TheSuperheroines.com Interviews

Excellent clip, it's really good to hear their views and perspectives. It's a shame the TheSuperheroines.com is mainly a peril site because the direction, photography, choreography, the general quality in fact, of their films is very high. And their actors, male and female, are class acts.

They do have a very few girl power films, their OOAngels series is worth a look, as well as some other one off films such as Onyx Strikes, but their focus is mainly peril, which I am not a fan of at all personally. But I read somewhere that they found consumer demand for peril far outstrips the demand for girl power films.

They do offer customs though and I have occasionally wondered whether or not I should try one.

I fear I might be one of the reasons for the lack of girl power films from thesuperheroines. I had a couple of customs done a year or so ago, far more girl power orientated than their usual offerings (I couldn't afford a full blown custom, only partial and mine were the girl power segments of the films), I was very pleased with both, but they later stated both films lost money, although the girls loved making them. So I guess you can't blame them for not making girl power films

dauntingmold wrote: I fear I might be one of the reasons for the lack of girl power films from thesuperheroines. I had a couple of customs done a year or so ago, far more girl power orientated than their usual offerings (I couldn't afford a full blown custom, only partial and mine were the girl power segments of the films), I was very pleased with both, but they later stated both films lost money, although the girls loved making them. So I guess you can't blame them for not making girl power films

Well honestly i think in this internet age i think there kind of business model-put together a fairly expensive by movie standards but short films-is a werid proposition. From what i gather there expecting maybe a couple hundred people to buy there films. I think yeah they do know what there audience wants in this scenario-and well thats that. Its a niche.

But I think if someone could put together a feature film with there production values and charged movie rates for it-well i think you would have a money making proposition. In that circumstance Girl power and them winning and being well more heroic-yeah that makes a lot of sence. I don't think the kind of plots they do have would work.

I will say I have seen movies on Netflix and in theaters that don't look as good as they do-they could do it. But well.

dauntingmold wrote: I fear I might be one of the reasons for the lack of girl power films from thesuperheroines. I had a couple of customs done a year or so ago, far more girl power orientated than their usual offerings (I couldn't afford a full blown custom, only partial and mine were the girl power segments of the films), I was very pleased with both, but they later stated both films lost money, although the girls loved making them. So I guess you can't blame them for not making girl power films

Wow, how can you blame yourself for this? Thanks for giving us such a gift. It's not our fault the rest of the world is totally misguided about girl power

Which films were these? I've never checked out the site, but I'll take a look at your specific ones.

Thanks for those words, the films were Helix of Hyperion and Return to Darkness, both feature the actress in my avatar Cayla Black. She's no longer acting, but after the first film the producer sent me the DVD of the film which included a lovely message from Cayla saying she really enjoyed doing the film. She didn't have to do that so I thought it was pretty classy on both her and the producers part

castor wrote:

dauntingmold wrote: I fear I might be one of the reasons for the lack of girl power films from thesuperheroines. I had a couple of customs done a year or so ago, far more girl power orientated than their usual offerings (I couldn't afford a full blown custom, only partial and mine were the girl power segments of the films), I was very pleased with both, but they later stated both films lost money, although the girls loved making them. So I guess you can't blame them for not making girl power films

Well honestly i think in this internet age i think there kind of business model-put together a fairly expensive by movie standards but short films-is a werid proposition. From what i gather there expecting maybe a couple hundred people to buy there films. I think yeah they do know what there audience wants in this scenario-and well thats that. Its a niche.

But I think if someone could put together a feature film with there production values and charged movie rates for it-well i think you would have a money making proposition. In that circumstance Girl power and them winning and being well more heroic-yeah that makes a lot of sence. I don't think the kind of plots they do have would work.

I will say I have seen movies on Netflix and in theaters that don't look as good as they do-they could do it. But well.

They would make superb feature films I am sure, and I do think that they would be better making Girl Power than Peril to a wider audience, if only because I think GP is a more politically acclimatised concept. But I think they could also, with their high standards, also make money with their current business model if they marketed it correctly. The British company Kick Ass Kandy seem to do quite well, for example.

dauntingmold wrote: Thanks for those words, the films were Helix of Hyperion and Return to Darkness, both feature the actress in my avatar Cayla Black. She's no longer acting, but after the first film the producer sent me the DVD of the film which included a lovely message from Cayla saying she really enjoyed doing the film. She didn't have to do that so I thought it was pretty classy on both her and the producers part

I've also bought Helix of Hyperion, superb production, karma from for that, it was a really good film. In their forums the producer, Logan, talking about Helix, did confirm that the cast enjoyed making it and consequently they thought making it more than worthwhile. Besides, they may not make money initially, but they are still up there, for sale, and so over the longer period they might do so. I, for example, bought them relatively recently.

lfan wrote: Well.....

Looks like we have a second chance to show the people at TheSuperheroines.com that we dig "girl power" videos and we will buy them!! Here is something I found on their site:

www.thesuperheroines.com/blogs/updates/1...l-power-custom-order

Looks promising and hopefully we'll see the product soon. I'll try and keep an eye on it so we can all go out and buy it!

ElF

Yes, looks very promising, I was hoping Heather would do a girl power video. Will be looking to buy once it comes out. I'd like to see their Bridget do one as well.

lfan wrote: Well.....

Looks like we have a second chance to show the people at TheSuperheroines.com that we dig "girl power" videos and we will buy them!! Here is something I found on their site:

www.thesuperheroines.com/blogs/updates/1...l-power-custom-order

Looks promising and hopefully we'll see the product soon. I'll try and keep an eye on it so we can all go out and buy it!

ElF

We all should go on there and leave comments of support for "girl power" films. I can't wait to see how this one turns out.

jdrock24 wrote:

lfan wrote: Well.....

Looks like we have a second chance to show the people at TheSuperheroines.com that we dig "girl power" videos and we will buy them!! Here is something I found on their site:

www.thesuperheroines.com/blogs/updates/1...l-power-custom-order

Looks promising and hopefully we'll see the product soon. I'll try and keep an eye on it so we can all go out and buy it!

ElF

We all should go on there and leave comments of support for "girl power" films. I can't wait to see how this one turns out.

Concerted support does work. But how many girl power fight fans are there? The girl power supporters do seem to be split - some prefer to see arm wrestling or lifting or posing rather that combat.

Well done! I was a big fan of Cayla Black -- she had a slightly more muscular, athletic appearance than any of their other actresses. Shame she's no longer with them.

I contacted them about a custom, too (the Trinity gal is tiny, but super cute)....they were VERY nice folks, friendly in emails, etc.....but at the end of the day it wasn't going to be something I could afford. Their quality is great, though....but we need more girl power!

Bolarpear wrote:
Concerted support does work. But how many girl power fight fans are there? The girl power supporters do seem to be split - some prefer to see arm wrestling or lifting or posing rather that combat.

I don't know how many "girl power" fight fans there are. I just like to see female superheroine domination, whether that is fighting, arm wrestling, etc...

One thing is for sure, there seems to be a lot more "peril" fans than "girl power" fans. I have no idea why that is but it seems to be true based on the amount of content for each genre being produced. Why so many guys want to see a woman tied up and tortured is beyond my comprehension.

@jdrock24
I think one of the biggest misconceptions is that peril fans are Superheroine fans. They're two completely different things.
Sick as it may be, there are guys out there who love to see women beaten, humiliated, and ultimately violated. The thing is, that type of content isn't just taboo; it's downright illegal in many regions.
Now, if you dress the female victim up in a Wonder Woman costume, then it's suddenly perceived as a "fantasy fight between superheroes" and not this kind of gross simulated rape.
So this whole peril fad has nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing to do with Superheroine fans, or comic books, or anything of the sort. It's simply a way of disguising this twisted, violent content whose fans would otherwise be ashamed to admit they get off on.
JT and I have banned the word "Superheroine" from our production company because of the peril sites. We can't risk our cast and crew thinking that we're somehow part of that. It's a real shame.
Jess

Its not that i don't think theres a market for girlpower stuff-theres a huge market not just people on the board but people in general that i think is a lot lot bigger then the female domination crowd....

i just don't think its willing to pay 30 bucks for 20 minute videos.

agree with Jess, that's it

JessP wrote: @jdrock24

JT and I have banned the word "Superheroine" from our production company because of the peril sites. We can't risk our cast and crew thinking that we're somehow part of that. It's a real shame.
Jess

It is a real shame-and to a certain extent something i think you maybe exagerating

The Avengers did about a billion dollars at the box office. at 10 bucks a pop- That's 100 million people saw it world wide.

i get the sense these videos.....at most maybe 1000, 2000. Maybe a little bit more or....

I don't think the average viewer is thinking that.

In my experience we had FAR more issues with girl power fans posting our content on YouTube and torrenting it than with "peril" films (though our peril films weren't all that perilous to begin with, so perhaps peril fans simply didn't care enough to bother with wanting to torrent them).

After a brief initial sales burst from our AWESOME customers, we ended up with one or two of you that purchased our girl power films and "shared" them (THIS IS THEFT) and then a huge percentage of this fanbase downloaded it illegally. Sales came to an immediate halt within a matter of days.

The audience for girl power films is already extremely small. As a community you abuse those few producers who are (or were) willing to experiment in this genre. So many of you are willing to share stolen content, and so many others are willing to eagerly download it and treat the thieves as if they are heroes. I've seen more positive feedback posted in praise of the pirates for "sharing" our movies than we received for making them in the first place.

I know that you are not ALL guilty of this, but there are enough of you to have squandered a huge opportunity for several producers that were willing to provide the content that you wanted. Making girl power films is expensive and time consuming, and as a community you make all but the weakest and cheapest productions financially impossible to maintain.

CultRetro wanted nothing more than to make girl power films indefinitely. We loathed including peril scenes in our films just to force sales. Girl power was MUCH more in line with our style and our personal values. But each Angel Avengers episode would be posted to sharing sites within a matter of days. Stormy Tempest: Women of Tomorrow has probably set some sort of record for "most frequently pirated microbudget film". Scarlet Scorpion was pirated during its first week of release and now I am in absolutely no hurry to release the sequel, which is actually 90% complete. The next few Stormy Tempest films are girl power oriented also, but again, why bother? Should I work my ass off for a month or more adding effects to a film just to make a couple of hundred bucks from a few dozen honest customers and then watch a few THOUSAND people download it for free?

We never set out to make lots of money, but we couldn't afford to throw it away either.

I've made an almost feature-length, girlpower-oriented film as a personal project starring Nicola Rae (see my icon) that I filmed over a year ago and that I really hope to release one day, but before I can do that I need to figure out how to make it available in such a way as to not throw away my significant investment.

Just think about that for a moment: By pirating Scarlet Scorpion so aggressively you killed its sequel, multiple Stormy Tempest films and my own project (all of which has already been filmed and is just sitting on a harddrive collecting dust) and pretty much guaranteed that CultRetro would never produce another girl power film.

Kind of a bummer.

HeroineFX wrote:
I've made an almost feature-length, girlpower-oriented film as a personal project starring Nicola Rae (see my icon) that I filmed over a year ago and that I really hope to release one day, but before I can do that I need to figure out how to make it available in such a way as to not throw away my significant investment.
.

Redbox.

Amazon Prime, Netflix.

Probably some more stuff like that.

This may sound a little glib but its intended seriously. If your depending on a 500 buys, a single person pirating it is a large large thing. If your depending on 50,000 to 200,000 watching it-not so much. There is of course tons and tons of piracy in mainstream movies-but well its not such a big percentage.

Plus your method of distribution involves giving someone a mov copy of the movie. I in no way pirated my movie-but yeah it but would really easy to do so.

Frankly given your subject matter, and your production values-yeah you could probabbly get mainstreamish distribution reasonably easy-just try.

Hey, its a very rare post from me, but HeroineFX hit the nail on the head.

I'm pretty sure that the majority of users on SWM don't partake in the 'sharing' of movies and content from the likes of CultRetro, Superheroines.net, NextGlobalCrisis, etc, etc.

However, many people do, and its absolutely killing the production of future movies, comic books and photoshoots.

About two years ago I would post up a movie and within 24 hours it would be posted on a bunch of forums, YouTube, Vimeo, Daily Motion, etc, etc. And whilst a few people purchased the movie, I could see from the YouTube views, the forum post views, etc that a LOT more were looking at the content we took so long to put together at great expense... for free.

So whats the point?

And thats exactly what happened. I like other Producers I'm sure, came to the conclusion that if its not possible to make a profit to then plough into the next production, or even worse to make a loss, why do we spend so much time doing it. These movies especially are really expensive, the girls are very expensive, and it takes days to put them together.

Like HeroineFX, I have a bunch of movies here waiting to be finished off, but I came to the conclusion that there was no point.

I don't know what the answer is. I've no idea how to stop it. If anyone does, feel free to Private Message me.

But.. I'm giving it another shot. Just one more. I love creating the movies, comics and photoshoots. I love working with the models and actresses, and I love working with the editors and FX guys to make something awesome. To produce something out of nothing to the best of our ability.

And again, if anyone has any ideas on how to combat the illegal distribution of movies/comics then please do give me a shout.

Jon

Thanks castor:

Redbox maintains a microscopic selection of mainstream films. They don't distribute movies that aren't attached to known distribution companies. They are not an option.

Amazon Prime has potential because you don't have to distribute a file, but i don't know of anyone that has made any money with it. You are a drop of water in the ocean on Amazon and it takes outside marketing to attract an audience to your purchase page. Just sticking it up there doesn't do the job. We ran Nyoka on Amazon Prime and sold maybe 3 or 4 copies as a download, fairly pointless relative to what we sold as downloads over the same time period via our own site.

Netflix is very picky about what they do and don't distribute and they don't pay very much, and again you are a drop in the ocean. I know a guy that made $600 via Netflix over the course of a year and his film had a little star power behind it and a much larger budget than ours (close to $1 million). He's lost more money than I will ever see with his film. Netflix is not really a viable option unless your film is already mainstream and people already know about it and want to see it.

The reality is MOST films loose money. it's the rare few that don't that you've actually heard of. I don't have the marketing power to reach 1000 buyers, let along 200,000. I might make some fun stuff for a limited audience, but it's far from mainstream quality. My little indie film has a budget between $1000 and $2000... even something like a SiFi movie of the week like Mansquito has a budget around $5 million.

The producers in this genre are not playing in the same league as mainstream entertainment companies with mainstream marketing budgets. We are lucky to make $1000-$2000 total per production... which is close to what it costs to buy a costume, hire an actress, rent a location and pay for the merchant service and does NOT account for our personal time and effort in the slightest. it's tough enough to break even, and almost impossible to make a living with it. Piracy of ANY kind is lethal.

Individual file distribution is the method that we use because it is the method that has demonstrated the highest degree of return. This is currently what the clip market expects. They want to OWN something that they can watch at anytime on any device and I've never heard of a microbudget producer in this genre having success with any experiments outside of this method.

... but then it gets pirated and you're done.

I may play with kickstarter in a few months, but even that will be a blind experiment.

HeroineFX wrote: Thanks castor:

Redbox maintains a microscopic selection of mainstream films. They don't distribute movies that aren't attached to known distribution companies. They are not an option.

I may play with kickstarter in a few months, but even that will be a blind experiment.

Well then may i suggest something that maybe a little odd but an option. Maybe worth an experiment at least.

Youtube.

From what i understand add rats can be highly variable-there not high. From what i understand 100,000 clicks can equal 500 dollars for some people.

That said....

That is money. You look around the shaddier sections of youtube and you will find feature length movies-i don't watch them but there there. Seen a lot of Sci Fi Channel original type movies typically get in the 5 million hits--which is probabbly more then your budget. I have a friend who did a full length megaman movie that has 1 million hits. Its pennies but count the pennies.

Of course thats something people know- at least theoretically-but your in a special case. Your stuff is based on characters that have a little bit of a following-AC is something not big by any means but something. suspect if you where to put something on youtube, some comicbook sites might give you a fair amount of publicty or at least an article.These aren't giant bumps but bumps.

And no one is going to pirate something on youtube(well it happens but i wouldn't worry huge about it)

I am not going to say the stuff i have seen of yours is anywhere close to mainstream production values-but its not horrible either, and it is funny and its got heart. I could see some of your videos maybe doing something online-i am not going to quote you numbers-which could equal some money in adds(maybe put a midroll in). Living in LA, i have never met anyone rich off Youtube(except people who work at youtube) but i have met people who do okay.

You mentioned that your video was on a shady website was there number 1 video. Great imagine if it was on a website owned by the biggest company in the world and you got a nickel every time someone watched it.

Becuse thats the thing to go to my original point. I think the market is huge, or at least very large. But i don't think the market that is willing to pay 15 20 dollars is. If you made it reasonable, or better yet free sure people will give you a watch. And if you can make a 2000 buck budget off it think thats possible.

Castor

HeroineFX wrote: In my experience we had FAR more issues with girl power fans posting our content on YouTube and torrenting it than with "peril" films (though our peril films weren't all that perilous to begin with, so perhaps peril fans simply didn't care enough to bother with wanting to torrent them).

After a brief initial sales burst from our AWESOME customers, we ended up with one or two of you that purchased our girl power films and "shared" them (THIS IS THEFT) and then a huge percentage of this fanbase downloaded it illegally. Sales came to an immediate halt within a matter of days.

The audience for girl power films is already extremely small. As a community you abuse those few producers who are (or were) willing to experiment in this genre. So many of you are willing to share stolen content, and so many others are willing to eagerly download it and treat the thieves as if they are heroes. I've seen more positive feedback posted in praise of the pirates for "sharing" our movies than we received for making them in the first place.

I know that you are not ALL guilty of this, but there are enough of you to have squandered a huge opportunity for several producers that were willing to provide the content that you wanted. Making girl power films is expensive and time consuming, and as a community you make all but the weakest and cheapest productions financially impossible to maintain.

CultRetro wanted nothing more than to make girl power films indefinitely. We loathed including peril scenes in our films just to force sales. Girl power was MUCH more in line with our style and our personal values. But each Angel Avengers episode would be posted to sharing sites within a matter of days. Stormy Tempest: Women of Tomorrow has probably set some sort of record for "most frequently pirated microbudget film". Scarlet Scorpion was pirated during its first week of release and now I am in absolutely no hurry to release the sequel, which is actually 90% complete. The next few Stormy Tempest films are girl power oriented also, but again, why bother? Should I work my ass off for a month or more adding effects to a film just to make a couple of hundred bucks from a few dozen honest customers and then watch a few THOUSAND people download it for free?

We never set out to make lots of money, but we couldn't afford to throw it away either.

I've made an almost feature-length, girlpower-oriented film as a personal project starring Nicola Rae (see my icon) that I filmed over a year ago and that I really hope to release one day, but before I can do that I need to figure out how to make it available in such a way as to not throw away my significant investment.

Just think about that for a moment: By pirating Scarlet Scorpion so aggressively you killed its sequel, multiple Stormy Tempest films and my own project (all of which has already been filmed and is just sitting on a harddrive collecting dust) and pretty much guaranteed that CultRetro would never produce another girl power film.

Kind of a bummer.

Wow that's a sad experience you relate there but to me it doesn't seem logical that people with one set of tastes would be any more likely to behave in such a dishonourable way than people with another set of tastes. Statistically that seems improbable.

Also I think that if members of the girl power community were more prone to stealing films in this way, then girl power companies simply could not prosper. But there are many that do (Kick Ass Kandy, Competitive Enterprises, Deadly Dymes, for example) and I don't know that they have any issues worse than the peril specialists.

Could it be there were other explanations for your experience? You only have to look at some other forums to see that some peril fans exhibit a surprisingly hostile reaction to GP films, If you don't want your favourite company to head off at a tangent in a direction you disapprove of, what better way to discourage them than by pirating the offending productions?