You can listen to the episode here (or wherever you listen to podcasts) or read the transcript below:
HT: Hi, I'm Ellie Vates for the Heart Temple.
CA: And I'm Chain Assembly Ribera with Chain Assembly.
HT: And together we've designed a project called Women's Wheel.
CA: It's based on the philosophy of women evolving with the seasons. And new modern archetypes that exist within those seasons.
HT: This new way of thinking is presented in a core set with many items and activities designed to further understanding between you and the women around you.
CA: Much more than self-help, these tools are for one or more participants in a community growing setting.
HT: Learn more about the Women's Wheel Core Set and its development at www.womenswheel.co.
My Top 10 Films of 2023
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Hey everyone, Chain Assembly again here and I am going to be doing something a little different. So I am a huge fan of movies. If you know me, you know that I go to the movies a lot. And a lot of the podcasts that I listen to are film related podcasts. And a lot of those creators have been sharing their top 10 movies of the year. Now, since about 2015, I've had a spreadsheet where I keep track of all the movies I see, all the new movies I see that came out that same year.
And I rate each movie on a scale of one to 10 for writing, acting, directing. And at the end of the year, I average those to assemble my top 10. So this is not just kind of like things that thinking back on the year, what I, what stuck with me the most, this is what I rated shortly after seeing that movie and then averaging it. So sometimes it's kind of surprises, like something I didn't expect to be on the top 10, cause I saw it earlier in the year and I'd forgotten about makes its way up. This also is just movies I saw.
So for example, throughout most of the year I did not have access to Netflix, therefore there's a lot of Netflix things that are not on here. Like I didn't see Maestro, I didn't see The Killer, stuff like that. So this is just the movies that I happen to see. And it is my top 10 from the movies that I happen to see. So before I actually get into those top 10 movies, I want to talk about some of the things that didn't make it to the top 10, but I think are still worth chatting about.
So these are things that maybe didn't do well or went under the radar. There's a lot of things like when evil lurks and a ride lane that a lot of people did talk about, but I just want to talk about some of the other ones that didn't come up a lot. First off, Hunger. Hunger made it to the 20th spot on my list. Speaking of which, that list is 111 movies long. So Hunger is a Thai film.
that I think I did watch on Netflix way early, like January or so of 2023, but it was wonderful. It was about the story of a woman who is probably in her twenties. She is a street vendor who is really good at making a traditional noodle dish using a wok and frying it. And she manages to somehow catch the attention of a very fancy restaurateur who is in that part of town and
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is hungry so he gets those noodles. I don't really remember the setup on how they ran into that, but anyways, he says, hey, in my super high end five star restaurant, I need someone who's really good with a walk. Can you come in? So she ends up discovering this world of super high end cooking and very elaborate, like private dining experiences. And she tries to move her way up in that world. So it's like the bear.
but way more specific to Thai culture and Thai cooking and way more. It's not a horror film. So it's not like say the menu, but it is kind of like that, like that way over the top. I can't believe people do this kind of stuff. How to cuisine. So mix the bear with
the menu and you have hunger doesn't go as far as the menu and goes a lot further than the bear. But it is also more like the bear and that it is that kind of like you're watching this person develop their skill and discover that they had a love for high end cooking and high end cuisine that they didn't know they had. So hunger. Great movie. Another one I want to pull point out is every year.
around December, my wife and I try to watch all the new Hallmark movies. And of course I also rate those too, so usually the bottom third of my list is pretty shitty Hallmark movies. But there were two this year that also made it into my top 20 that I do recommend. Hall Out the Holly lit up. That's a sequel to last year's Hall Out the Holly. It is adorable. It is starring Lacey Chabert,
And let's see who else was in it. We also had, there was like a lot of good character actors in it. Stephen Tobolowski, you know him as Ned Ryerson from Groundhog Day and as, what was his name? John G from the Memento. So Stephen Tobolowski is in it.
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It is really fun. The first one is about this girl who moves back to her hometown, as most Hallmark movies are, and she goes there for Christmas. She's really depressed and she finds out her parents are not there for Christmas. But the cul -de -sac, the HOA, is still forcing her to decorate the house, even though she's totally not in the mood. So by the end of it, she ends up getting the Christmas spirit, et cetera. In this new one...
This like super famous power couple who's known as the the Jolly Johnsons, I think it is. They've like they had some HGTV show or something about how their Christmas decor is the best. They buy the new house in the cold to sex. Now everyone's trying to compete with them. And of course, they end up losing the sight of the true meaning of Christmas. The movie was adorable, very good writing, very funny, and it's just full of crazy characters.
that is just, it just seems so elevated from a Hallmark movie, and so that they trusted these people to develop a character and play out that character in a way that you don't really see from Hallmark movies. Usually everyone's very stiff. So, haul out the Holly part one, haul out the Holly part two, great. Part two, I think was better than part one. And that's why I made it to the top 10. To be even more specific, I gave that one a eight out of...
10 for writing, 7 out of 10 for acting, and an 8 out of 10 for directing. The second Hallmark movie I want to call out is My Norwegian Holiday. It was a, again, very contrived plot about this girl now has to go to Norway for Christmas and she doesn't know why. But it is very sweet. The writing is very funny, very punny, lots of jokes about Norwegian culture, and it's just...
It gave you all the feels. It did everything you needed, but it didn't do anything incredibly, but it did a bunch of things really well. And overall, I gave it a nine for writing. Wow, that is intense. Maybe that should have been an eight, but I laughed a lot in that movie, which I did not expect from a Hallmark movie. So nine out of 10 for writing. Wow. Okay. Eight out of 10 for acting, six out of 10 for directing. I also want to call out, you hurt my feelings.
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a wonderful small, small stakes comedy about a woman who's a writer and she overhears her husband telling her friend that he didn't really like her book. It's not much of a plot, but it is just a really fun, super New York -y movie with it's like, do you, do you like the films of Woody Allen, but don't want to support Woody Allen? Then this is right up your alley.
It feels like Woody Allen without having to get him involved. Very nice little bits of comedy. Some things that my wife and I have been quoting to each other, such as, I don't wear V -necks because I don't have cleavage. Makes sense if you see the movie. Another one I want to shout out is Mafia Mama, which I don't know why I got such bad reviews. It was a silly premise, but it was really funny. It is, that was starring, what was her name? Let's see.
It was the mother, yeah, Toni Collette, the mother from Hereditary, but it's not a horror movie. It's a comedy. She's like a soccer mom who's depressed that her daughter's going off to college, her husband leaves her, and then she finds out that she had a great uncle in Italy she didn't know about who just died. So she goes to the funeral, and while she's at the funeral, she finds out his dying wish was that she take over the family business, which is the mob.
So she uses her like super sweet soccer mom skills to kind of find her way through that, make friends, make alliances and survive a gang war. Very silly, but very fun. I gave that a seven out of 10 for writing, acting and directing. A little bit further down the list, we have No One Will Save You. This was a direct to Hulu movie that it has no...
Dialogue which doesn't necessarily make the movie better. It's just an interesting thing to point out. But what is really cool is I always love any movie that creates like a world and Doesn't give you the rules of that world. You just have to pick it up Slowly as you watch that movie like you're like, what is that? And then a bit later you're like, oh, that's what that is I'm sure there's a better terminology for that in writing But I I really like movies like that and no one will save you is absolutely that
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You see this, it is a horror film about aliens. That's as much as I'll say, but it is a great action movie with a really smart character who does really smart things and alien forms and life forms that you've never seen, but are really cool. So shout out to no one will save you. I gave that one a six out of 10 for writing, seven out of 10 for acting, seven out of 10 for directing.
And while I'm at it, let me just tell you the worst movie I saw of from the year which ended up a hundred and eleventh place and that is the Netflix original We Have a Ghost. That was horrible. Family moves into a house, the house is haunted, but the ghost is played by... I'm sorry guys. I am not good at remembering names. We have a ghost. David... David Harbour plays a ghost.
He also can't speak. He has no dialogue. So they try to just like help him find his surviving family or something. I remember it was stupid. Don't waste your time with We Have a Ghost. Second to worst was Dashing Through the Snow, the new Christmas movie on... I think it was Disney Plus. Yeah. Starring Ludacris. That was rough. Don't see Dashing Through the Snow. Like I know child actors are bad, but this is one of the worst child actresses I've ever seen.
Alright, so now let's get into the top 10. And the first one I want to call out, coming in at number 10, is Kill Bak Soon.
I gave this one an 8 out of 10 for writing, 9 out of 10 for acting, and a 9 out of 10 for directing. Coming in at 8 .67. This movie is, if you like John Wick, you're definitely going to love Kill Baksoon. It definitely, it absolutely comes from the school of John Wick, if you could say, in that it is about this subculture of assassins and all of the rules that they have to abide by.
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But what it adds to this is the main character, Gil Baksoon, everyone calls her Kil Baksoon. She's like the best assassin out there. She's kind of older, she's thinking about retiring. And the way it works is each assassin organization is a corporation and they have different level executives and she's really high up. She's the highest paid one there. So if anyone needs to get someone killed,
and they want the absolute best person to do it, they'll call her. And the price is gonna depend on how many stipulations they have. Like it must be done at exactly this time, it must have no witnesses, it must look like a suicide, all those different things based on the complexity of it, they will assign a different assassin to it. And she's one of the best. And I thought it was fun that they call it productions when she goes to kill someone, they call that a production. And her family and people who are not killers think that she's a film producer or a director.
But one fun thing too is that she has a daughter and she's really struggling to connect with her daughter. Her daughter's in high school. Her daughter's getting trouble at school. She's got trouble with boys. Oh wait, no. Sorry, I saw this earlier in the year. Trouble with girls. Oh yeah, that's right. So there's like her trying to balance being a good mother and being there for her daughter with the fact that she has to constantly leave town to go to some exotic locale to kill someone.
And of course, what inevitably happens in all these movies, she tries to get out of the game, but they end up putting a hit on her head because they don't want her to leave. So now she has to defend herself against all these other assassins. Unlike John Wick, it has a lot of comedy. It has a lot more heart, not as much anxiety. The action's not as good as John Wick, but overall it is a much more rounded drama with lots of comedy and it just, it, it, it,
puts you in a world that you enjoy being in.
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Number nine on my list, which has a 10 for writing, seven for acting, and a 10 for directing coming in at nine as the average, is Godzilla minus one.
Now, I've never been the biggest Godzilla fan, but this was fantastic. It is so creative the way that, like, so I love a movie such as Ocean's Eleven, where half the movie is them describing a plan and the other half is them completing that plan. And that is absolutely Godzilla minus one. The title is really weird, but it's kind of like a prequel to the original Godzilla film.
So in that regard, I guess it's kind of like Godzilla negative one if the original one was Godzilla zero But it is it's really focusing on like the devastation that Japan suffered after World War two all the bombings and like how they were trying to get their life together and then out of nowhere Godzilla shows up and It really makes it small -stakes because it's all from the point of view of one person who barely survived the war and is trying to build a life for himself But shit just keeps going bad
The effects definitely look cheap, but for the fact that the movie was made for like $10 million, they look incredible. The acting is not the best, which is why I gave it a seven out of 10. But I don't know how much of that is just me being a Westerner, not knowing if that's actually how people in Japan act. It just, a lot of it felt very inflated, very unnatural. So that's why I gave it a seven out of 10. But.
Writing was incredible. You have no idea what's gonna happen. You're so excited on the edge of the seat the entire time. And the directing was beautiful. Again, when you see how huge this movie looks and know how little they made it for, that was them really stretching a penny. And that's what gave it the 10 out of 10 for directing.
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Coming in at number eight on my list is a movie that came in again with 10 for writing, eight for acting, and nine for directing, and that is Bottoms.
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What I really loved about Bottoms was... This movie did not give a shit. It doesn't have... It's a tone that you rarely ever get to see. It will kill people as a joke, as an aside, and not reckon with it. Which is refreshing for a comedy. Because so many comedies have to be like grounded or realistic. This one does not bother. It is a...
hyper -fantasized fantasy comedy in the teen sex comedy raunch. It's almost like not another teen movie or some type of cartoonish comedy like that, but everything is done in the service of a joke that comes from heart and from character. The movie is starring, I really should have had all of this prepared, sorry, bottles. It is starring,
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I just have more of a movie hanging out with her. Ruby Crews playing Hazel, delightful. The general plot is Ayo and Iberi and Rachel Sennett decide to start a fight club in high school so that they think, because they think it'll let them kiss the girls that they like. Very silly premise, but it was super fun, very irreverent, very silly, very high stakes, but in a comedy version, a high school comedy version. And it's not like,
the drama is, oh no, is he gonna kiss me? The drama is like, oh, we just killed a bunch of people. Oh well, what happens tomorrow? It's very strange. So that's what makes it really refreshing is that there's not a lot of movies like that. Maybe Heathers would be close because it's so exaggerated, but like Heathers was an intense drama. This is all comedy all the way.
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Next, coming in at number seven is another movie that happens to star Ayu Edebiri with a nine for writing, a nine for acting, and a nine for directing, averaging to nine overall, is Theater Camp.
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Now, I'm not a big fan of Broadway musicals or stage act or anything like that, but theater camp was hilarious. In the vein of improv comedies like A Mighty Wind or This Is Spinal Tap, theater camp feels like one of those things. It is a fake documentary about a theater camp, a camp for kids who want to be part of the theater, and it is just...
It is overwhelmingly hilarious. All the characters they introduce, all of these middle school and elementary age kids who just want to perform are so funny, so endearing. The music is actually genuinely catchy and I don't know why this didn't get more love. I think it's on Hulu right now so please watch it. It is so funny. I don't know what else I could say other than it's really funny.
The story is not super in -depth, you can kind of come in and out of it, but it was just a delight. Theater Camp, it's one of the few movies I was able to get my wife to watch this year and she loved it too. So definitely check that one out.
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Number six on the list is a movie that I'm sure is not on a lot of other people's top tens And I had to again. I mentioned this is a very subjective list. So this is me bringing my own baggage to it But this one I gave a 10 for writing 10 for acting and 7 for directing coming in again at an average of 9 And that is Dungeons & Dragons honor among thieves
Now the reason why I said this is involving all my baggage is because I absolutely adore the Forgotten Realms, the universe and world, the campaign setting, where this movie takes place. So it blew my mind seeing all these locations that I visited as I played Dungeons and Dragons in my youth realized beautifully on screen and not always with CG but with actual like real life creatures. I really wish this movie made more money because I want to see more movies made in this vein.
And from this group. This was the same writers who put together Game Night, which was my top movie the year that came out. I think that was 2016. But it was great. Chris Pine is always a charm. He's wonderful. You can't say you don't like Chris Pine. But like in this one, he wasn't even the best part. It was just I loved the world that was built around it. I wanted to spend more time in it. I wish the movie didn't end.
And it actually did have a really good ending, which is hard to expect out of movies these days. Usually they are all set up with no finish. It had a great finish.
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Coming in at number five on the list was, now we're moving out of the average of nines. This one had a nine out of writing, nine out of 10 for acting, 10 for directing, and that is, no surprise, Barbie.
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I know Barbie's ended up in a lot of people's top tens, so it's not, you know, I'm not flipping over any new leafs here, but this was wonderful. The only reason I didn't give it a 10 out of writing was because I didn't really care for all the Will Ferrell being on the board of Barbie and Mattel stuff. I feel like that could have been taken out of the movie and could have just spent more time with America Ferrera, who I think is just wonderful. I could watch America Ferrera do anything.
Margot Robbie was perfectly serviceable, but it was all America Ferrera that really made me care about the movie and the characters. Greta Gerwig is a wonderful director. I really liked Lady Bird when it came out. I adored Little Women. My wife's a huge Little Women fan, and I watched all the other ones and I just didn't get it. But when I saw Greta Gerwig's Little Women, the way she split the story in half and laid it on top of itself, I understood it.
I understood how someone could identify with those characters, see themselves in those characters. And so that's what made me so excited moving in to Barbie and seeing how she would tackle this. And working with Noah Baumbach, come on, he's an incredible writer. And together they put something wonderful that didn't need to exist. Like, Barbie would have made a bunch of money if it was not a great movie. But it was a great movie, so it made an incredible amount of money.
And that is all thanks to Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie and Noah Baumbach. So kudos to them for doing something unexpected and making it better than anything needed to be.
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Just above that in number four, speaking of movies that were way better than they needed to be, this one has a nine for writing, a nine for acting, and a 10 for directing. Coming at the same average as Barbie, 9 .33. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Mutant Mayhem. One thing I keep thinking back on about this movie is Mondo Gecko, voiced by Paul Rudd. Humans, they gots to go. It's so dumb.
But it makes me laugh every time I just picture Paul Rudd in a sound booth doing the Mondo Gecko voice. I'm sure he was shaking his head. Just for that alone, the movie's worth it. But that being said, it is really fun. It actually makes the Ninja Turtles into teenagers, which seems like a novel idea. They don't look like 40 -year -old men in suits. They're actually like kids. They're also all shaped differently too, and not just act differently of different personalities, but...
They have different body types, which is again, a novel idea. Why was that not done before? It is beautifully art directed. It's definitely comes from the, into the spider verse world of CG filmmaking, but it is, it's really a delight. It is super funny. It's got a lot of heart too. You care about these teenagers. You want them to fit in. You want the world to like them. And it's just,
It's... I don't know what to say, it's great. Go see Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Mutant Mayhem. Even if it's for kids, you're gonna have a good time with it, I promise you.
Number three on my list is an eight out of 10 for writing, 10 out of 10 for acting, and 10 out of 10 for directing. And that is John Wick, Chapter Four.
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Now I know this movie has also been in a lot of people's top tens. Just like Barbie, this is one that is constantly up there. And John Wick 3, you could have skipped it. John Wick 2, you kind of could have skipped it. If I just went straight from part one to part four, I'd be happy. Part four was incredible. You really see people putting their all on screen.
The effort, the exercise, the danger, the inventiveness, all of it, showing you things you've never seen, you never thought you would see. Any movie that shows me something new is a movie that I am going to be thinking about, and John Wick Chapter 4 did that, absolutely. That overhead shotgun scene? Geez, I could watch that over and over again. I've seen the movie only twice so far. I'd like to see it more, but obviously I have a -
a lot of the movies I got to see to put on my list. I had my wife watch it, she didn't really care, but I mean, watching it on the couch isn't the same as seeing it in theaters, but John Wick Chapter Four was wonderful. And I don't know if I want to say I want this to be the end of the universe. I guess it could be the end of the John Wick movies. I don't really need, like Keanu Reeves is great, but I think it's really the directors and the writers that are doing.
what I love most. Like I could watch anyone in those same scenes and I'll be happy because they are beautifully done. So not a dig at Keanu Reeves. I think that's probably why I gave it an 8 out of 10. Not him specifically, but because I didn't really care about the actors. I just liked the characters in the universe and the inventive action scenes that were put together.
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Number two on my list is a nine out of 10 for writing, 10 out of 10 for acting, and 10 out of 10 for directing. This one comes in at 9 .67, so just beating the block beneath it of John Wick, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Barbie. And that is the Amazon Prime original that I haven't heard anyone else talk about, Cassandra.
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Cassandro takes me into a world that I didn't know I cared about and that is the world of lucha libre wrestling. It is starring Gael Garcia -Benal who is wonderful. If you saw him on station 11, you know how great he is. If you saw him in old, don't hold that against him. He's a really good actor, but this tells the true story of Cassandro, what is called an exotico that is like referred to as the gay
wrestlers, which there's a small subset of them. They always lost. They were really just for the people who pleased the crowd to defeat as they move on to the more complex fighters. But he really wants to be more. So he ends up developing a character that people root behind and he becomes the first exotico lucha libre wrestler who people cheer for. And it's not like your typical gay story where it's going to be full of like heartbreak and sadness. It is really a movie about triumph and
coming out of the closet and being proud of who you are, it is incredibly shot. The cinematography is wonderful. A lot of shallow depth of field, dark scenes, stationary cameras, and lots of heavy emotional moments. And it's just, it's a feast for the eyes. And in a practical way, like as I've been developing and learning more about photography recently,
This movie got me inspired to want to do darker shots with brighter colors and like show color as a beautiful masterpiece. It was a wonderful movie and I highly recommend everyone see Cassandra.
Now coming in in first place, the final movie on my list, which got a 10 for writing, 10 for acting, and a nine for directing, is Past Lives.
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Now I know I'm not saying anything wild here again because a lot of people have this as their number one and that is because that's exactly what this movie is. It is incredible. I will say the only reason I didn't give it a 10 for directing is because the final shot, which is the most emotional moment in the movie, is slightly out of focus and that took me out of it completely. Maybe they didn't want to get a second take, maybe they didn't notice, but I noticed the background behind the actor was in focus and the actor was just
barely out of focus and that just it cut the ending for me by a lot so that annoyed me but it's an incredible slow heartwarming moving about what could have been it's about just because you are happy now with what you have doesn't mean you can't think about things you don't have and would they have possibly made you happier it doesn't take away from the joy you have at the moment but it does
of are for you that freedom to think about other lives. It's a beautiful story about basically a woman who left Korea when she was a child and grew up in the United States and then reconnects with someone she knew when she was a child. I told the story to my wife of this movie after I came home because it affected me so much and she started crying as I was telling her the story and I really want her to watch it but she refuses because she said just me telling it made her cry so she wouldn't be able to handle it.
Which is a shame, because I think she'd really love it too. But, Past Live had such... Past Lives had such amazing writing, acting, like... Every line they say, you can feel like emotion welling up with that line. Everything keeps you on the verge of tears throughout the movie. And they're not sad tears, they're like longing tears. Happiness tears, just like... It's like a level of...
It grabs your attention emotionally and not a lot of movies can do that. Like they'll give you anxiety, they'll give you horror, they'll keep you on the edge of your seat because of what's about to happen. This keeps you emotionally on the edge of your seat and it's just something that you rarely ever see in a movie and that's past lives.
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So thank you so much for taking the time to listen to these. I'm gonna post the list on my blog as well as on my chain assembly blog, as well as my art for profit sake blog. I am not a film critic. I mostly just do all this for myself, but I do hope to get better at talking about movies in the future. I know I definitely next year wanna bring my wife on to review Hallmark movies as we watch those.
But hopefully I didn't sound crazy, I didn't repeat myself too much. And hopefully you saw some movies on this list that you would like to visit. And I hope to see some of you at the movie theater. So thank you so much for listening to me and following me on this podcast journey throughout these last, I guess, 34 episodes at this point.
So I know I'm still very early on in the podcast, but it has been a really fun adventure. And it looks like 2024 is gonna be kind of a dead year as far as films go. Everything got spread out because of the strikes. But again, thank you very much.
Outro
Chain Assembly: Art for profit sake is recorded through Riverside FM, distributed through Spotify for podcasters, and edited on Adobe Audition. The music is provided by Old Romans. If you learned anything useful or found this podcast helpful, please rate and review us five stars. If you want to learn more about me or my art, head over to ChainAssembly.com.
]]>You can listen to the episode here (or wherever you listen to podcasts) or read the transcript below:
Nick’s Reflections on 2023
Chain Assembly: Hello everyone, just going a little off the cuff on this episode. I don't have a scheduled interview and just wanted to kind of go over how this year has been for me, kind of what I have planning going on and where I am with my business at this point. I know usually December is kind of the time to look back and see how things have done, but I guess for me, it's always felt more like a January thing because that's when I'm actually doing my taxes and looking at all the numbers of where my different income sources have been.
Um, recently, I guess the, the biggest issue was that women's wheel project that you all heard a lot of the ads for, uh, I was extremely proud, not still am. I'm extremely proud of all the work that Melissa and I put together on that project. But the crowdfunding campaign did not go that well. And I think it really comes down to two things. First off is we decided to use backerkit’s crowdfunding campaign platform instead of Kickstarter, which is what I'm used to and what I've always used in the past. One of the reasons we went with BackerKit was because of the conversation I had with Seven on episode six of this podcast. Seven had great success using BackerKit's crowdfunding campaign platform, crowdfunding platform, I should say. And Seven also spoke very highly of the marketing team at BackerKit.
So when we met with the marketing team, described the project, they thought it was a great fit. And they said that if we used their crowdfunding platform, there would be a discount. So we started using the platform, it was easy to set up, had way more options and a much easier interface than Kickstarter was, so that was all feeling pretty good. But then when we started running the advertising campaign, that is when we noticed there was an issue. And generally what it comes down to is, project itself, it's similar to Satisfy, a board game that I designed a couple years ago. When you have the chance to explain to someone how it works, why you made it, and how it's helpful to them, they're on board and they're ready to buy it. Women's Wheel is not a traditional tarot deck or traditional oracle deck. It is a bit more complex than that and that makes it hard to share through marketing. So like one way that it is different from an oracle deck is the point of it isn't to draw a card and get your fortune. It is instead a tool that helps women identify their, the archetype that they are embodying at that moment as a result of the seasonal changes that women go through on a monthly basis. And through the process of the wheel, you can also identify where you might be headed, what you can prepare for. It also helps you understand what roles the women around you are in and how you can best communicate with your sisters, mothers, daughters.
Now, I know it sounds crazy that I'm talking about this, but this was not my philosophy. This project and all the philosophy and design behind it was developed by Melissa and I used my Product design graphic design illustration skill set to make it into a realized project But like I said that crowdfunding campaign on backer kit work well As a result of that We didn't get as many backers as we would have liked so what we decided to do because again, we are so proud of the product and we've put so much work into it, we're definitely gonna get it printed. We went back to the drawing board and Melissa and I decided, all right, let's try and get a funding goal at $2,000. That makes sense. So we removed the items that were not super important to the core set, things that were nice to have, but not needs to have. We got new price quotes to match the lower quantities we're aiming for, 250 in the initial print run. And we got numbers that it's gonna really come to about $3,000 in the production costs. But with that in mind, we are going to still put the funding goal at 2000. We're gonna run this on Kickstarter and we're both ready to throw in some of our own money if needed. But it's been fun going back to Kickstarter actually because they have updated their project design interface quite a bit, so it's a little bit easier to mess with. And that's what I've been doing this week is translating the graphics, updating the numbers, kind of getting that page up to a place where we can be proud of it. Around as Christmas present to myself, I bought some new camera equipment, so I'm looking forward to shooting a new video with Melissa soon, probably sometime in the next week or two. And kind of tough with the holidays happening now. But we are aiming for a launch date of the crowdfunding campaign early February and ending by the end of the month. So kind of looking for it to be a nice heart-famed Valentine's self-love crowdfunding campaign project.
Um, aside from that, I also have a new tarot deck that I've been working on. Um, the title right now is Tarrochi Gialli. It is a tarot deck inspired by giallo film movie posters. That's Italian Gothic horror films from the 60s and 70s. They have a very specific aesthetic style for their movie posters, and that's what I'm trying to replicate with this tarot deck. I'm making each card look like a movie poster. The main text on it is Italian, but I'm also using the descriptors of that card to help explain what the card does and make it look more like a tarot make it look more like a movie poster. So that's been a fun project. I've been utilizing a bunch of old photographs I took. Plus I've also been digitizing tons of my parents old photos from Italy in the 70s when they had their honeymoon. And utilizing those old photos has really helped allow me to get that kind of nice aging photography effect on some of these cards. And I'm really excited about the way that's looking.
Originally I planned on this being an a component of a role-playing game similarly inspired by that same thing. But now I'm thinking it might make sense to extricate it and have the tarot deck as its own crowdfunding campaign and then follow that up with the role-playing game later on in the year. Because I'll always be able to use that crowdfunding campaign as an opportunity to sell additional decks. So in that regard, it makes sense. If I do it all as one campaign, that means I am required to wait on a whole lot more things for me to design and build before I can actually start the project. I much prefer the idea of working on the role playing game and doing the crowd funding, sorry, doing the play testing, working on the core rule book and all that stuff while I'm waiting for this tarot deck to finish production. Thematically, that just makes sense in my mind. Another project that I am going to be revisiting soon is a board game that I was working on with my wife called Propagation Station. It's all about propagating houseplants and then buying and selling them. So that game, I feel like I was probably about 80% done, art-wise, to get to a place where I can start playtesting, because I always like to have most of the art done before I playtest. And then life got in the way. But I am excited about revisiting that and getting it to a place where we can playtest it and hopefully have that crowdfunding campaign happening. If I'm lucky, Q3 of next year. So in my mind, I'm picturing February will be the launch of my Italian tarot role playing, Italian tarot deck on Kickstarter. It'll also be the launch of the women's wheel, which I'm doing with Melissa under Melissa's Kickstarter account. So therefore I can run both projects simultaneously. Then...Maybe May or June would be the role playing game component that is also inspired by Italian Gothic horror. And then August, September maybe be the propagation station board game.
And this is all just floating in my head right now, but I spent so much time working on Women's I'm antsy to get back on the crowdfunding train. So, excited about that. Last week I also was part of the Dali Dozen, which you probably heard in my interview with Pamela Joy Trow. She's the one who sponsored me for that event. It was really fun. It was really nice to be able to, I guess, be in an art museum again. It's been a while since I had my stuff. And you know, since I'm on this podcast a lot talking to artists, I'm always talking about that push and pull between the official recognition of being a traditional fine artist versus what actually makes money for me. So that was a really nice networking opportunity. Met a lot of people who will hopefully buy Teradex from my website. Um, and that's kind of what I've been looking at for the rest of the year. I have one more event, uh, coming up before the year's over. It is going to be Winter in the Wood. This is an event that I organized last year with some other artists in my neighborhood. And this year, my wife's on the committee, so that happens next weekend. But otherwise, it's been a wild adventure working on this podcast. I know it sounds kind of like it's not like we're actually hitting a milestone or anything like that. But again, if I'm looking back at what happened throughout this year, this has been one of my biggest accomplishments. It's something that has absolutely not translated into money. It has translated into way more time spent than I expected. I'm also thinking in the next year, I'm going to increase the amount of money I pay for this platform to record this Riverside. Right now I'm at the $15 a month level. If I go up to, I think $24 a month, it adds a bunch of AI tools that will help streamline my process. I'll hopefully be able to spend maybe an hour less each week working on this as far as like cleaning up transcriptions and putting together show notes and scheduling those all that stuff. It's all very tedious. It's way more work than I expected, but it has been really fun doing. And for any of you who listen to it, thank you all so much for continuing to listen. The more listeners I get, the more likely I'll be able to attract an advertiser and make it financially worth it. When that does happen, I'll make sure to let you all know because that's what the whole point of this podcast is. As far as what's happening in the future, I've reached out to two nationally known, one is a standup comic, one is a musician, people I really admire and I'm currently working on scheduling them to be on the show. So that is helping elevate my conversations, help elevate the podcast itself.
When I first started, I thought it was just going to be like fine artists, but no, I'm learning a lot from people in tons of different industries that are arts related. So that's been really great to have on. Uh, and definitely follow me and, uh, we'll follow the new women's wheel project. It is going to be, um, at women's wheel.co again, same website from all the old advertising you heard women's wheel.co. That will take you to the new launch page where you'll see the new details and you'll be able to be notified when the Kickstarter page begins. So thank you all so much again for always listening to my podcast and always being there to hear what I have to say. I also wanna point out, I don't think I've ever mentioned this in any podcast, but any one of these episodes on the Spotify page, so if you look up an episode on Spotify of this Art for Profit's Sake podcast, there's a space to submit questions. So any questions you have, any comments you have, let me know and I will be very happy to answer those. It'll give me some nice content for future episodes. So thank you again so much for being a part of it and I hope you all have a wonderful holiday season.
Outro
Chain Assembly: Art for profit sake is recorded through Riverside FM, distributed through Spotify for podcasters, and edited on Adobe Audition. The music is provided by Leslie Haas. If you learned anything useful or found this podcast helpful, please rate and review us five stars. If you want to learn more about me or my art, head over to ChainAssembly.com.
]]>There’s been a lack of blog activity lately, and food that I am sorry.
But that doesn’t mean I haven’t been working hard; Art for Profit’s Sake has turned into a bigger time sink than I had expected. With each episode I publish, my efficiency improves- only to be replaced with more work.
I developed a checklist to help me track my progress for each episode:
I am an avid user of checklists, and this helps me make sure I do all of my required tasks after each episode is recorded.
Last week I joined a live Masterclass related to growing your podcast through listener interaction. The hosts that guested on that episode each agreed that their podcasts took off when they started sharing clips on TikTok. I may be late to the party, but for the last two episodes, I’ve exported short clips and turned them into videos. It’s more work but hopefully, it’ll translate to more listens.
This also does double duty of keeping me active on TikTok, which I need to do anyhow.
One struggle I’ve had is tying my Art For Profit’s Sake branding with my Chain Assembly branding. Right now, I have a separate Facebook page but everything else is under Chain Assembly. Is that a bad thing? I don’t know. Are the A4PS TikTok clips going to annoy my Chain Assembly TikTok account followers? I don’t know that either.
Time will tell.
I’m also running ads to increase awareness of the podcast. This is a facebook and IG ad, and it’s the first time I’ve run an awareness ad. It’s strange not looking at clicks as a metric but instead just seeing how many times it appeared on someone’s feed. I’ve put about $96 into it so far and I have seen a bump in listenership, but I can’t tell if it’s because of the TikTok clips or the Facebook Ad. Once that one runs out, I’ll try a Reddit ad. I’ve heard good things.
You can listen to Art For Profit’s Sake wherever you listen to your podcasts or by clicking this link.
This project has been in development, along with Melissa Elizabeth of The Heart Temple, for the last 6 months, and we’re finally approaching the launch of the Crowdfunding campaign. The amount of work that we have each put into this is immeasurable and I’m really excited to see it come to fruition. The art, the design, the aesthetics- every inch of this is designed to match the deep philosophy that Melissa has developed over her years as a healer.
I entered this partnership with a healthy dose of timidity. I am a very fast worker, and I don’t like having to wait for another person to complete their portion. But I met with Melissa and was blown away not just by her ideas, but more than anything by her work ethic. She has that same hustle and desire to learn that I see in myself. I also was really drawn into the idea of expanding past a tarot deck, past an oracle deck, and making something that worked in a communal setting- full of activities, for more than one person, to allow people to grow and learn together.
For this project, we’re also going to be using the new Crowdfunding feature of BackerKit. I’m nervous about the shift from the familiarity of Kickstarter, but that has been softened by the direct communication I’ve had with BackerKit’s customer service and marketing teams. I truly feel like we’re working with people who also want to see our project succeed.
That being said, we will still need your help. So please hit this link and make sure you have a backerkit account so you can join us on day one.
In May of this year, my mother suffered a massive stroke. She was living alone in Miami at the time and didn’t have any Long Term Care Insurance. Through lots of stress and sleepless nights, I was able to bring her to a St. Petersburg long-term care facility, near me, and get her on Medicaid. Before the stroke incapacitated her, she was known for, among other things, her love for Native American jewelry. To help with her bills, my wife and I have been cataloging, researching, and photographing all of her pieces. Most of these pieces are currently available for sale in the Cindy’s Jewelry section of my Etsy Shop. Don’t worry, we’re keeping her favorites and bring them to her to wear during our visits.
If you or anyone you know is interested in this type of jewelry, please share the listings with them. Each sale is set aside and used for her property taxes, HOA fees, water, and electric, in her Miami home until we can sell it and buy a condo where she can age gracefully in St. Petersburg.
]]>And I always left these conversations feeling energized and a sense of being full of potential for growth. It was during a recent meeting that I realized I should be recording these for others who might want to make money with their art but don't know where to begin.
The name, Art for Profit's Sake, is inspired by a conversation I had with another artist two years ago. She asked me "Why do you make art?" My cynical self responded with "To Make money." She proceeded to point out that if that was really the case, I'd be doing something else, like Crypto mining or accounting.
She made a good point- it's the desire to create something that drives me, and the renumeration for it is a tangible reward for my hard work. That's what I hope to explore in the conversations that this podcast will provide.
My first episode is a conversation with Elizabeth Eleanor Davis, Black Abbey Studios, who has found success with her art in a more traditional manner via selling original paintings and prints of her originals.
I follow that up with a jump in the opposite direction with Madame Berry, GlitchBerry, who's business more closely resembles my own. We discussion finding products and building communities of fans through different social media avenues.
In an effort to prevent Gatekeeping, I am recording these episodes via Riverside.fm and editing the RAW audio files via Adobe Audition. Finally, the episodes are uploaded and distributed through Spotify for Podcasters. I plan on this being a weekly episode.
At this point, I'm completely new to each step of the process and hope to improve as I record more episodes. I've tried using my laptop's (Surface Pro Studio) and my Headphone's (Sony WH-100XM5) microphones and neither have sounded as good as I'd like, so I'll be shopping for a new mic soon.
I hope you enjoy learning about podcasting with me and I hope you enjoy these engaging conversation with how different artists have found success and avoided failure in their businesses.
This site is built on Shopify, and I was inspired by Madame Berry (Now Glitch Berry) on TikTok, to revisit my old theme and see what can be done better.
Shopify comes with a handful of free theme options and I only explored them when I initially built the site a few years ago. Now that the brand has morphed into a beast that is quite different from what I initially planned, I knew it was time to make some changes.
I wanted a new site design that let me focus on my main publications and not feel like a bastardization of a cheap clothing brand (which most Shopify themes seem to look like). I wanted to be able to create pages that feel different from one another and highlight the individual personalities of each product, but still had a sense of identity for Chain Assembly as a whole.
Aside from that, I also wanted my blog to look much more professional than it did before.
Before this change, I was paying $15 a month for a third-party app called LayoutHub. It was kind of janky but worked to let me create individual pages for each product. It also only let me create 10 pages before the cost raised way higher than $15 a month. Meanwhile, a lot of the Shopify themes have the same or better flexibility and have a one-time payment with access to their support teams.
What I ended up going with is called Pipeline. I really liked the ticker on the sample homepage that can link logos to different pages, as well as the places to add embedded videos behind different section blocks.
It took me about a week to get it all set up (re-uploading all tarot cards and descriptions was the biggest time suck) and I feel like I’m 90% there. I still need to edit the header graphics on each main section and figure out which art to post under the Art Section.
The new structure of the site ties back to a tagline that I have been exploring. I now mount a banner to the front of my tent at pop-up markets: Art, Tarot, and Games. This small description seems to accurately describe what I make and has recognizably helped direct customers towards my booth during highly trafficked events (during Localtopia 2022 I didn’t have the banner and brought in around $500 while the 2023 iteration had the banner and brought in nearly $2k).
By limiting the breadth of my products I feel it will allow what I have to better shine. I therefore also removed dozens of Print on Demand products from my site. I will still have some, provided they are:
This new area of my site has a huge presence on my homepage. Inspired by Das Bootleg 13 and the new direction for House of Shadows, I wanted to allow each of my illustrations time to breathe. This will prevent my art from being lost in the weeds and will allow me an opportunity to explain why that piece exists and how it came to be. It will also add to the exclusivity of each items.
For the month of May, I decided to begin with a piece from the Pilgrimage of the Penitent, a role playing game that just finished its funding campaign at the start of the month.
I’ve also decided to have short descriptions of what’s in the works at Chain Assembly. As long as I have a banner image and a place to link people, I’ll have a dedicated area for it on my homepage. This will help people who browse the site see Chain Assembly as a growing and producing brand and maybe get a little sense of the excitement that I have.
Right now I’m featuring three projects:
But what I am, is curious and always ready to learn.
So let’s use my impending Kickstarter project, Pilgrimage of the Penitent, as a case study. I’ll discuss what I’m doing to market it and how I’m doing it.
The most important thing for any company is to collect email addresses.
Okay, good- I’ve already been doing that. So let’s collect more. When it comes to Kickstarter projects, you want to start the marketing as soon as you’ve decided to commit to it. You’ll need a landing page ASAP. A landing page is a short description of your project with a “Call to Action” - a request you want people to complete. Maybe it’s signing a petition, maybe it’s buying a product, or, in this case, you want them to enter their email address and get a notification when your project is ready. When you are setting up your Kickstarter project, you won’t be able to get your “Pre-Launch” landing page until the project has been approved by the KS team. So how do you collect leads before you’re ready to submit? Well, you could make a landing page with an email sign-up form, or you can post about it on social media. But from my experience, the best option is a product from BackerKit called “Launch.”
Many projects ago, I met with the Backerkit team (they are happy to schedule a private tour of the platform for you, and they asked me if I had tried Launch (one of their many features). I mentioned that I was interested in it but didn’t know what it was and didn’t want to pay $99 to access it. They waived the price for me and set me up with an account. Now, I don’t know if it’s now free for everyone or what, but even if I did have to pay $99 to access it, I would. Basically, BackerKit Launch is a set of tools to help you launch your Kickstarter project before you’re ready to have the project live.
Generally speaking, my prelaunch timeline looks like this:
Now I’m ready to start pushing people toward my BackerKit Launch landing page, which you can view here. Not only does this serve as a URL I can include in any conversations, posts, or emails, but it is also searchable on Backerkit’s website, so you’ll organically gain leads from people browsing their list of upcoming projects.
Backerkit Launch isn’t just landing pages. They also have tools to help you utilize that email list you’ve been collecting. I export my customer list from my Shopify store and then import it into BackerKit launch. BackerKit is able to identify which of those people have backed your previous project and create estimates on how much you’ll raise based on your average pledge amount. For example, it’s generated this helpful bit of information for my next project:
How many leads should I collect? You need at least 67 pledges to reach your funding goal of $1,000. Based on how a typical targeted email list converts into pledges (5~10%), we recommend building an email list of around 670 ~ 1340 leads.
It also has email templates that you can use to urge your previous supporters to join you on this new project.
Aside from all of the pre-project tools, BackerKit also has a pledge manager, which you can use to make additional sales post-project and help with organizing your fulfillment. But I have no experience with that (I do all my fulfillment via my online store), so let’s move on.
When your Kickstarter project is all built out and ready to go, the final page in the set-up has some tools to help you promote it. The most valuable of which is the Custom Referral tags. These tags are basically individualized links that all go to your project, but will let you know how much money each specific link raised. You can use this to check on the efficiency of your advertising channels.
Looking at my list:
Here is an example of this information that will be reported during the project and after it ends (this chart is taken from my Eros Tarot Second Edition campaign):
Type indicates where the link came from. “Custom” are the ones I’ve created and tied to my advertising locations. “Direct traffic, No referrer information”, at the top of the list, is likely people sharing direct links to the project amongst each other. As you can see, most funding comes from people already browsing within Kickstarter, which is why an amazing banner image that stands out among the others is so important. “FBAD2” was a facebook ad I ran. I believe I spent $50 on it and it resulted in $315 in pledges, so I’d call that a success.
For this project, I’m trying out a tool called Bidvertiser. The first big downside is you have to pay for advertising up front, by buying “credits,” and the minimum is $100. So I’m committed to spending at least that much. It doesn’t have to all be for the same campaign though, which is nice. So once this Kickstarter project is over I can use some of those funds to push other products on my website. I learned about this because they allow for the advertising of porn and other adult themes, which might work well for Eros Tarot, my erotic tarot deck. Ads for Eros Tarot on Kickstarter kept getting rejected.
The platform itself was also very easy to use. You select an amount of money you want to pay for each ad’s click and your ad will bid for that space against other ads. If you win the bid, you are only charged if the link is clicked. I started at 17 cents and was winning about 6% of the time. Meanwhile, my Facebook Ad was averaging around 50 cents a click, so I raised my bid on Bidvertiser to that same rate to see how it affected the win rate and it shot right up. It’s early in the day right now, so the rate is low again, but it should increase as more people get on their computers:
Facebook Ads, or also known as Meta Business Suite, is much more complex than Bidvertiser, but can be very valuable when you have a very niche product. This new project, for example, is a role-playing game that takes place in the Mork Borg universe/system. Therefore, I can target people who like Mork Borg AND like Crowdfunding, as they are most likely to back the project. From this comparison of my last two ads, you can see that the Tarot By the Neon Light one was much more effective- likely because the image was that much more enticing to click. I also spent a lot more on that ad, but had a comparatively smaller audience.
Advertising on Facebook or Instagram is really a nuanced thing, and it can only be learned via experimenting. Again- this is why those custom referrers are so important. You might get a lot of clicks from a FB ad but if it doesn’t translate to actual pledges, it’s meaningless.
Aside from the two sites above, I’ve reached out to a bunch of social media influencers and writers in the role-playing game space with a message similar to the one below:
It may seem kind of gross, but keep in mind that content creators are always looking for content, so this is often a win-win. Through these inquiries I’ve recorded two podcasts (and have two more scheduled for tomorrow), I’ve gotten two published reviews/previews, found one additional advertising opportunity, and collected five quotes that will be at the top of the Kickstarter page, adding to the project’s tangibility and legitimacy.
When this project ends, I promise to share the results of the different avenues with my readers. Thanks again for taking the time to check this out, and please click this link to view and pledge to my new game! And yes, this is a custom referral link so I’ll know how successful this blog post was :P
]]>Pilgrimage of the Penitent is a “zine” or a “compendium” in the Mörk Borg role-playing game system. So what does this mean? Before last year, these were all foreign words to me, too.
Flashback to Origins in June of 2022. I hosted a seminar on lessons I’ve learned from crowdfunding on Kickstarter. In attendance was Zac Goins, the crowdfunding guru for World of Game Design. We chatted afterward and I showed him my Ready Play Games series. He told me that what I had inadvertently created is now known as a “Zine.” No longer relegated to fighting the Man or promoting punk shows, Zine now also refers to small one-off RPG scenarios. Like a single-adventure campaign. And there is a healthy market for them on Kickstarter. In fact, Kickstarter has a month dedicated to their promotion called “ZineQuest.” He suggested using the next upcoming Zine Quest to promote my small pocket-sized RPGs and it worked well. No, I’m not retiring off of what I collected from it, but it did help me fund the printing of another batch, and the second volume is live on Kickstarter right now (for the next 4 days).
Okay, so Role-Playing Games are a viable avenue of revenue, and they are fun to make, too! Smash cut to a few months later, and I learn about Mörk Borg via TikTok. Mörk Borg is a newer RPG system that is super simple to learn and describes an incredible world of dark ages horror as the world begins to end. The core rulebook is an incredible feat of design, illustration, as well as gameplay, and it inspired me to make a zine that uses the Mörk Borg world and ruleset.
My initial plan was to adapt my illustrations into a series of cards, each with art on one side and rules on how to use the item, interact with the NPC, or explore the environment on the other side. I then decided- why not write a story that ties all of these disparate elements together? That way it can be played as one large adventure or just taken apart piecemeal. 10,000 words and 26 illustrations later, my content was finished.
As I was writing this, I vended at Atomic Holiday Bazaar in Sarasota. I was amazed by a neighboring booth’s work- Print St. Pete, and their Risograph prints. Many of my recent commissions were for event posters, and the one I had most recently made I decided to do in the style of a 70’s Italian horror film, so I knew I had to create a fake movie poster for my game, now called Pilgrimage of the Penitent via Print St. Pete’s Risograph machine. This became the first physical product in this project.
My process for converting the Google Doc’s text to the zine involved:
Some design choices I made along the way:
Once that started, I went crazy. Reviewing other crowdfunding projects in the Mörk Borg space really made me feel that my imagination could go wild with additional products outside of the book itself (which is currently at 76 pages and will be a hardback A5 size to match the core rulebook). I designed a silkscreen t-shirt, custom printed dot journal, enamel pin, bookmarks, Giclee prints, character sheet pads, a deck of Oracle cards featuring the illustrations, and a UV Spot black Collector’s edition box.
I am currently waiting on price quotes from 5 different manufacturers to solidify my pricing plans.
I have the Kickstarter project design based on my estimated retail prices, which may change if the quotes come in unexpectedly high or shockingly low. I plan on having 90 Collector’s edition boxes as well as offering many of the items as add-on, so the price quotes I’m basing my project off of will be 500 hardcover books, 40 t-shirts, 100 Collector’s Edition boxes, and 200 of everything else. I find this to be a safe estimate and, if the project does really well, I’ll increase my quantities which will reduce the production costs further.
For the Kickstarter project itself, thanks to the option for Add-Ons, I can simplify it with four tiers:
For marketing, I’ve been sharing my 3d renders as I’ve been making them on a Mörk Borg Facebook group. I’ve already got a Backer-Kit Launch page up, so I’ve been collecting leads through there. I just submitted the project for approval on Kickstarter (you only need the bones in place for this, you can keep editing it after approval is granted) so once that is done I’ll have an official pre-launch page. I’ll create a subdomain on my website that redirects to either the Backer-Kit Launch page or the Kickstarter pre-launch page. I haven’t yet decided.
I plan on sending out some review copies so I can collect some quotes from people known in the DMing and Mörk Borg space. These will either be print-on-demand books or PDFs - I also haven’t yet decided. I’m in no rush since I am planning on an April launch.
For Ready Play Games Vol 2, I guested on two podcasts. When this project is launched, I hope to do the same. In an audio medium, you need to be able to very easily get people to visit your project, so leaving them with a simple URL or a name of something to look for is paramount.
Will I run Facebook ads for this project? I think I might. If I can target people who like Mörk Borg, then that is a no-brainer. But targeting people who like Role Playing Games and Horror Movies might be too general. But those are decisions for another time.
So that’s how I’ve gotten to this point- over a month out from release and a lot left to do. No matter how it does on Kickstarter, I know I’ll be extremely proud of the printed book and the desire to see it realized is ultimately what drives me in all of my projects.
You can view the BackerKit Launch page, and sign up to be notified when it launches, here.
]]>
Another film tradition of mine is predicting the winners for the Oscars each year. Seeing as how the nominees were just announced, below is a table depicting who I predict will win and who I want to win. Please note that I did not include Best documentary, best short feature and best animated short, as I did not see enough of them to pass judgement. I also did not see Banshees of Inisherin or a couple other movies that were represented on this list.
]]>This tradition goes back a long time ago. When I was little, I adored my older sister. I thought she was the coolest person ever. And in high school, she wanted to be a film director. That’s all I needed to know that I also had to obsess over film. It was what I studied in high school and it was what lead me to work at a video rental store for years longer than I should have.
It was also why I made that New Years' resolution when I was 16 to watch a movie EVERY day for a year. Encore was the best channel ever back then. No matter what nonsense was on, I watched it.
Fast forward a few years and I stopped watching as many movies and instead read a ton of books. I started using goodreads.com to track them. As my reading died down, my film going returned, and I switched to a spreadsheet. This was back in 2015, and I only wrote down their names and the order in which I saw them. I ended the year by rearranging them in order of the ones I liked the most. It was only a short list (20 movies) that started with Creed at #1 and Sisters at #20.
2016 I decided to rank them 1-10 as I saw them, to make sorting them easier, and in 2018 I moved on to ranking each one on a 10-point scale for Acting, Directing, and Writing and then averaging those numbers together to get its final placement.
So this brings us to 2022—our most recent year in film. Last year, I watched and rated 115 movies. All films were released in 2022.
Before I move on to what made it to the top of the list and what made it to the bottom, I want to call out the films I did not get to see but were on my radar.
As a lover of spreadsheets, you know I have a documented list of shame that details all that fell through the cracks throughout the years, and it’s usually at the beginning of the year when the pressure is off that I get to catch up on those.
A fun thing I’d like to explore is the movies that earned a 10 somewhere in the rating but did not make it onto my final top 10 of the year.
All of these are movies that I recommend, especially “The Fire Place” (go in completely blind- it’s on HBO Max). I always give extra points to any movie that shows me something I’ve never seen before, and that movie has it in spades.
Now for the not-so-great. Before sharing this list, let me warn you that my wife and I LOVE to watch Hallmark movies during the holiday season. A bad movie can still be an entertaining movie. There are plenty of Hallmark originals throughout my list. My highest-rated one made it up to #59 out of 115 films, so cheers to “The Christmas Sitter.”
I don’t curate the order of the bottom 10, so here are my worst-reviewed films of 2022:
And in case you’re wondering, “The Colors of Christmas” is about a colorblind elementary school science teacher who falls in love with an optometrist that gives him special prescription glasses that let him see color for the first time, which makes him finally understand the spirit of Christmas.
To make sure these don’t all fall into obscurity, here are some honorable mentions:
Okay, now for the top 10. Since I started rating on these three levels, only two movies have gotten solid 10s across the board, and one of them is from 2022. The other one to get this distinction was 2019’s “The Biggest Little Farm.” If you haven’t seen it, you MUST. A documentary about organic farming will make you cry while smiling ear to ear.
In 2022, I gave out twelve “10s” from a possible thirty spaces across the three categories. This is way higher than any year prior. Maybe it’s because the pandemic allowed artists to have time to reflect on what was most important or what they really wanted to say. There was no rush in my top three movies- each one is deeply plotted and takes time in each scene to really layer the impact of their messaging.
I hope my ridiculous amount of tracking has helped someone out there. I’ll keep watching movies and I’ll keep writing down numbers, with or without anyone reading them.
]]>Early in June, I was contacted by Nick Kellet, founder and creator of Deckible. His goal for this app is to make what is basically Audible, but for decks of all kinds- flash cards, games, trivia, and especially Tarot. I was selected, among many other creators in the tarot-sphere to try it out and use it as an avenue for sales once it launches (September 16th). The platform was a little odd at first, as it was still in active development, but quickly simplified. I have two decks in there now- Date Night and Eros Tarot. I'll add The Goracle once inversions are added to the platform.
The financials of the transactions were more creator friendly than I had expected. The app store takes it's cut (usually around 30%) from each sale, and the remaining amount is split evenly with the creator and the app developers. Compare this to traditional print publishing where you'd only get a few dollars for each physical deck sold. Plus, since it's a digital product, no need to print anything or play with logistics.
The creators still retain full control over their IP and can remove their deck from the store at any time (although anyone who purchased it and downloaded the cards will still have access to your deck on their device). You are also able to give cards more than two sides- this allowed me to put the Eros Tarot meanings as a third graphic on each card. So you draw a card and see it's back- flip it to see the illustration- flip it again to read the description.
One more element about this that I'm excited about is that I have full control over couponing my products- so I can have Kickstarter projects that have a code for a free digital implementation of the deck via Deckible, or I can put a coupon code in the digital deck that will lead to a discount on purchasing the print version from my store.
How successful of an avenue will this be to me? Time will only tell, but the negligible amount of work that went into digitizing my already digital illustrations to this format made it worth the time commitment.
Deckible launches officially on September 16th.
I recently completed a 10 week course, hosted by my county business development center, called Co.Starters. Throughout the course we focused on making steady income, developing profit and loss statements, finding when and where to hire help, and much more. During the final class, we each did a small presentation on our next steps. I used the opportunity to talk about Tarot By the Neon Light. Below are two slides from that presentation:
This slide shows the static marketing avenues for this project. I've got my Kickstarter Pre-launch page, so that gives me something to link people towards. This page has a counter that tells me how many people clicked on "Notify me on launch" - which is a good indication of the general audience's interest in the project. Even though this is my 15th kickstarter project, I've never tracked what this number was before launch, so I really should start taking note and comparing it to the final result.
I also created a subdomain for my website based on this deck. I didn't find it necessary to buy a simpler, more direct domain, but if the project does well- then I'll go back and see what's on the market. A subdomain is free, as I already have the main domain of ChainAssembly.com, and I can freely change where it redirects. Currently, neonlight.chainassembly.com takes people to my BackerKit landing page, but once the project is launched I'll change it to the actual Kickstarter page. And once that is over, I'll have it redirect to my online store.
The BackerKit launch page is something I am trying for the first time on this project. Essentially it is the same as the Kickstarter launch page, except it's more customizable- you can have more text, links, images, etc, and you can also collect email addresses. It also has some lovely tools to track who has or has not opened the emails you've sent.
My more active marketing avenues are as follows:
I've been posting semi-daily on Discord, Facebook Groups, and Instagram. I have a photoshop template that allows me to easily swap out the card for each day's post.
I once again returned to Moo.com for custom business cards, each one featuring a different card from the deck and info about the project, plus a QR Code, on the back. I'll be giving these out at my upcoming events before and during the Kickstarter project.
I just finished my Intro video (all done in After Effects) which I also just posted on YouTube earlier today. This will give me more content to share online.
I enlisted The Gamecrafter to print three copies of the deck and shipped them out to three different Tarot reviewers/content creators to also drive more people to my site in anticipation of the launch. Keep yours eyes peeled for posts from:
These reviews will also give me more content to add to the Kickstarter page, which adds to the trustworthiness of Chain Assembly as a brand and the verisimilitude of the product itself.
Lastly, I planned on making some Facebook ads. I also put a really nice 20 second video together. But today I want to post it and saw that my ability to place ads has been revoked- probably because I had so many ads rejected for Eros Tarot. So I submitted a review and will hopefully be able to boost that video post soon. Meanwhile, you can watch it here.
I hope the information above shows you how I plan on launching this thing. It's a bunch of work, and I'm going at it from a lot of avenues. I have zero advertising related education, or real world experience, so here's hoping it all works.
Tarot By the Neon Light launches on Kickstarter on October 2nd.
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First, we'll start with Printers. Many people I follow on TikTok have great printers and are doing high quality prints at home. Would I like to do this? Absolutely. Not just because it ends up being cheaper to make the print itself, but because I wouldn't need to wait for a delivery before an event or order multiple prints at once to make the pricing work out in my favor. The freedom to do one and be done is enticing. So at-home digital inkjet printing is on my to do list, and when that time comes another blog entry would surely follow.
So I outsource my printing. These are the companies I reliably return to:
Shutterfly - There are always a ton of sales and coupon codes floating around, so with some finagling you will get an incredible price. As far as quality goes- it's impeccable. I'm a huge fan of their Pearlescent prints for my larger sizes (11x14). Even though the shimmer makes me happy, it's pretty invisible behind a plastic sleeve or in a glass frame. It's also hard to photograph, but when you see them in person, they are impressive. Their matt prints are also great. Effectively, this is my go-to printer.
Printful - When I want to print large Tarot images, or for Print on Demand services, I use Printful. Their matte posters have a lovely velvety texture and great detail. Prices are more expensive, but the best part is their integration. Orders placed on my online store automatically go to Printful, who prints it, packages it, and ships it out all on my behalf. As far as making prints to sell in person, I use them for larger sizes. Particularly, their 12x18 prints, as that size is not available via Shutterfly and it's a great 4x scale print of my tarot and oracle card illustrations.
MPix - I tried to use them for my Eros Tarot and Goracle prints, but they refused because they are a "family business." I support their freedom to refuse me service, but that's why I haven't tried them again. I was interested in their white labeling (they ship the print to my customer and make it look like it came from me), but Printful already has me covered in that department so it wasn't worth revisiting.
Let's discuss pricing. I feel like there is a general agreement on the prices of prints, as you'll see some consistency any time you walk through artist alley at a convention.
Let's start with an 8x10 (a very common size). You'll usually find it for $15 or $20. What goes into this print? Materials wise, you've got the print ($3), the sleeve ($1) , and the backing board ($1). Please note these prices are generous estimates. This comes to about $5 worth of material for, in my case, a $20 sale. When pricing things, the general rule of thumb is materials x2 equals your wholesale price, and wholesale x2 is your retail price. That's how I end up with $20 for my digital prints.
Back when I first started, I decided that 5x5 and 5x7 was really the way to go. This was a huge mistake. Lowering your retail price does NOT translate to more sales. When it comes to a print, your customers will make their decisions based on the image, not on the price of the image. So pick a size that makes the best sense for you. I noticed that as soon as I added matts to my smaller prints, customers started buying them more readily. This also got factored into my pricing because it really made the small image look more important and bigger. Matting a 5x7 to an 8x10 will have much more presence in your booth and on the customer's wall.
So at this point in my career, here is the pricing structure I use for my Unlimited Digital Prints (all sizes in inches):
Regarding how sales have been, let's take a look at a report of my market sales over the last 12 months:
*This data is only based on in person sales at markets. It does not include prints ordered along side Kickstarter projects, from my website, or via consignment from local stores.
Based on these numbers, the medium size is definitely the best selling size. That's not to say the large ones are a waste of time- they are what people see at a distance and bring them into your booth. You'll just need to hold on to them for a bit longer than the other prints.
Let's talk about packaging. I mentioned the pricing of sleeves and backing boards a bit earlier. For each print, you'll want it to be in a sleeve and you'll want it to lay flat. If you show respect to your products, customers will see that and feel like it's a product worthy of respect. If it's flimsy and looks like it's been rolled up and thrown into a bin, people will expect a cheap price. Another vender at a recent Artist Alley had asked if I wanted to do a print swap. To not be rude, I agreed. All of her prints were bigger, but the paper was thin, the quality was spotty, and they had no backing boards. The print immediately curled and got smashed when I tried to put it away. No bueno.
I recommend committing to no more than three sizes at first. Like I did, I have small, medium, and large. Therefore if I buy a 50 pack of 11x14 sleeves, I know I can fit both matted 8x10s and unmatted 11x14s in that same sleeve. It gives you flexibility when deciding which pieces to print. The sleeves and backing boards I buy tend to be from Golden State Art on Amazon.
You also don't want to get more than 5 prints of a single image in the same size at once. It may be the best thing you've ever drawn, but you'll get batter at it as you work on your art and will quickly be making better pieces. I've got a lot of early prints that I should throw away because I no longer consider them to be up to my standards.
It's okay to throw away prints that you are no longer proud of. You can still use the sleeves and backing boards.
For the prints themselves, I slip in a business card and add a label to the bottom left. These sticker labels are printed at home on a thermal printer. I feel that this label, which costs no more than 1 cent to print, adds a level of official-ness and perceived value to the print.
Meanwhile, the price is handwritten on a removable adhesive label. It's not the prettiest, and I really should do better, but I know I often switch out what is in the sleeve so I need to make sure I'm using something removable.
I have the thermal printer, so I'm sure there's a good solution out there for me. I just have so many left from the pack that I'll wait until I start to run low.
I also add an adhesive hang tag to many of the prints. When I'm showing art in public, such as at a brewery or selling at a market, my prints are my biggest items, so hanging them in a way that they can be seen from a distance is paramount. In lieu of original paintings, these are what draw in the customers. These tags allow me to non-destructively hang the prints that are for sale. This tiktok video shows off my display before I added these tags; when I was still using binder clips which, while pretty, did dent the mats.
My smaller prints go in a folding table-top print rack. Customers love flipping through prints, so I make sure to put it at the edge of my booth or table space and within reach of passerbys.
I hope this provided some useful information to some of you. I'm not an expert in all things prints, but I am expert in the path I took to get where I am. Please let me know if you have any questions.
P.S.: Giclee is nothing but a fancy word for any digital print that won't fade over time. Most prints can be called Giclee if it helps your sales.
]]>A couple months ago I was at Origins Game Fair in Columbus, Ohio. I had hosted a seminar that I called "Lessons Learned from Kickstarter as a Small Time artist." Zac Goins, from World of Game Design (WOGD) was in attendance.
Afterwards, we got to talking and I showed him my Ready Play Games project. I described how the Patreon format was a complete failure, but it was selling well at Origins. Zac went on to describe how his company works and how he thinks we might be able to do something well together- so we swapped cards.
In a nutshell, World of Game Design will run every aspect of your Kickstarter campaign and fulfillment in exchange for 25% of the money raised. I had already completed 14 successful kickstarter projects by this point, so I didn't need their help, but I was still intrigued. There were a few benefits that made me want to work with WOGD:
All of the reasons, as well as the fact that I already had these games produced and stock ready to go made it worthwhile. Even if I made $0 in profit, the learning experience as well as the new active consumers being added to my email list absolutely made it worth the endeavor.
Off the bat, Zac created a very simple structure for the pledge levels that I wouldn't have thought of. We decided to sell three games through the project and offer each as either a PDF or physical printed box of cards. As of this writing, 16 of the 61 backers have selected PDF only levels, which really helps with the profitability. Even those levels aside, I'm still bringing in about $2 for each printed copy. I won't be quitting my day job over it but it's still nice to know I'll have some money coming in to help produce samples for Tarot By the Neon Light.
One unexpected success in this project is the use of Backer Kit. A few projects ago I met with BackerKit's marketing team to learn about their benefits, specifically their product called Backer Kit Launch. Here's a tip- if you complain about the $99 price tag during the meeting, they'll waive it for you.
Backer Kit launch is a tool that targets your previous project's backers and specifically emails them and urges them to back your new project. I have small email list, but it is a reliable one. I didn't find it necessary since I was already planning on emailing them. When Zac implemented it into this project, it was a huge boost, because he was able to import the email list from all of the previous WOGD campaigns. As of right now, 24% of the funds have been collected as a result of BackerKit. I know this because Kickstarter allows you to create trackable links. So if I had ran this project on my own, without the help of Zac and WOGD, I would be $400+ lighter.
So while the project isn't even close to being finished, the experiment is looking really good. Will I stick with them for more Ready Play Games releases?
I think I will.
Will I use them for my next Tarot project?
I don't think I will.
In conclusion, I feel that the service that WOGD offers is a marvelous one, especially when PDFs are part of your sales. It's a wonderful tool for anyone who does NOT want to make a habit out of running Kickstarter projects, who doesn't want to build an enduring brand and instead wants to release a single project.
Let me know if you'd like for me to connect you with Zac and I'll be happy to make the introductions.
Ready Play Games will be live on Kickstarter until August 22nd.
]]>I've got a few projects in the works, and one of them, working title of "Tarot by the Neon Light," is one that I've decided to NOT develop in a vacuum. I've been sharing the illustrations as I've been making them to instagram, facebook, and the Tarotholics discord server. The reception has been great, the feedback invaluable, and the organic growth of the brand- undeniable.
Therefore, I've decided to use this philosophy to the overall Chain Assembly brand and its email marketing. That brings me to this, the first entry in hopefully a steady blog.
There is a lot I could discuss- mostly topics I've shared with my wife and discussed as possible directions for my future projects. I could discuss them all in this post but that's probably too much, so I've got a few primary topics to bring up.
First- let's take back even further and introduce myself fully.
Chain Assembly IS Nick Ribera. I do art under the name Chain Assembly for a few reasons. Mainly, I like that it makes me seem like a larger entity housing multiple artists. I don't like spending too much time in the same art style, and pretending I'm multiple people allows me the flexibility to go in a completely different direction in each project's illustrations.
But because I am one person, I've had to learn marketing, social media and traditional, web design, product design, customer service, fulfillment, production and more.
It's a lot for one person to do, but I do it because I love it.
Second topic- Ready Play Games
You've probably see me post about this in the past. It was a crazy idea that was terribly marketed and positioned, but I 100% stand behind the product(s). It began as an idea for one-off role playing game scenarios released on a monthly basis via Patreon. I created 10 games before deciding to nix the ill-fated Patreon page (which had one patron for 4 of the months).
I decided to end it at Origins Game Fair. Not because it had a bad reception, but because it had an incredible reception. The physical printed games sold really well, teaching me that the audience is out there, but they don't want to print-and-play their own copies and they won't find it on Patreon. At Origins I also met a contact at World of Game Design, a game marketing company that focuses on small role playing games. They convinced me to give it a try as a kickstarter featured in this years ZineQuest. Therefore, I've handed them three of the games and they will be running this project on my behalf, and it launches on August 2nd.
Right now I'm impressed with the amount of attention the prelaunch page has and I can't wait to see the full potential of this project and to learn from their marketing and project design expertise, which I'll be able to utilize in my own subsequent projects.
Well, I think that's enough for this blog, but in the name of transparency, I'll share a short list of what I'm working on, in no particular order: