DEVELOPMENT TIMELINE

2005 I get the idea for a new kind of online story — one in which the user is thrust into the heart of the story to interact with the characters and affect the timeline of events. Ever since the advent of the web, ideas for how to use it to tell a different kind of cinematic story have been bouncing around my head, but now this new model is starting to crystallize; one that uses text and e-mail communications as well as a trail of clues leading across multiple websites. I noodle around with different story ideas, but have trouble settling on the right one.
March 2006 I begin crafting a specific story to fit this model — one revolving around international espionage and the occult. I shoot a short video that is intended to serve as the opening episode of Mercury Chain, tapping my friends in the theater to perform in it.

As I am shooting the scene in a converted room of my house, I take a call from a theatrical producer wanting to revive the stage musical adaptation of Frankenstein that I co-authored several years earlier. I debate the pros and cons of turning him down to focus on this new project vs. revisiting the old one. I ultimately decide to pursue Frankenstein, which means my dream of an internet-based adventure story will have to wait.
October 2012 The Frankenstein musical project eventually made it to the New York stage, but it dominated several years of my time and energy. In 2013, I decide to revive my idea of an internet-based story. But I jettison the Mercury Chain concept as being too complex and expensive to produce. Inspired by my new taste for horror films, I decide to craft a story in that genre, as it’s proven to be a resilient one for low-budget filmmakers for decades.

I create the basic storyline for Daemon_9 around the concepts of internet security fears and demonic possession. I have a window for rushing it into production, but I live in New Jersey and winter has just begun. I decide to decamp for Los Angeles and shoot it there. I take a quick trip there in November to line up cast and crew as well as housing for myself for a three-month stint. I meet with Shanele Alvarez and immediately know I’ve found the perfect right-hand person. As my Assistant Director and Unit Production Manager, she will ultimately recruit most of the crew and help me pull off this gargantuan task in more ways than I can count.
January 2013 I depart for L.A. right after the first of the year, move into my sublet condo in Brentwood, and immediately dive into pre-production. Since the whole concept of Daemon_9 is about low-res found footage from security cameras, home video and clips shot with phones, I decide to be my own cinematographer and shoot all the video with a Canon pro-sumer camera that I purchased for the project. But this is still like shooting a feature-length indie movie. There’s a full script, a cast of about 25 actors, stunts, vehicles, extras, locations — the whole nine yards, and it all has to come together in a few short weeks.

Through a NY theater contact, I was connected with casting director Paul Ruddy, and he already started showing me some audition clips via the web back in December. (Online auditioning was revolutionary then, but is now standard practice.) I conduct in-person callbacks with the actors in early January and the cast starts taking shape. In this time I’m also scouting locations and lining up production resources.
February 8–20, 2013 The film shoot covers 13 out of 14 days in early February. My choice of L.A. for its warm climate for outdoor shoots ends up not being so great, as it’s one of the coldest winters in L.A. history. This is especially tough on our lead actress, Stephanie Ver Eecke who has to work outdoors at night in a very skimpy costume. The R-rated elements of Daemon_9 (language, violence, nudity) are a deliberate choice to add to its sense of reality. An essential lure of D9 is to give the player the mental space to pretend that what’s happening in the story is very real (a la The Blair Witch Project). The grit of reality is an important tool in achieving that.

Like most indie film shoots, we constantly battle the clock and limited resources. Thankfully, I had Shanele to help me through it all, and we complete the shoot on-time and on-budget.
April 2013 I return to N.J. but have to keep D9 on ice for some time due to commitments to two other New York theater projects (my play Two Point Oh and directing the musical Love in the Middle Ages).
June 6–9, 2013 I quickly squeeze in shooting the “Stalking Evil” portion of the script — a faux British TV documentary that provides key background information for the game player. I use a local crew and tap my N.J. theater actor friends to portray the various British characters. I shoot the green-screen material in a single day at my old haunt, The Black River Playhouse in Chester, NJ. (Many thanks to Chester Theatre Group!) The balance of the material I shoot on location at the homes of some of the actors, who graciously let me mess up their houses for free. Much like Shanele Alvarez was my indispensable right hand during the L.A. shoot, fellow filmmaker Adam Chinoy goes above and beyond his job description to help me through this shoot.
Jan.–June 2014 Temporarily living in Jersey City, NJ, I continue sifting through the footage from both the L.A. and N.J. shoots. I also begin creating the myriad graphics, web site designs, and other ancillary materials that support all the video and flesh out the story for the game player.
July 2014–July 2015 I move permanently to Los Angeles in July 2014, and the move consumes all of my bandwidth both in the months leading up to the move and the afterwards. Not to mention slogging through the detritus of a 10-year marriage. But I eventually return to Daemon_9, tackling not only the voluminous video editing and post-production, but the daunting task of programming and tracking all the web interactivity. I team up with Areg Abcarians (with whom I would go on to enjoy a long, productive professional relationship) to tackle the programming. I get a crash, trial-by-fire course in Javascript and other coding languages required to make D9 work.

It’s slow work because I’m doing so much of the project single-handedly. But I’m still developing a lot of the game play on the fly, so it’s nearly impossible to direct anyone else to take on any part of it. I have to pretty much go it alone.
July 2015 After months of trying to coax something useful out of one the most important scenes that we shot in L.A., I come to the painful conclusion that it won’t work and must be re-shot. I enlist the help of crew members Shanele Alvarez, Sam Stisles and Edith Raya, and I lure our lead, Stephanie, out to L.A. (she had since moved to N.Y.C.). I write an entirely new “dashcam cop stop” scene and film half of it on location in Griffith Park. I turn my new apartment in Glendale, CA into a makeshift greenscreen studio to capture the rest of it. (Check out the VFX breakdown video here!)
July 2015–September 2017 I spend the next two years(!) completing Daemon_9 — far longer than I anticipated, far longer than it probably should have, but it was a huge undertaking. In addition to completing post-production on all the video and doing all the web programming, I have to beta test it and employ a team of volunteers from around the country to help. There are techniques in D9 that experts told me couldn’t be done — like programmatically calling players on the phone with recorded messages. But piece-by-piece, I figure it all out — eventually. Also, somewhere in here I ran a failed Kickstarter campaign to try to raise advance sales.
September 2017 Daemon_9 finally launches! Surprisingly, this complex beast works well with only minor glitches. I launch an advertising campaign across multiple social media platforms. But getting players to go to an untrusted web site proves difficult. In this original web version, players get to view the preamble video and sample the interactivity before being asked to pay to continue. Despite experimenting with a variety of price points, sales are lukewarm at best.
Spring 2018 After much market analysis, I conclude that Daemon_9 will never reach a wide audience unless I can port it to one of the established online gaming portals. I choose Steam and re-imagine the story and core elements to fit this platform. Unfortunately, it means watering down some of the more interesting parts of the game, like the characters texting you and knowing your home address (since that info isn’t made available to us on Steam). Plus everything has to be re-programmed, and new elements created. But the main story, 95% of the video content, and the basic structure of the game remain intact.
October 2018 Daemon_9 re-launches on Steam on Halloween 2018. Critical reception from both players and the media are overwhelmingly positive, and sales start picking up thanks to Steam’s massive reach.
2019-2023 Sales continue at a steady but modest pace. At first, I continue to promote the game through paid social media advertising, but this is expensive and I can only sustain it for awhile. Ironically, sales seem unaffected by advertising and continue at about the same pace even after the promo campaign stops. For the next four years, players will continue to find and play Daemon_9, generating just enough revenue to cover the cost of maintaining the network of websites that still provide supporting content. But never enough to really be a breakout hit. Maybe it scared people too much? (We also had a BIG problem with piracy.) My rough estimate is slightly over 10,000 people played D9 across both of its iterations.
May 2023 Fast-forward nearly six years: I make the difficult decision to discontinue D9, concluding that even the small amount of time it takes me to support it isn’t worth it. So perhaps, in the end, I failed. But I failed spectacularly! Daemon_9 is no more but will continue to haunt the memory of those who were lucky enough to experience it in either of its releases.