Missing Pieces is available 100% free online. It was not pirated illegally, and it’s not something we threw together overnight to give away.

Our team spent five years on it with the help of 600 volunteers and a work load of over 137,000 man-hours. It cost $100,000 and stars Mark Boone Jr. of ‘Sons of Anarchy’/Batman Begins and Melora Walters of ‘Big Love’/Magnolia.

Now why would a filmmaker make such a silly decision?

Simple: so you’d watch it.

When we started this journey, our goal was- of course- theatrical. After a year of festival limbo and a shifting market, we set our sights a little lower: DVD. After another year of trying and failing to get a respectable deal, we just hoped to clear our music rights (with money we didn’t have) and we hoped someone would watch the film.

Without money for marketing, we knew no one would take a chance on something they’d never heard about. Since most films get pirated anyway, we thought our best bet to get the film to an audience would be “free” in hopes that it might spread via word of mouth.

We’ve exhausted everything we know to do to promote it, but no one seems to bite. It would take another article to fully outline the things we’ve done over the past couple years to spread the word, but there’s a time to let a project go and know you’ve done your best.

The movie doesn’t have the kind of viral quality it takes to make major waves online or in print, and the plot isn’t easily-explained. However, we’ve found people who discover it one-by-one and watch it all the way through truly love it. It touches their hearts and sticks with them (or so they say), and that’s why we made it.

As an example of another obscurity, Donnie Darko tanked in theaters. However, after years of slowly spreading around, it gradually built a fan base and seeped into “movie consciousness.” If Missing Pieces is ever going find its place, I think it would be that  kind of gradual way. We just don’t have the resources to make it spread quickly or traditionally.

Ideally, people would watch it, share it, and buy the DVD or donate so we can get out of debt. This may not happen as we’re realizing, but we’ll keep telling people about it one by one. So far our audience has been limited to mostly family, friends, and a few new faces.

Hopefully it does become a film that breaks through the clutter, but time will tell.

If nothing else, we just wanted to hobble to the finish line and make it easily available to whomever wanted to find it. There’s nothing worse than fielding that dreaded question, “So- how can I watch it?”

In the lulls since 2010, I’ve written three scripts, and we’re trying to find money to get one of them made. Maybe having a finished feature will be a way to attract actors or investors to show what we can do, and maybe having a budget on a second film would be a way to end the debt from Missing Pieces.

The distribution landscape is pretty bleak for art house and smaller films like ours. However, the economy was in the dumps when we started this project in 2008, and it’s never been easy. We didn’t let that stop us when we started, and we won’t let the way things are stop people from being able to see the film we worked so hard to make.

Hope you’re able to check it out and enjoy.

Happy filmmaking!
Kenton

Website: http://www.FindYourMissingPieces.com
HD Stills: http://bit.ly/MPHDStills