Only 4 hours left to help fund my documentary on 2-time Grammy winner Jim Lauderdale

As you probably know if you've been in any kind of contact with me in the last two months - either in the real world or social media - I'm making a documentary about Jim Lauderdale.

For the uninitiated, Jim is the best dressed man in Americana music. Writer of hit country tunes for George Strait, Patty Loveless, Blake Shelton, the Dixie Chicks and more, winner of 2 Grammys for his stellar, bluegrass albums, host of 2 radio shows and the annual Americana Music Awards and tai chi master.

I've been working in the country music industry here in Australia for the past five years and have been lucky enough to become friends with Jim. He may be the nicest man in show business. He's also had an unconventional, twisted kind of career and has worked with everyone from Elvis Costello to Willie Nelson.

We were touring the Beatles museum in Liverpool a couple of years ago when I got the notion that his life and career would make a great documentary film. I pitched it to Jim, he signed off and last June I took off to Music City, USA - otherwise known as Nashville. I got to interview folks like Buddy Miller, Gary Allan, Jerry Douglas and Randy Kohrs. Saw Jim get inducted into the Blue Ridge Hall of Fame. Fun times.

That footage ended up as a 45-minute documentary for Australia's Country Music Channel, which premiered last month and aired six or seven times across March. It was well received too. At the CMC Rocks the Hunter festival this year, one of the artists found out I was the director and hugged me.

But you can only tell so much story in 45-minutes, especially when you're paying for it all out of your own back pocket. So in the intervening period since wrapping filming last year, I got together with a great producer named Chris Kamen and we've been putting together a plan to return to the US and cut a swathe through Tennessee, California and North Carolina - capturing Jim on the road and in the studio and picking up interviews some of the collaborators I couldn't schedule the first time around.

To finance the second round of filming, we took to the crowdfunding site IndieGoGo. Over the past forty-five days, we've raised an astounding $10,783! We couldn't have done this without the support of people like the Americana Music Association, British film and television critic Boyd Hilton, Whispering Bob Harris, BBC Radio FiveLive's Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo and the incomparable Stephen Fry - who continues to be exceedingly nice to me for no good reason.

It's been damn inspiring to see the love for Jim and his music that people out there have. The comments accompanying donations about personal connections with songs and experiences with Jim over the years have made me doubly sure I'm right to tell his story. It also puts a pretty big weight of responsibility on my shoulders to not fuck this up.

The fundraising campaign is almost at an end - but don't fret! You can still give me money help fund the documentary! Just go here: http://www.indiegogo.com/Jim-Lauderdale-The-King-of-Broken-Hearts

Every dollar helps. Lots of dollars help more! But seriously, I'm so grateful for everyone who's spared us some of their hard-earned cash. Y'all rock. And when I jump on a plane on Sunday to head to the US, you're the wind at my back.

See you on the LauderTrail!

- Jeremy Dylan

Concision

'My daughter Annie has a good rule. No movie over three hours should be eligible for Best Editing.' - Ken Levine

Concision is crucial for a filmmaker. If you feel any sort of empathy toward your audience, you're trying to keep the running time down around ninety minutes. For most movies, anything longer is just rude. Romantic-comedies do not need to be as long as 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Actually, 2001: A Space Odyssey probably doesn't need to be that long either. But at least it manages to go from the the dawn of mankind to the birth of a new species. If you take the same amount of time to tell the story of two pretty people deciding whether or not to make out, you're doing it wrong.

I hear a lot of talk about how short audiences attention spans are these days. Really? Here is the list of the ten highest grossing films of all time.

1	Avatar	$2,782,275,172	2009	[# 1]
2	Titanic	$1,843,201,268	1997	[# 2]
3	The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King	$1,119,110,941	2003	[# 3]
4	Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest	$1,066,179,725	2006	[# 4]
5	Toy Story 3	$1,063,171,911	2010	[# 5]
6	Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides	$1,032,610,000	2011	[# 6]
7	Alice in Wonderland	$1,024,299,904	2010	[# 7]
8	The Dark Knight	$1,001,921,825	2008	[# 8]
9	Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone	$974,733,550	2001	[# 9]
10	Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End	$963,420,425	2007	[# 10]

They're all from within the past ten years. Number six is still in theatres as I type. Only two of them are under two hours. The average length is 160 minutes - exactly two hours and forty minutes. Audiences were more than willing to sit through them, multiple times.

Compare this to, say, The Marx Brothers' Duck Soup, which is all of 68 minutes long. If you tried to get a 68 minute film made today, you'd be laughed out of the studio. Barry Sonnenfeld padded the end credits of Men In Black to push it past the 90 minute mark. I used a similar trick to flesh out Benjamin Sniddlegrass and the Cauldron of Penguins.

This seems somewhat emblematic of a trend in media towards over-indulgence, wastefulness and just generally taking things too far. I mean, look at the length of pop songs.

Heartbreak Hotel, a quintessential 50s pop single, is 2 minutes and 8 seconds.
Born This Way, one of this year's bigger pop hits, is 4 minutes and 20 seconds.

It's also worth mentioning the irrelevant guff that makes up most of the airtime on 24-hour cable news channels.

I recently guested on the Elitist Bastards Go To The Movies podcast and was part of a discussion about Super 8. The thing I most admired in the whole film was the opening two shots, which in the space of about 25 seconds with no dialogue, establish that the lead character's mother has died in an accident at her factory job. Incredibly efficient storytelling.

I'm currently in the middle of principal photography on a short film named Access All Areas. It's going to come in around seven minutes long. It follows the Hero's Journey story structure pretty faithfully. I don't think I could tell this story any more concisely, but I could probably make a less compelling half-hour version with less effort. The restrictions of film festival guidelines have forced me to sharpen my knives and cut anything extraneous. Making short films helps keep you concise. I don't intend to direct another feature until I have some more shorts under my belt.

And if I ever make a film that runs over three hours, feel free to slap me.