process of finding funding was hard but once you found the funding, and you finished making your movie you were done. I couldn’t have been more wrong. As an independent filmmaker the real work starts when your movie is finished. Getting on set, working with other creatives, capturing each scene, and then editing the project is the fun part. The labor comes when you have to try to build an audience for you movie. I don’t think any filmmaker loves marketing their film because its the part of the industry that doesn’t feel as creative as storytelling does. If you don’t have a famous faced attached to your film them you’ll be surprised at how few people care about your poster, or about you teaser. The trick is not getting discouraged but instead continue to be consistent. Keep posting about your movie, get your cast invested in posting about your film, and connect your audience to whatever it is that makes the story you are telling unique. When I made my first film Holy Zombie in 2020 it seemed like nobody cared what I was doing until it won best short film at the LA film festival and best comedy at the New York international film festival. Once I won those awards people were interested in how someone they knew from the midwest could create a short film that was good enough to win in those bigger cites. Now I am on my fourth film and it’s starting to be difficult to keep that same audience engaged with my work. People have shown up to support my last three projects but without much momentum from Hollywood or bigger budgets to move me towards theaters it’s starting to feel like the nobody cares what’s next. People are starting to get burnt out own seeing my latest project screen at a local theater and that leaves me questioning how do I attract a new audience? How to widen my approach for my films? Do I need to network at more festivals, find the right lower level star to give my movie a chance, or just keep creating films with the hope of one finally breaking through on an international level? These are the answers I am currently searching for, wondering how to create more industry buzz for my projects without relocating? I had to unlearn that nobody cares about your feature film until you give them a reason to. You can go in to debt trying to make a movie but if you have no distribution plan for how to make your money back then climbing out of that hole of debt might take years. I believe the best way to make your money back on an indie movie is by having a solid distribution plan in place before you start filming your movie, and if that’s not possible have build a social audience that will pay to see your movie if you ask them to buy a ticket to a screening or use a online paywall to watch it. That way you will know exactly what your audience is looking for and how much money you anticipate making to break even on my film budget. It’s not easy being a Film-trepreneur but if you got the hustle and a good story you’ll be surprised at what you can accomplish.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/_hearandsee/?hl=en
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/p/Hear-And-See-Productions-100064050842567/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@hearandseeproductions5499
