Artist house, Inc. Business Plan 2024

By dan from why.movie | April 28, 2024

Executive summary

Mission

Artist house® (Ah) produces original narrative and documentary cinema.  Ah's movies spark imagination with an audacious conceptual scaffold, self responsibility.

Location

Ah's production facility is co-located with Love Farm, a 287 acre wilds resonant agriculture and foraging operation in Northern Lower Michigan, USA. Sharing land enables a synergy of purpose that helps the companies elegantly achieve their unique objectives.

Talent

Because Ah also shares creative and logistics contractors with other studios, projects are enhanced by creative cross pollination while gaining recognition. Ah's primary marketing strategy is to enable adjacent creative networks to participate in the production process.

Distribution

Currently, Ah distributes via the world wide web, both by self hosting and third parties. Ah is also preparing for a counter intuitive distribution trend, the resurgence of physical media.

Audience

People who choose stories that make them smarter and more effective in the real world are Ah's target audience. Ah transmits a signal that can be received by anyone yearning to explore their full potential.

Sales and Marketing

Ah's updated word of mouth marketing combines participatory production and a tight tuning to the target audience. Ah's audience expands because the movies remind people of who they want to be. Revenue streams include regional and remote location partners, micro subscriptions and streaming services.

Competition

The major movie studios are mostly mediocrity machines, churning out mundane movies based on formula and franchise. Ah's spartan design and conceptual scaffold of self responsibility are singular advantages over the drifting and bloated behemoths that comprise the legacy industry.

Offer and Value Proposition

Premise

Imagination is the interface to existence, to our shared experience of the physical. To create we must first dream. Virtuosic cinema fuels the imagination, which in turn drives breakthroughs, achievement and success beyond the screen.

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.” Albert Einstein.

Self responsibility is Ah's conceptual scaffold for sparking imagination. With both pragmatic and spiritual implications, self responsibility serves up a smorgasbord of revelatory documentary and narrative ideas.

Narrative Application

Taking complete responsibility for self is an experience of autonomy. No other person or factor can influence our outcomes, only our own determination and state of mind matters. Absolute autonomy shades into spirituality, the perception that we and the entire cosmos are somehow the same, or that we can collaborate with the cosmos. To control or influence forces that appear to be beyond control suggests stories in the genres of time travel, alternate history, fantasy and science fiction.

Documentary Application

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” Margaret Mead

From a purely pragmatic perspective, self responsibility drives change. Transforming our world into a more desirable configuration begins with a willingness to transform ourselves, to acquire the skills and knowledge to effect the change we seek.

Many documentaries are about people who take on corporate and government corruption, and how their commitment to a cause is actually a commitment to become more capable and courageous, to either manifest personal power equivalent to what the cause requires, or be crushed. Either way, documentaries with self responsibility at the core help audiences to model success and avoid failure in their own lives.

Summary

With self responsibility as a scaffold, Ah's movies are templates for people who want to live fully. Self responsibility creates options and solves problems. A self responsible person can find their bliss and allow excellence to flow, even in a variety of challenging circumstances. Audiences may not be able to precisely replicate the approaches and outcomes in Ah movies, but the activation of imagination shows how to adapt the template to their personal stories.

Example

Feature Documentary - Around Lake Michigan

Ah's documentary project from 2010, Around Lake Michigan, The Search for Sustainable Civilizations exemplifies a documentary application of self responsibility, (www.ondesire.movie). In ALM, director Dan Kelly sails a 16 foot Hobie Cat 600 miles solo around the coast of Lake Michigan. He visits locations in Michigan, Indiana and Wisconsin to discover how folks are practicing a benevolent human presence on Earth.

Extended Excerpts (Not available via the Brave Browswer after 5/1/24)

Breakfast on North Manitou https://artisthouse.com/domains_core/desire/story/09-09-09_crescent_city_north_manitou/01.html

Ritch Branstrom https://artisthouse.com/domains_core/desire/story/09-09-28_ritch_branstrom/01.html

Narrative short - La Pala

La Pala is a 2005 narrative short about transitioning from enigmatic loss to decisive empowerment. After a drunken tumble off a pleasure yacht, a rakish gigilo wakes up on a desolate beach, lost and alone. He tramps along endless, wild shoreline until he discovers a talismanic object that galvanizes him with energy and purpose.

Excerpts not available, currently being remastered to 4k.

Target Audience

Introduction

"The forgetfulness built into Theme Park Earth has been dialed up, and so we tingle, we host a delightful itch. To forget harder is to be reminded of what we are, what this is, what we should do about it." Uncle Joe, Daughter of God.

For another Joe, Joseph Campbell, mythology is how our we told ourselves about ourselves and our place in the cosmos. In the 1988 Power of Myth PBS series, Joe and Bill Moyers mused about whether mythology was still relevant and if so, where the modern myths would come from.

Scientific civilization seems to transcend mythology. Myth has become a synonym for delusion, as in the popular 2003-2017 TV show “Myth Busters”. Who needs stories when we've got proof, data, facts? With SpaceX, quantum computing, Costco, green energy, world banks, mega churches and the Disney franchises, maybe we've finally figured ourselves out. Have we outgrown mythology?

"Looks like meat is back on the menu boys!" Ugluk, the Uruk-hai. The Two Towers.

Billionaire tech executives assert we are living in a computer simulation, perhaps constructed by our super advanced selves, hundreds of years or maybe just decades in the future. The revelation that we are all fakes, reality is gamified, and that the gods are just an advanced version of us, is not new. Mythology is back!

Problem

What does the simulation story tell us about ourselves and our place in the cosmos? Simulations are by definition finite. Games have rules and limits. Are we approaching the end of the consumerism game? Has convenience über alles become boring? Are we no longer satisfied with doodads, widgets and instant landfill from China? The myth of simulated reality tells us we have painted ourselves into a corner and are trying to find a way out, maybe through a nearby window or by swinging on the chandelier, but out!

"What would you do with a brain if you had one?" Dorothy Gale, Wizard of Oz

A century of consumerism has so disconnected us from each other and ourselves that a slew of first world countries are undergoing social and financial implosion. Rather than saving the planet by limiting consumption, we can align with self responsibility and save ourselves. An Earth populated by aligned humans will thrive.

Solution

The target audience for Ah is the vanguard of alignment. People who have deliberately defined themselves as outside of simulations, who shun imitation and desire to feel fully alive. Ah's target audience is myth literate, in that they choose stories that make them smarter and more effective in the real world. People who enjoy insight and epiphanies integrated into their cinematic action and adventures, who are curious, competent, compassionate, perceptive and mentally agile. Ah's audience demands more than entertainment, they seek a profound experience of themselves.

“There are [a lot of cool people in the world] and most of them have an expressive intellect. However, in our society we seem to be embarrassed by those individuals and instead tend to ‘pay homage’ to fools and idiots. Example, athletes and entertainment figures who are overrated, under talented and have the loudest but vacuous voices and thoughts.” Graham Lidiard, Quora.

Ah's target audience may not be in the majority today, possibly less than 2% of the web enabled population, but growing that percentage offers the most promising future for our planet. An expanding cohort of dynamic and engaged people can reverse environmental degradation, shut down police states, and prevent economic collapse, not through cynical rhetoric or virtual signaling, but by the application of self responsibility in their own lives. This demographic is not defined by a specific range of income or age, but by an individual's willingness to make deliberate choices.

Ah's movies are for everyone who resonates with self responsibility, whether they are just getting started or looking to become more adept. Ah transmits a signal that can be received by anyone yearning to explore their full potential. Movies that help make life more wonderful, will be shared and Ah's audience will grow.

The desire to participate in cinematic creation is another quality of our target audience. Collaborative cinema is a variant of crowd funding schemes like Kickstarter, but rather than providing money, the audience participates in project development. Ah's collaborative cinema or Crowd Creation is an adaption of several trends, including open source software development, crowd sourcing content and fan fiction. Collaborative production is also Ah's primary marketing strategy and is showcased in Season 2 of the Daughter of Godcast podcast.

Example

Narrative Feature - Daughter of God

The narrative feature, Daughter of God is a post apocalyptic romantic comedy. In a universe next door, a cabal of spiritual adepts, the Clique, is attempting to accelerate the flowering of humanity. They believe making Earth less pleasant will stimulate innovation and progress.

Uncle Joe is one of Clique's most trusted field agents, and a clandestine trickster. He seems to be following the plan… at first. After orchestrating a series of apocalyptic events on Earth, he startles his co-conspirators with a hilarious double cross, the Daughter of God.

The story pokes fun at the idea of Earth as a construct that can be managed and improved upon by a self designated elite. As spiritual adepts, the Clique are outside duality. They are powerful, but because concepts like good and evil aren't relevant in non duality, there is no obvious application of the Clique's power, no mandate. Uncle Joe thinks his fellow Clique wield power to create identity. Vast power, they opine, exists to control and change, for improving things, managing them. Therefor we Clique are managers.

For Uncle Joe, vast power just feels like fun. He knows the nature of the cosmos is to become more excellent automatically, his intervention is not needed. He delights in humorous exploits, practical jokes and theatrical flourishes, especially when a sparkling insight is nigh. In contrast to the Clique, He lives power, reveling in the experience of power without needing to justify, rationalize or prove himself worthy. Uncle Joe is an exemplar of self responsibility.

Revenue Streams, Sales Channels and Marketing

Revenue Streams

Ah is iconoclastic in both ideology and execution. Revenue usually refers to financial inflows exclusively. We have several metrics of success including financial gain. For Ah, any gain in operational resources is considered revenue.

An example of an alternate revenue category is to be famous only among cool people. Cool people co-exist and cooperate with others, cultivate a connection to life in all it's myriad manifestations, are exploratory, and have a robust sense of humor even when looking in the mirror. This very specific recognition could be considered fungible in that  is readily converted to fiat currency.

Present Financial Inflows

Financial inflows include support from regional and remote location partners, micro subscriptions and streaming services. Ah also provides occasional consulting and creative services to regional companies for narrative and documentation projects.

Location partners are companies that benefit from the additional commerce a movie production brings to their local business. Incentives are negotiated during and after location scouting.

Micro subscriptions are small annual payments made by members of the target audience to support early project development and production.

Streaming services such as Amazon enable independent movie companies to offer pay per view. Ah provides free streaming currently through Vimeo for excerpts from the Daughter of God. Archival projects like La Pala, Some Almonds, 500k in 10 minutes and Around Lake Michigan will have dedicated websites with online ticketing after they have been remastered to 4K.

Consulting and creative services are provided to other regional production companies such as Brauer Productions (Traverse City) in April of 2024 for Dog Man 3. Services to other regional companies companies include Eco Building Products (Elberta) and Love Farm Cooperative (Beulah) to document their collaborative tree planting event in May of 2024.

Future Financial Inflows

At present, completed movies are distributed via the world wide web, both by self hosting and third party services. The collapse of international copyright and the rise of AI suggests that physical delivery may reemerge as a trusted and cost effective distribution method, which Ah is exploring.

Workshops feature a movie screening followed by a collaborative deep dive into the issues raised and their relevance and application to real life. Can include director, cast and crew as facilitators. This concept is an adaption of test screenings which audiences attend free of charge to give the production team feedback as a project nears completion. Workshops explore the insights provided by the completed movie and how the audience can best implement them.

Swag is typically associated with movie merchandise such as t-shirts and action figures, too often of very low quality and price point. For Daughter of God, swag is crafted by fine artists by hand and in small quantities. Ceramicist Ben Woody produced a series of glazed rice bowls with the Daughter of God logo and jeweler Akiko Kato has been approached to design a pure silver pendant for the movie's release. Ah swag is subtle, useful, of high quality and durable, reflecting Ah's ethic.

A ticket is essentially permission to watch copyrighted material, but what is a ticket in a world of no copyright? When countries are in conflict, copyrights are violated. Torrent sites host copyrighted material for rapid free download. Tickets make sense when a movie is screened at in public at a physical location, less so anywhere else.

Perhaps the movie could be the ticket. What if the time a person spends enjoying a movie is their initial payment for a ticket to the movie's World, a web site hosting all the conceptual and development material, like production stills, animation tests, sketches, rough drafts, cast and crew interviews, etc. This would be the reference for canonical fan fiction, with a path for vetting and licensing completed work. This would also become the reference for workshops.

Movie's monopolize our full attention. Audio books can be enjoyed while getting other stuff done, like commuting, house work, etc. Conversion of the World's content into audio allows content to be accessed more easily and more often than the movie itself. World audio could include side stories, lectures by characters, cosmologies of groups, tribes and entities in the story. The conceptual scaffold of the movie would permeate audio content, offering audiences more opportunity for pragmatic application.

Sales Channels

Attendance at physical theaters is changing but independent and non profit theaters could be important venues for Ah. A resurgence in physical theater attendance is possible. For now income from streaming and Ah's World concept depends on the web. Live Workshops could also be streamed, but hosting in person is better for communication, as audience members can meet and share with each other how the movie helped them apply self responsibility.

Marketing

When the movie "Rocky" was first broadcast on network television, the theatrical run time of 159 minutes had an added 30 minutes of advertising. A teenaged Dan Kelly, watching with his father and a stopwatch, was flabbergasted.

The promise of the early internet was freedom from compulsory advertising exposure. The web has since been colonized by platforms and services that prioritize advertisers over audience. Ah views this as a phenomenal opportunity.

Ah's web deployments are deliberately hidden from search engines. Ah movies are generally not entered into film festivals. Ah eschews all marketing approaches tied to consumer culture.

Ah's primary marketing strategy is to enable adjacent creative networks to participate in the production process.

Ah has contractors sign a reverse NDA. During development, contractors working for Ah can pass work in progress to anyone else who might be inspired by the concepts and content. New people can explore the project, add their ideas, feedback and even contribute resources. Through this sharing, Ah's target audience begins to coalesce and through participation, grow. Once the movie is completed, engaged collaborators pass the movie to their networks, then to the networks of those networks, and so on. Because the sharing is motivated by a feeling of participation in a virtuosic project, word of mouth stands in stark contrast to so called viral marketing, which implies a sort of mind control or addiction. Ah movies get passed around because they remind people of who they want to be. Audience appreciation flows back to Ah as future collaborations, blogosphere reviews, derivative remixes / fan fiction and revenue.

Structure, Suppliers and Operations

History and Creative Lead

Artist house, Inc. is a Michigan s corporation. Established in 1988 as a sole proprietorship by Dan Kelly.

Dan is a polymath and autodidact, an unlettered iconclastic entrepreneur and fine artist. As a kid, Dan exhibited a natural immunity to schooling. After barely graduating from high school, Dan promptly failed out of his freshman year of college.

Liberated from academia, he launched a series of profitable micro businesses in the 80's, from residential restorations to graphic design while assimilating video editing, digital paint systems and C language programming. After a decade of eclectic projects and sporadic prosperity, Dan's father, Jim Kelly proposed incorporating Dan's fledging dba, Artist house, and setting up Dan as the family cash cow. A plethora of innovative operations followed, including digital originals for the fine arts, transparent marketing for high integrity businesses, electronic yearbooks for self educators, hands on museum exhibits, and software development optimizing human computer interaction.

In 2003, all stock in Artist house, Inc. (Ah) was transferred to Dan, and Ah was reorganized to provide support for cinema projects with the eventual goal of producing original narrative and documentary features. In 2004 Ah opened a studio in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, New York. In 2010, Ah moved the Brooklyn studio to a farm in Northern Lower Michigan, which would eventually become Love Farm in 2020, a 287 acre wilds resonant agricultural and foraging operation. The co-location of Ah and Love Farm is reminiscent of George Lucas's Skywalker Ranch, with a twist. by leveraging the untapped market for Self Responsible Thriving, the two companies are implementing a benevolent human presence on the planet.

Love Farm is beautiful, with diverse natural ecosystems and scenic vistas ideal for movie making. (www.love.farm). Gardens, swamps, springs, wild shoreline, grassy fields, antique orchards and both coniferous and deciduous forests offer great locations for cinematography. Ah has access to Love Farm property for original projects and an exclusive contract for leasing locations to other production companies. Northern Lower Michigan is a under utilized cinematic destination, with large national and state parks and mild urban centers.

Shared geography enables an easy exchange of knowledge and resources to achieve objectives common to both companies. Love Farm demonstrates human resonance with the ancient and innate intelligence of wilderness through permaculture inspired farming, mindful collection of natural bounty, and land based adventures for all ages. By sparking the imagination with self responsibility as the conceptual scaffold, Ah helps people experience what matters most to them.

Talent

After six years of collaboration with the performance and film community in NYC, followed by 12 years of cinema advocacy in Michigan, Ah has established an extensive network of domestic and international freelance collaborators for production, finance, management and marketing. Ah has no employees, creative and logistics contractors do not focus on Ah exclusively. By sharing talent with other companies, Ah's projects benefit from creative cross pollination and gain attention. Ah's primary marketing strategy is to enable adjacent creative networks to get involved with the production process.

Operations

Actual studio operations costs are minimal. Symbiosis with Love Farm keeps Ah's access to the property affordable.  Ah maintains just enough production equipment and expendables to prove and share project concepts, requiring little if any additional funding from Dan. Affiliations with other regional production companies provide access to rental equipment including 4k cameras, drones, cranes, dollies, etc.

Finance

Dan is the primary contributor of capital and project funding for Ah. Liquidity injected directly by Dan enables rapid response to changing conditions and total creative control over the content and distribution of cinematic projects. A savvy contingent of legal and creative talent advise Dan on significant financial decisions. Dan's net worth is approximately 2.5 million USD in real estate, securities and cash. His income derives from various business operations including wilds resonant agriculture, creative direction and swing trading.

Assets

Intellectual property

  • The USPTO trademark "Artist house" in 2 classes, sculpture and painting.
  • Multiple domain name variants of the corporation's name including artisthouse.com, artisthouse.org, artist.house, artists.house, artiste.house, artista.house, artish.house, artisans.house, artis.house, artifice.house, and ars.house.
  • Domain name variants for specific movie projects include desire.movie, ondesire.movie, dog.movie, why.movie, tricksterpictures.com, trickster.pictures, tricksters.pictures, terrorist.training and almondsmovie.com.
  • A variety of domain names referencing story elements from the feature narrative Daughter of God. These web deployments will go live when the project is completed and blur the line between fact and fiction. The domain names will be visible in the background of key scenes, "easter eggs" as they are known in software and game development.
  • 6 completed scripts for shorts and features.
  • 1000s of hours of raw digital footage, 1000s of still images and illustrations

Production equipment "essentials"

  • cinematography (digital cameras, lenses, tripods, lights, generators, etc.)
  • recording equipment (microphones, digital recorders, booms, blimps, etc.)
  • fabrication studio (clay, paint, fiberglass, miniatures, special effects, etc)
  • carpentry (power tools, hand tools, lumber, fasteners, etc.)

Production support

  • finished miniatures and props
  • costumes
  • reference library

Network of Creative Contractors

  • Actors, Dancers, Singers
  • Directors
  • Crew light, sound, assistants
  • Craft services
  • VFX artists
  • Prop specialists
  • Costumers
  • Cinematographers
  • Animators
  • Stunt people and martial arts choreographers

Target Audience

  • Local to Northern Michigan region
  • Domestically and Internationally

Financial Forecasts

Because Ah's marketing approach is unconventional in the extreme and incompatible with existing measures and benchmarks, projecting future sales enters the realm of science fiction. Ah is basically betting on a better future. 15 years ago, Around Lake Michigan discovered traces of this better future. Recent developments provide more supporting evidence, but the bet has always relied on Dan's future fluency.

An avid reader of science fiction since his teens, Dan was especially interested in stories that extrapolated current events. Early exposure to Futurists like Alvin Toffler (Future Shock, 1970) and Faith Popcorn (The Popcorn Report, 1991) inspired rapt attention to  the effect technology has on culture.

More recently, Dan established a track record of profitable trades with effective risk management. In 2022, Dan completed a million dollar land purchase, adding 100+ acres to Love Farm. 25% of the purchase price was generated by swing trading stocks, crypto and commodities. Being able to accurately predict the ebb and flow of price action is both profitable and an undiluted perception of the aggregate human sentiment that drives world events.

Dan has always had one foot in the now and another in the nearly now. This future fluency is leveraged by Ah to build a tomorrow enabled business. The big ideas in this plan are self responsibility as a cognitive scaffold to spark imagination, collaborative production involving both creative contractors and audience members, and synergistic co-location with wilds resonance. Ah has instantiated a vision unprecedented in the movie industry and if successful, there will be little if not competition in the near term. With luck, Ah's target audience will grow, personal responsibility will be a profitable paradigm and lots of competition will show up... Ah looks forward to many svelte studios all competing to make life more wonderful.

Additional funding for Daughter of God's completion is being allocated. When production resumes, podcasts and collaboration will reactivate and new objectives for target audience growth and revenue will be set. A wealth of content, an established web presence and hard won experience make the completion of this narrative feature possible in the next 12 months.