Wednesday, November 24, 2010

3D Doll Porn, RealTouch and a New ‘Ambassador of Strange’.

So, you say it’s your birthday?

It’s Thanksgiving, and so we’re getting ready to take a couple days off to eat turkey and hopefully not much else. Before I shut down mission control here for some much needed ‘down time’, I’ll fill you in on a couple of new developments here at Maddy G.

We started work on “A Very Jenny Christmas” for December. It’s a new Doll Porn Adventure and we’ve been discussing shooting it in 3D. I had some concerns that all the ‘Reds’ in the costuming would fuck with the Anaglyphic (Red / Blue) Playback. So, I did some test shots, and it turns out not to be the case.

jenny-3d-test-05

Pretty remarkable, I’d say. There’s actually some science to why the color scheme isn’t a problem. In the Anaglyphic Post Process, the ‘Left Eye’ video has all the Blue and Green levels removed, leaving only the Red. Then, the ‘Right Eye’ video has all the Red Levels removed, leaving the Blue and Greens, so when the two images are overlapped, all three color channels (RGB) are represented.

In this above shot of Jenny, I shot both ‘Eyes’ handheld, rather than using the 3D Camera Mount we built. I’ve been doing a ton of 3D shooting and post lately and I have a pretty good handle on the post process, so I just wanted to see if I could do it by ‘feel’.

“A Very Jenny Christmas” is a short film like “Award Show Fiasco”, so I think it might be a good project to try it on, especially because I can fit both versions on a DVD. We’ll be shooting it right after the break, so I’ll keep you posted on it goes. If it’s a pain in the ass on day one, I’ll probably abandon the 3D on this one, because we only have 4 days to shoot on this before I’ll start running into deadline crunch’s to get it out by Christmas.

In other news… This is a little early, but Maddy G Productions will be part of the re-launch of RealTouch, the virtual sex machine that was so popular, it’s been sold out for many months. The company didn’t anticipate the demand I guess, and quickly sold out of the machines and had to do another manufacturing run.

realtouch

If you’re not familiar with it, you plug this baby into your computer, then plug yourself into the unit ( you know what I mean) and then watch ‘RealTouch Enabled’ movies that react precisely with the action on the scene. So, what you see – you also feel. And at a price point of around $200, it uhm… blows away any other virtual sex device on the market.

In January, RealTouch will be re-introducing the device with a new marketing campaign and new studio partners, and I’m proud to say we’ll be a part of that. Many of Maddy’s ‘Girlfriend Experience’ movies like “Naughty Bits” and “Oral Servitude” will be available “RealTouch Enabled” as well as a couple of brand new films shot specifically for it. And that’s just skimming the surface, but like I said, it’s still pretty early.

In the fury of bullshit that was going on in the last couple of weeks, with our computers being hacked, and whatnot, I don’t think I mentioned that we have a new Ambassador of Strange, Lewis Adams. Congrats to Hyland Church on his promotion.

Lastly, we have been nominated for 4 AVN Awards this year.
“Best Pro-Am Series” for “Inside Marie’s Play Place”
”Best Specialty Release” for “Lil’ Stella’s Really Short Stories”
”Best Solo Release” for “Alone at Last”
and our 2nd Nomination for “Best Original Song” this time for “What Am I Gonna Do About It” from “Inside Marie’s Play Place 4”. The song was co-written by Hyland Church actually, and performed by Harlow. Last year it was “Kiss The Girl” written by Denny Smith and Performed by Best of Seven, from the “Regarding Jenny” Soundtrack.

Enjoy your thanksgiving, and travel safe.

- Mark

Saturday, November 13, 2010

MaddyGTV and Other Good Problems to Have

We launched www.MaddyGTV.com last September, only 2 months ago. We’ve been trying to get “Inside Marie’s Play Place” and “Regarding Jenny” on Pay Cable for a year now. These two shows are the most expensive property’s the company has.

These shows are expensive, because of the size of the productions, the locations involved and the amount of cast involved. Working with a RealDoll is not all the glamour that’s been reported.

“Inside Marie’s Play Place” was budgeted to make it to cable television by Series 3. It still hasn’t been picked up. We’ve now done 4 Series, a ‘Thanksgiving Special’ and 3 Spin-Off’s. It’s gone on longer than we' can afford, because it’s got a lot of fans around the world, and well… it’s hard for all of us here at Maddy G to let them down.

DSC_0166 (3)

Well… a full year went by between the first episodes of “Play Place” and “Regarding Jenny” and we’ve done (literally) everything we can to get the attention of the cable programmers. “The show’s too weird”, or “Who’s gonna watch a RealDoll?” to simply “I don’t get it.” We’ve heard all of it.

But over this last year, the audience has grown beyond what we expected. It’s everywhere, so it’s hard to get an actual number, but our best estimates put the total viewership at around 500,000 from more than half the world. We’re tracking 102 Different Countries who have tuned in. So… no matter what the cable programmers are saying, this ‘show’ has an audience.

We decided, as a last ditch attempt, before we fold the whole hand and move these two shows into the history books, we’d start our own Internet TV Channel and start running the show.

And www.MaddyGTV.com was born. We set a budget of 200 gigs a month in Bandwidth. Zero advertising budget, so we’d have to get the word out thru the site network and social networking. The whole point is to get people to watch the show and decide for themselves if they want to see more of it.

Correction. To get as many viewers as we can, within budget, so we don’t go broke in the process.

We launched September 1st, 2010 with the ‘Pilot Episode’ of all our shows, plus “Fury” as the ‘Free Movie of the Week’. By the end of that month, we ran the entire “Play Place Series” as well as all of Maddy’s ‘mainstream movies’ and we had 11,000 viewers tuning in mostly from the United States, Canada and Europe. (No surprise there, that’s Maddy’s core audience). We used like 50gigs of bandwidth.

fury-freemovie-side

The network was built to accommodate 200 viewers simultaneously, and during September, we had a couple of nights where we had 400 – 500 viewers, and no real complaints and no real problems with the functionality of the network. Month one – handled.

Month Two: October. The official 1 year anniversary of “Regarding Jenny” being released, so we featured the series running a new episode a week, for four weeks, opposite the first four episodes of “Inside Marie’s Play Place”. Plus, we featured a few new movies from our friends at other studio’s. “Day of The Ax” from Brain Damage and “Tear” from Bobby Jones Films.

The first week of October had 13,000 viewers. More than the entire Month of September. And it just kept growing. By the end of October, we had tracked 58,000 viewers from 99 different countries. We exceeded our bandwidth budget half way thru the 3rd week.

Now, we’re having some problems. Some viewers are experiencing long buffering times, and some are having connection problems all together. There’s simply too many viewers accessing the files at once during peak times. The solution to this problem is an upgrade to the system that would utilize a ‘CDN’ or ‘Content Delivery Network’ much like the network news sites use. The upgrade would cost about $1,000 to implement and raise our monthly bandwidth budget from $200 to $500, the monthly cost of maintaining the CDN.

Since MaddyGTV is free, we just don’t have the cash.

So, here’s our conundrum. We have yet to achieve the traffic levels required to lure paying advertisers, but the traffic we are getting, we can’t afford on Affiliate Advertising alone. And our affiliate advertising is doing exceptionally well. We’re converting 1:3 to Amazon.com, and in fact sold out of the “Day of the Ax” DVD over the Halloween weekend. We’re converting 1:15 to HotMovies. The rub in affiliate advertising, is the commissions are small. From a $20 DVD sale at Amazon, we get like $.80. We get like $0.03 per minute at Hotmovies. All combined, we earned like $40 in affiliate advertising during October.

Between September and October, we more than quadrupled our viewership. If we grow at all, yet alone double or triple the viewership, then www.MaddyGTV.com will become a financial liability, and will be in real danger of closing.

Weird, because having that many viewers should be a good thing, right? It seems that way to me too.

However… ‘Tube Sites’ and ‘Torrents’ have made pretty much everyone think content is free. It’s really hard to get someone to pay for what they believe is, or should be – free.

We have ‘donate’ buttons, and we have a DVD store, and all the proceeds go directly towards our bandwidth costs, but it’s not really working. No one’s really buying, and no one’s donating, and so all of us here at Maddy G Productions are trying to figure out what to do.

“90 Days” was our agreed upon test window. If the idea wasn’t working, we’d know for sure in 3 months. The problem, is we were expecting a clearer indicator. If no one was watching, that would be easy to pull the plug. But a lot of people are watching, and those numbers are growing. The fact that they aren’t spending any money there, can be attributed to many factors. Including that the World Economy is crushed, and in most parts of the world total bullshit.

So… we’re going to run full speed ahead in November and see where we end up.

If you have any thoughts on it, or possible solutions… e-mail me.

mark@mariemadison.com

- Mark

Mark Audess
Maddy G Productions
www.MaddyGTV.com