Why Morias Race Flopped So Fucking Hard
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by Blender Dumbass
Aka: J.Y. Amihud. A Jewish by blood, multifaceted artist with experience in film-making, visual effects, programming, game development, music and more. A philosopher at heart. An activist for freedom and privacy. Anti-Paternalist. A user of Libre Software. Speaking at least 3 human languages. The writer and director of the 2023 film "Moria's Race" and the lead developer of it's game sequel "Dani's Race".
Information or opinions might not be up to date.
As you maybe already know ( but actually how would you, nobody reads my articles anyway ) Moria's Race, the movie I've been making for 3 and half years is a worthless piece of shit that nobody wants to see. I could blame people for not wanting to see it. And would be a worthless piece of shit myself doing so, but instead I think I should unleash my deepest fears onto this god forgotten page, so if there is a poor sole actually reading my ramblings, this poor sole could learn how terrible the situation truly is. But to be frank, I am writing it as a form of psychological coping mechanism. ↩ Reply
Context for my psychological deterioration
Since long time ago I was fascinated with stories of success. And since long time ago I was arrogant enough believing that I was destined to success myself. Maybe some of it was my mother's fault. She used to tell me how utterly perfect I am. But since she died from alcohol poisoning I started to become way more sober and instead of success I have depression now. Imagine growing up thinking you will be the next Steven Spielberg, just wait and those dumb hoards of people will recognize your unstoppable talents, just to realize that you are a worthless piece of shit and nobody wants nothing from you. ↩ Reply
I remember a situation with a friend of mine when I told him something that ended our friendship. I was about 16 at the time and working on Wrong Hate project on a cheap ass, very slow laptop. I made a shot. A test shot of a building. It looked cool. I liked it. I remember feeling very good when that friend of mine told me that it looks amazing. ↩ Reply
He was coming to my house because I was lonely and poor. He was coming as a form of psychological support. He told me that one day. And this woke me up so badly I had hard time recovering from it. I was under the impression that he comes to my house to be in awe from my Blender skills. But he wasn't. He wasn't a super-fan. He was just a dude trying to help another dude. I felt ashamed in the fact that I needed helping. Am I not a god damned best person in the entire universe? How dare he suggest that I needed helping! I thought he was my fan! I told him what I thought and it broke our friendship. ↩ Reply
I'm Not Even Human was a mild success. It got a few thousand views on YouTube. And some people liked it. I thought that it was a nice stepping stone which I can use to start going into serious cinema. Right after the movie was done I was seriously trying to use its existence to justify a studio giving me money to make my next movie that would be an entirely my vision. I would not agree to some other asshole directing it. And I would show them I'm Not Even Human as a proof that I can do something. I got through one phone call with a studio in Israel. And they were quick to catch me on my bullshit. My only movie is not even a little popular. What is a few thousand views? A few thousand views from people that do not need to pay to see your stuff. Compare it to cinema, where people pay money for a god damned ticket! Yes Christopher Nolan's first film "Following" got a few thousand views too. But every single one of those views was paid by the people who came to see it in the cinema. ↩ Reply
Later Moria's Race was one of those project that finally would make me the ultimate god of internet cinema and I could finally tell those bitches in the Israeli movie studio to shut up and give me money. But then the movie got a little less than 200 views if you add up views from multiple platforms. And if you take into consideration that ( according to PeerTube ) only about 10% actually watch the movie, and not just skip it after a few seconds, the number of actual people who saw the film is close to 18. ↩ Reply
Expectations didn't correlate with reality. Therefor I'm depressed. ↩ Reply
Lack Of Visceral Film-making
Movie-making wise I'm a lot happier with Moria's Race than with something like I'm Not Even Human. Or even the plans I had for Wrong Hate. It turned out to be quite intense and the action flows quite well. I enjoy watching Moria's Race myself quite a lot. So I doubt that a lot of faults of the movie is with the movie itself. Though there is one aspect of it which is not very good when you are pretty much relying on word of mouth for promotion. And it's that the movie is way too kosher. ↩ Reply
I think I'm Not Even Human made more people recommend it to others because it was vulgar and insane in some way. A lot of directors start their careers in horror because it is a good genre to go crazy. It's a genre where you can justify extreme violence and nudity much more than in something more "family friendly". And therefor you can get people recommend other people to see those films. ↩ Reply
In the same time you can do weird stuff that is also repulsing in some way. Not necessarily horror. And use the shock factor of the movie to make it selfpromotable. Movies that are unnecessarily depressed or unnecessarily weird do well for starting filmmakers because it makes a certain visceral impact on people. And then those people want to share the visceral feeling they got with other people. That is how film-makers like Quentin Tarantino got their start. ↩ Reply
I'm Not Even Human contains a lot of those shock value element. It suggests possible pedophilic relationships between the characters. It has images of condoms. It has graphic murder. It has the end of the world for god sake, where one of the characters is feeling happy about all people dying in front of him. This movie was a ride, as some people told me. ↩ Reply
Similar to the vulgarity of this movie, people pop up here and there tell me that they read Sheiny The Hacker. My "let's see what I can get away with" book. Which is even more sexual and even more violent than I'm Not Even Human. ↩ Reply
Moria's Race is very tame in comparison. Instead of going for a hard core insanity ( which I considered in the beginning of the project ) I thought that I want to make a movie that my dad would show my little brothers. Which means that characters cannot say "fuck" and perhaps the most gross language you would hear from them is "shut up" and "stupid". Where there is no death, even though in one scene I allowed myself to suggest that there could be death. There is not a single sexuality expression. The closest thing you get to sexuality is Moria lusting over a race car. Where I actually directed the voice actress to talk about this car as if she has an orgasm from it. Which ended up sounding like excitement from a cool toy, rather than something visceral. ↩ Reply
Recommending this movie, thus, becomes very hard. There is nothing clearly insane in it that warrants a recommendation. And therefor people are silently, maybe, enjoying it. But they do not invite friends to watch it with them. ↩ Reply
YouTube and Choices of Platforms
I accepted it to be a given when people say that on YouTube I have more chances to get watched than on any other platform. But because I didn't want to endorse something like YouTube, I ended up having to make a tough decision early on, to be happy with less views. ↩ Reply
Though this thought ultimately broke me one day when I had the first teaser for the movie done. I thought that it would not be a big deal to release it on YouTube. Just a for a test. Like I'm not going to be publishing the final movie to YouTube. So I've put the teaser on YouTube as well. ↩ Reply
On YouTube the teaser has at the moment 159 views. And 9 likes. On an old Blender Dumbass channel that has about one thousand Subscribers. On Odysee this same teaser ( which was posted at the same time ) now has 310 views. And also 9 likes. On a channel with the same amount of Subscribers. I have 1029 Subscribers now on Odysee. ↩ Reply
Why is an alternative, lesser known platform, gives me something like twice the amount of views than a big player in the game? Well everything has to do ( as I far as I know ) with differences between the platforms. ↩ Reply
First of all the over-saturation of YouTube. On YouTube you have way more people that would potentially watch your movie. That is true. But there is also way more people uploading to YouTube. Which means that you have to compete with more stuff in the same time. ↩ Reply
Then there is the algorithm. Odysee is still very much supporting the idea of Subscriptions. Which YouTube almost completely disregards at the moment. And due to the algorithm being proprietary machine learning garbage, it is impossible to know how it works. It could be changing from day to day. ↩ Reply
The only reason YouTube could potentially be a choice for it is that YouTube is supported on more forums. While something like a PeerTube or Odysee links would look like simple text links. While YouTube would actually properly embed itself into the page. But I don't think this is something that I like doing anyway, because I don't want to be a reason why people loaded YouTube proprietary spyware on their computers. ↩ Reply
The only real way I could see YouTube being used is if some poor sole would help me by sacrificing their freedom for my shitty movie. As in downloading it and re-uploading it to YouTube. I'm checking Invidious once in a while to see what I get if I type "Moria's Race", so far I only get the first teaser I've posted. ↩ Reply
On the other hand I have to rely on platforms that nobody knows and forums nobody goes to from which I'm banned for trying to promote my movie. ↩ Reply
Paid Advertising
I wanted to make a Moria's Race billboard somewhere in the country I live in, not to far away from me. That would have been very nice. But working on low wage jobs to barely sustain myself, I don't see how this could be possible. And why would this get me anywhere? If I pay for one billboard, only people that are close to that one billboard would ever see the advert. And who from them would navigate the complex internet to actually see the movie? ↩ Reply
I could potentially put a billboard, or simply colorful paper posters of this movie in heavily religious places throughout Israel. I've convinced to show the movie once in a gas station on their big monitor and the religious folk enjoyed it. The movie is kosher enough and has enough references to their culture for them to get hooked on it. But that was a presentation setup by me for them. Those religious people do not have a phone and most of them have what's called "Internet Rimon" in their houses. So if I give them a QR code to scan, most of them would not be able to scan it. And those who would get a link to a movie is some other way, would not be able to see it, because of Rimon's censorship. ( Rimon is a censorship service where people curate links for kosherness. Most unknown websites or new links would now work. And I'm pretty sure Odysee would not work in its entirety because it is a "Free Speech" platform. Which automatically makes it non-kosher ). ↩ Reply
I was contemplating on some ludicrous ideas. Like they could get a phone number to call, from which they could negotiate with me to buy a hard drive ( or a USB stick ) with the movie. But as soon as we touch money we get into a territory of taxes and it opens its own can of worms that I do not want to touch. Perhaps I could arrange them comping to me with a USB drive and I could drag and drop the movie to their USB drives. But it becomes so ludicrous that it's beyond any logic. ↩ Reply
Paying online for advertising say on YouTube or on Facebook is a thing that some people do. But given the nature of the way this advertising model works, this is not something that I would be comfortable with doing myself. Facebook and Google ( YouTube ) advertise by first collecting as much data as they possibly can from the users. And then matching it with what they know about the product. This way of advertising requires undermining people's privacy. And I am very much against it. It is not even about me needing to sign up to Facebook or Google to do the advertising. But rather I would be benefiting from other people being spied on if I did this kind of advertising. And it's not something I would want to do. ↩ Reply
To tell you the truth, before I stopped using YouTube, I did pay for advertising on Facebook briefly. And I got maybe 10 views from that. The way that they are controlling you there is so bad that I don't know if I even wanted to advertise through those companies even if that would not require surveillance. They are so afraid of their image, that they would not let you put a picture with too much text, for example. It doesn't even worth risking it. ↩ Reply
Sponsored advertising is another option but it as expensive as billboards. And I would probably be in a competition with other brands trying to buy spots. I'm not even talking about how people on the internet actively trying to skip / bypass ads today, especially those using Free Software, which are my target audience for this movie. ↩ Reply
I was trying to get people with following to talk with me about the movie. The closest I've got was unfa who is subscribed to me on Mastodon. He said that it would be cool. But since then it didn't happen. Perhaps he is either too busy, or he doesn't like the message of the movie. ↩ Reply
I've send an email to Free Software Foundation. They were confused about what they should do about the movie. I've sent an email to Chris Stuckmann ( a popular movie reviewer on YouTube ). He didn't reply. I sent an email to Brodie Robertson. He also didn't reply. I've sent an email to Nick, from "The Linux Experiment". He also didn't reply. I don't think any of them will reply. Probably my emails are in their spam. ↩ Reply
I tried writing an article about it on Blender Nation website. And it almost got through but ultimately failed miserably. ↩ Reply
Distaste for movies
Now let's talk about the darkest part of why Moria's Race is a worthless piece of shit. Tik Tok! The increased amount of absolute lack of human boredom. The constant bombardment of dopamine and other viral chemicals that people mindlessly crave today 24 / 7 while breaking their backs, staring at their god damned mobile phones. People don't have any time today to watch a 30 minute long cartoon. Anything larger than 30 seconds is already demanding. And it is only going to get worse. ↩ Reply
Cinema is now at a point where deleting finished movies is way more lucrative for them than actually publishing them. It has something to do with how taxes work in the US. And the films that are made are more mindless and sterile. Gone are the days of interesting mid-budget cinema. Gone are the days of dramatic pieces of art. And gone are the times when people craved something original. ↩ Reply
Perhaps Moria's Race isn't popular because it's not already established. Well then, how the hell would you establish anything? The whole movie business becomes a hellish show of Catch 22 upon Catch 22. It is insanity. Even people I know that tell me that they will watch my film. People who have the link and know that it's only a matter to push the play button, don't watch the film. They avoid it and then apologize to me. For what? How did we get to this point? What is this? ↩ Reply
People got so over-saturated from every side from every type of media so much that there is no space for anything new. Making anything is to fail. Not uploading Moria's Race and instead deleting it altogether would have made no difference at all. Nobody gives a flying fuck! And those who say they do, they lie! ↩ Reply
Conclusion
Perhaps justice came. And my arrogance in the early days backfired into my utter inability to function now. I'm not going to work already a few days, because why bother. I sleep too much and can't wake up in the morning, because why bother. I'm writing this article because one single person wanted me to explain why marketing Moria's Race is impossible. And hopefully it will illustrate the point. And any time somebody else will ask me if I tried YouTube or paid advertising, I could just shove this article down their throats and scream from the bottom of my agony something profane at them. And if some time ago sudden magical explosion of fame might have saved me. Not anymore. I'm sick of my own fucking self! ↩ Reply
Shitty Hacking!!! ↩ Reply
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