Never, Never Give Up

In another thread, @North Star mentioned this video, which caught my interest, so I decided to look it up. I was curious as to how the video was made. For example, how did they get all of that footage? Who did the editing?

Well, it turns out that Arthur was being filmed for a movie about what inspires people to achieve their weight loss goals. The director put together the footage that they had to make a clip they could share on social media. The director describes how he made the clip and it went viral in this blog post. The original video now has 11 million views.

It looks like Arthur was being mentored by a Diamond Dallas Page (DDP), a former WWF wrestling star who now is a celebrity yoga instructor teaching a "tough"-branded version of Yoga. It was actually DDP's YouTube channel that shared the version of the video that went viral.

It sounds like one day Arthur was desperate and found DDP Yoga on Google. He decided to give it a try and ended up corresponding with DDP. DDP had sent Arthur a follow-up survey after his purchase of the Yoga DVDs and was impressed by Arthur's drive and seriousness. They recount the experience in the following interview. It's nice to see them in their natural element in an unedited clip. It gives you more of a sense of what they are really like:

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It looks like, for a while, he went back to being a Special Education teacher and educational administrator. However, based on the above video, it looks like Arthur works for DDP Yoga now. There is a page on the DDP Yoga site about him. He also started doing some independent inspirational speaking, which you can watch in this video. (From the video you can see that he still has ups and downs with his weight--which seems like it is just part of life. Though now that he works for DDP, I bet he'll keep tight control over it...)

 

I was interested in how this video was made because I'm proud of how we are a 501(c)3 public charity and of how the TMS movement is an authentic grass-roots movement rather than a fake, "astroturf" movement:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing
We are a completely independent organization and our grass-roots action really comes from the grass roots. I wanted to know if the "Never, Ever Give Up" video is the same way, so I did a bit more investigation.

I was also interested because, as I mentioned, above, the video was made by an independent film studio attempting to make a documentary. The film studio had turned to KickStarter to raise money for the film. This drew my attention because we are currently working to help another production company that has also turned to KickStarter to make a documentary about Dr. Sarno.

Here's the director's pitch for the KickStarter campaign for "Inspired: The Movie." You can tell how much he cares about the movie and how much it means to him:

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Unfortunately, that first Kickstarter campaign was not successful. It had a goal of $75,000 but it only raised $15,592. Because of the way that KickStarter works, no one was charged and they didn't get a single penny of it because they didn't meet their goal.

In comparison, the Dr. Sarno documentary also has a goal of $75,000, but it has already raised 69% of it's goal and is only 39% of the way into the campaign. I'm confident that they will meet their original goal, though I do expect things to slow down unless they can pull in some media attention. The key thing, though, is that they surpass their goal.

Not to be dissuaded, the "Inspired" team made a second attempt. This one ended on July 21, 2012 and featured a goal of $25,000, which they surpassed, raising a total of
$26,157.

You can watch the pitch that Arthur made for the KickStarters, trying to support the film company that documented his progress. He is very open and also passionate about the project and the responsibility the video has given to him:

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I've wondered why they were able to raise 168% as much the second time around. Was it because they had learned more about how to run a kickstarter campaign? Was it because their goal was lower and so backers felt like they might actually succeed?

Unfortunately, while their second KickStarter may have succeeded, the movie itself seems to have stalled. Their Facebook page hasn't been updated since December 2012 and some former supporters have written some very angry comments on the wall of the page:
https://www.facebook.com/inspiredthemovie
The web page is still up, though:
http://inspiredthemovie.com/

It's a sad story, but it doesn't detract from Arthur's individual hard work and accomplishments. It does, however, help explain why the editing on the YouTube video is so very good. Sometimes it takes a partnership between people with real experience and others with special skills to make a movie that will reach 12 million views.

Anyway, I thought I'd share what I found... I feel very lucky that we are dealing with an experience production company for the Dr. Sarno documentary, who has six films under their belt and even a Guggenheim award for one of the directors. Nothing beats a track record of success when you are trying to figure out who to partner with.

Finally, as a bit of a bonus, I thought I'd share a little footage that I tracked down that shows Diamond Dallas Page working with Arthur and another person from the film. It was made before Arthur's video went viral and it shows a little more of what the collaboration between Arthur and DDP looked like on a day to day basis. It's not particularly inspiring, but it does help to ground us because it shows what it really looked like behind the scenes. Based on all the help that it was clear Arthur was receiving it also might help us understand why we personally don't always get the same results.

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