Archive for the ‘marketing’ Category
By chris, January 11th, 2009 in festivals, filmmaker tips, marketing | Comments Off
I originally wrote this piece to help filmmakers prepare for South By Southwest last year. I’ve referred to it so often that I figured a quick overhaul of the series was worthwhile, both to update the information and to make it more applicable to all (or at least most) film festivals rather than just SXSW.
If you’re a filmmaker looking to build a career in the industry, a large film festival is the closest thing to heaven you can find: a target-rich environment designed specifically for the development of new connections and the communal pleasure of watching great (and sometimes, admittedly, not-so-great) cinema. Even a small or medium-sized festival can be a great stepping stone in your career, provided you’re prepared to make the most of it. Over the last couple of years of attending film festivals, I’ve had the good fortune to meet a lot of filmmakers. I’ve also been surprised at how few of them seem to arrive at the festival prepared to promote themselves and their films to the fullest extent. Even if you don’t have a film in the festival itself, you owe it to yourself to be ready to make the most of any festival you attend.
Let’s get started with a few basics:
• If you’re without lodging this late in the game you’re not completely screwed, but you’re either going to have to pay out the nose for something last minute or throw yourself on the mercy of the locals. The ever-trusty Craigslist may be helpful here, but you’re more likely to find a couch to crash on with a friend of a friend. Reach out to your friends and acquaintances — chances are there’s someone who knows somebody who used to date someone who lives in your destination town. If you’re comfortable with the idea of crashing on a total stranger’s couch, try Couchsurfing.com. If your film is in the festival, use that as a bargaining chip. People love to feel connected to the festival community, even if they’re only “doing their part” in a tangential way.
» If you’re a filmmaker in the festival, you should be all set in terms of admission. Check with the festival to see what your filmmaker status entitles you to; usually it’s admission to all of the films, parties, and panels (if any), though it’s not true for all of them. If you’re a filmmaker attending the festival but without a film in the program, buy the highest level badge you can afford. Going on the cheap in this department will literally leave you out in the cold while the good stuff goes on inside. And unless you’re really good and talking your way past the bouncers, the right badge will make your entire experience better.
» If you haven’t printed any promotional materials yet, you have a choice — pay a lot of money for full-color materials printed in a hurry, or go lo-fi. Personally I think filmmakers waste a lot of money printing up posters and such that don’t do them a lot of good in the end. There are only two essential pieces of printed material you should have, and you should carry them with you always. Always.
#1 – business cards, and lots of ‘em. About 500 to really do it right — few things suck quite as much as the statement “I’d love to give you my card, but I ran out.” Because of their simplicity and size, business cards are still the primary method of information exchange during film festivals and conventions. The object of any professional gathering is to establish new relationships, and in the (often alcohol-soaked) haze of a film festival the business card is your ticket to remembering and being remembered.
You can get these printed at Vistaprint for not a lot of money or you can print some yourself on a laser printer with those perforated sheets. Go for the VistaPrint route if you have time; it’s less trouble and they’ll look much better than the homebrew kind. Don’t worry too much about what they look like, though — just make sure they have your name, the name of your film, and your e-mail address. If you’re the outgoing type, include the number of the cell phone you’re using while at the fest. If that sketches you out too much you can hand-write your number for those people you feel you can trust.
#2 – Screening flyers. When you introduce yourself as a filmmaker with a film in the festival, the very next question is usually “what’s it about?” and hopefully followed by “when’s it playing?” Your screening flyers should contain that information, though you should take the opportunity to answer the questions personally. Follow up the conversation by handing over a flyer with a smile and a question of your own: “Will you come see my film?” Personal commitments like these may be your best chance of filling your screening, so you should always ask. If they say yes, say “I’m looking forward to seeing you there!” If they say no or are non-commital, point to the flyer and ask them to hang onto it just in case they find their prior engagement has fallen through.
At the very least, your flyer should have your film’s title, synopsis, and screening times and places, along with the URL for your web site. (More about your web site in the next post.) Include a strong still from the film, one that conveys a lot of emotion and that will reproduce well on a xerox machine. Keep it simple and to the point, and then have a bunch made at your local copy shop. Spring for some bright colored paper — yellow, green, whatever works best for your film. If you’re driving into town it’s probably best to print 1000 or so and store them in your car rather than waste time making copies while you’re in town. If you’re flying, consider whether the time saved is worth the extra bulk and trouble of lugging flyers on the plane.
Since this is a last-minute prep guide I’ll assume that it’s too late to print four-color postcards or posters, but the same general principles apply. Posters can be attention-grabbing, but my feeling is that flyers and postcards posted or distributed at random on walls or in stacks rarely convince anyone to go to one movie over another. Rather the repeated reinforcement of the fact that the film exists is the goal, so that when a potential viewer encounters more concrete information about the film, they have some vague idea of a connection to something they saw earlier. That “oh yeah, I remember hearing about that” moment is an important psychological weapon — people like to be in the know or at least have some familiarity with something (a film, a book, a musician) before they commit to the experience. The more you can prime that pump of the mind, the more people you’ll see at your screenings.
There are usually plenty of opportunities for posting flyers around the festival venue and surrounding areas, but you should always do so with permission and without posting over others’ flyers or posters. The tables and kiosks for flyers are obvious in most venues, but businesses in the surrounding area should be approached politely. Check in with the festival staff to find out whether it’s even worth your time to post flyers around town, or if there aren’t better places (the local college campus? other movie theaters around town?) to do so.
» Last but not least, have plenty of screeners on hand. Now is not the time to be over-protective of your intellectual property — the way to get noticed is for as many people as possible to see your movie. That’s not to say you should be giving out discs indiscriminately, but anyone in a reasonable position to give your film more exposure should be seriously considered to receive a screener if they ask.
Some larger festivals are crawling with scouts from other film festivals; since part of your business strategy should be to play as many festivals as possible, be ready to accommodate. Ditto for potential distributors and most especially the media. If you have any doubts about the legitimacy of a person who asks for a screener, play dumb and tell them you just gave out the last screener you were carrying with you. Ask for their card and offer to send them a screener after the fest. If they turn out to be a shmoe looking for free movies, you can conveniently forget to do so, but be sure to check them out online in case that person is actually an important connection.
Read part 2: getting your web site up to snuff.
By chris, September 17th, 2008 in Events, marketing, news | Comments Off
These are my notes on the Niche Marketing Tools panel, including some of my thoughts before the panel and some of the more interesting concepts that came up during the panel. I’ve listed them below in no particular order and attributed them to the panelists where I could remember where they came from — apologies to those whom I misremember.
- To speak generally, niche marketing is about identifying special interests in your film, researching that special interest, and contacting those heavily engaged in that interest to spread the word within the existing community. Tapping into existing communities who can spread word of mouth for you is the goal.
- The basics of marketing a film still apply — still photos, well-written supporting material, making a good first impression. (Jon Gerrans)
- Jason Cassidy – On marketing “Blindness” — speaking to the built-in core audience of people who loved the book was hugely important in marketing that film.
- Larry Fessenden – On creating a film web site: Stills, etc are important but it’s also important to use the ability to customize to help draw visitors into the story of your film and the story behind the film. A director’s statement (while it may seem corny) can very much influence press and audience perception of the film. Web site preferable to facebook or myspace in this way because you can customize a web site in ways that one cannot with facebook.
- Larry Fessenden – On building community — your community consists not just of your fans but also of other filmmakers, journalists who cover your genre (including bloggers, etc). Recruit them to your cause and be a partner to them as well. Larry has built a network of horror/genre filmmakers who have their own stories that feed into the larger story of this filmmaking community. Like a mini-studio or unofficial releasing “brand.”
– Jason Cassidy – On Facebook: New media like facebook can make marketing more efficient but the social tools only work if people are drawn to them. That can actually take a media/advertising spend to gain critical mass and make maintaining Facebook presence worth it.
- Jon Garrans – On Facebook: Facebook is a great place to store data like trailers, etc, which might otherwise cost you money to store and transmit (outgoing bandwidth fees).
- Aaron Hillis – On bandwidth fees – Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) can also help with storage at low cost. http://amazon.com/s3
- Aaron Hillis – Facebook & MySpace can be oversaturated, difficult to attract an audience to any one thing — get more creative, take steps beyond just setting up a social network page.
- Stephen Raphael, on communities – some communities are stronger than others and distributors make decisions based on that. For example Jewish community networks are very strong and can be relied upon to spread word of mouth but also have strong formal networks (community centers, email lists, etc).
- Stephen Raphael, in answer to question about tapping known niches – Don’t self-distribute to a niche if you think you might want to beyond self-distribution. If you tap out a potential revenue source then you’re reducing the value of your property to a distributor. Doing the research on that niche, however, is a selling point — the more supporting evidence you have that there are people out there just waiting to buy your film, the stronger selling advantage you have.
Web sites for panelists:
Jason Cassidy, Miramax – http://www.miramax.com/
Larry Fessenden, “The Last Winter” – http://www.thelastwinter.net/
Jon Gerrans, Strand Releasing – http://www.strandreleasing.com/
Aaron Hillis, Benten Films – http://www.bentenfilms.com/
Stephen Raphael, Required Viewing – ???
See also Film Tiki’s Eyewitness report of the panel.
By chris, July 7th, 2008 in distribution, marketing, photos | Comments Off
If I made a practice of buying DVDs at Target I might have seen it before now; apparently it’s the result of a three-year deal between IFC and Target that started two years ago. When it began, Target had its own night of programming on IFC called “Cinema Red Mondays,” but I couldn’t find any mention of that on IFC’s current web site. But there it is, large as life: a full display of “indie” films recommended to Target by IFC. Check out the pictures at the bottom of this post (click for larger versions) to see some closer shots of the display and for the visual evidence of my completely nutty claims.
Lesson #1 – To the outside world, “indie” is synonymous with “arty.” Independent films star all of the same people in studio films, but these movies feature stories either too complicated or depressing for Hollywood to touch. Target’s definition of an independent film in this instance is largely academic — arty, but not too threatening. Notice that in order to keep the shelves stocked with recognizable stars, the catalog goes back ten years or more (The Red Violin was made in 1998).
There are some films here that could be considered “truly” independent, depending on how much you want to torture the phrase (Hannah Takes the Stairs is a notable exception), but for the most part, this is grim confirmation that the indie titles that make it into big box stars are the yuppie-friendly ones with recognizable faces. (Is this starting to sound like an unclever entry in the Stuff White People Like blog?)
Lesson #2 – Don’t just find your niche, dominate it. Lookit that — an entire shelf of Tyler Perry movies. Granted, Perry’s first movie had a budget of $5.5 million, so its status as an “indie” film is once again dependent on your personal definition of the term, but the principle applies: if you can speak to a sizable audience and make them love you that much, the big box stores will come find you.
Lesson #3 – Piggyback on the success of something similar. Notice how each shelf positions the movies on it as ideal for people who loved some other movie? That’s what you want to do with yours. Figure out who your piggyback film is and practice the phrase “If you liked X, then you should see my movie.” Hackneyed? Obvious? Yes, but also effective. Don’t run away from comparing your film to another, similar (and more familiar) film unless your film really suffers by comparison — in which case you might want to think about making a better film.
Lesson #4 – Documentaries should feature grisly death or rock musicians. Preferably both. Rock stars are the name actors of the documentary film department. (Maybe I should call it the doc film ghetto, since it’s relegated to the very bottom shelf.) If you can’t find a rock star to make your doc about, then make sure it either confirms the viewers’ worst fears about the world or features someone being eaten by a bear. For the love of Pete, make sure it isn’t funny — unless you’re Michael Moore, and even then the point is debatable.
Lesson #5 – Until you start making movies with million dollar budgets and Zooey Deschanel, you probably shouldn’t roam the DVD aisles at Target. Not that there aren’t some wonderful movies represented here, but the thought that the world at large views the state of independent film through this particular lens could really drive you crazy.
By chris, June 9th, 2008 in distribution, festivals, marketing, news | 2 Comments
A couple of weeks ago Jonathan Marlow posted a piece to the GreenCine Daily blog that created a minor stir in the festival world. It’s an essay called “They Didn’t Build Their Sales Model For You” that raises a lot of questions about the festival circuit, the collective place of filmmakers within it, and what happens after a film has made its festival run.
Since the beginning of the independent “common era” (circa 1989), the traditional Grail-quest of acquisition-derived-from-festival-screenings was a relative uncertainty. Now, nearly 30 years later, such good fortunes are approaching the level of impossibility.
Since I started writing this reaction there have been a lot of responses, most notably here and here, and a follow-up post from Marlow himself. It’s a hot topic to say the least. I expect Marlow himself already has a clear understanding of everything I’m about to cover, but so many of the filmmakers and moviegoers I encounter at such festivals do not that I feel some discussion is warranted.
Notion #1 – The festival circuit is an “ersatz” distribution system. “Informal” or “unintentional” might have been better adjectives here, but the meaning is taken as intended. As art house theaters close or reduce their independent offerings, the festival circuit is evolving into the only growing form of theatrical exhibition left for indie filmmakers. (Over at B-Side we’re working on new forms of audience-driven “theatrical” screenings, but programs like these are in their infancy.) That doesn’t make the festival circuit a distribution method, however, because (as others have pointed out previously) the festival circuit is not a centrally-organized network with the stated purpose of delivering films to audiences and compensating the filmmakers for their work.
Festivals cull through the mass of indie flicks available and put them on large screens in front of willing moviegoers, true, but (with a few exceptions) they do so as non-profit arts organizations. This is what allows festivals to select movies on relatively egalitarian and merit-based criteria, though festival programmers certainly feel the need to pack houses (more on this later). The good news for filmmakers is that festivals take more risks and display a wider range of movies than any other (non-Internet) exhibitor. If anyone in this wide world is going to show your movie, it’s going to be a film festival.
Now for the bad news.
Notion #2 – The money collected by festivals in the form of submission fees, sponsorships, and ticket sales doesn’t find its way back to the exhibiting filmmakers. This one is true — filmmakers don’t see a dime from these screenings, at least not directly from the festivals. There are plenty of filmmakers who think that festivals should cut them in for a piece of the action, and their rally cry is usually something along the lines of “without the films the festivals wouldn’t exist.” The flaw in this particular logic is that it assumes the festival staffers are lining their pockets at the expense of filmmakers. It’s an easy mistake to make — certainly the free-flowing liquor, high-end hotel rooms, and red carpet screenings project an image of glamour and success that the festival would like you to believe. That’s the image they sell to the audience to entice them to show up. Pierce that thin veil of glitz, however, and you’re likely to find a young, underpaid staff hunkered down in tiny offices, holding their festival together from year to year with the help of volunteers and masking tape. The vast majority of film festivals survive through a combination of government grants, sponsorship dollars, ticket sales, and of course the despised submission fees. (These fees are a much smaller portion of overall festival revenue than you might expect, which is why some fests dispense with them. Most of the time fees exist as a barrier to entry, keeping every schlub with a camcorder from submitting his home movies.)
So where’s the money going? Mostly towards operational costs, including those meager staff salaries and office rent, but also towards theater and equipment rentals, hotel and airfare for filmmakers and other guests, printing, ground transportation — the list goes on. Even for small fests the operating expenses can range into the hundreds of thousands of dollars — larger festivals require millions per year to keep going. “The cost for projection equipment and venue rental alone can eat through our ticket sales for any given screening,” Austin Film Festival programmer Kelly Williams told me recently. “On a good night, all expenses considered, we break even.”
The notion that festivals could somehow share the revenue from ticket sales isn’t completely without merit but it’s a thorny problem. What if a festival increased its per-ticket price by a few dollars and promised to pass that “surplus” on to the filmmaker? The accounting would be nightmarish (and likely impossible in the case of short film programs), but the real question is: would filmmakers be incented to work even harder to fill their screenings, knowing that they stand to make a few hundred bucks on the deal? I have a hunch that the results would be mixed at best. Some filmmakers would kick ass to really make it work, others would operate about the same as they do now, and still others would find the rewards insufficient. After all, even with a medium-sized theater of 200 seats, you’re only talking about making back the cost of a single plane ticket — and that’s if you pack the house.
I can tell you with near certainty that overall happiness at film festivals wouldn’t be increased by this scheme. At any given festival there are always a tiny but vocal minority of filmmakers unhappy about the way they or their films are being treated. Introducing the almighty dollar into the equation could only make this situation more treacherous. Suddenly a smaller venue represents not just less prestige but also fewer seats to potentially sell. A less-than-desirable screening time or a perceived smaller share of the festival’s marketing efforts would suddenly mean lost revenue in addition to smaller crowds. Festival programmers would be under pressure to take fewer risks, especially given that audiences likely wouldn’t respond well to higher ticket prices. Given that the festival system works reasonably well now without the promise of remuneration, it’s unlikely that even the most forward-thinking of fests would introduce such unwelcome complications and the potentially explosive situations that could result.
Some festivals do pay flat screening fees, though more often to the distributors of popular films that have already been acquired than directly to independent filmmakers. There is an entire class of festival that currently pays for a large portion of the feature films they screen: the gay & lesbian (aka the “GLIFFs” or GLBT) festivals. Demand for GLBT-interest films is high enough, and the material scarce enough, that most quality films in the category get snapped up by distributors quickly. Those distributors know that the target market isn’t large enough to support a traditional theatrical run, but they can generally count on the festivals to pay a fee for the right to screen a popular festival film.
Such festivals are caught in a tough spot between what they can afford and what their audiences expect to see from other GLBT festivals. Lisa Kaselak, programming director for the Austin Gay & Lesbian Film Festival, admits that paying such fees makes her job more difficult, but as a working filmmaker she has seen the benefits of the system as well. “[Gay and lesbian] festivals across the U.S. are really struggling to pay the screening fees we have to pay. The margins are razor-thin and we often lose money on screenings. I can’t blame distributors though, because they provide a valuable service.” Don’t expect this model to creep into the mainstream fests, however. Mainstream fests pay far fewer screening fees and some refuse to pay them at all. With a larger pool of fee-free films to choose from, they can well afford to do so.
With the notion that festivals are a potential source of revenue at least partially laid to rest, let’s turn our attention to another implication of Marlow’s essay that turns out not to be true:
Notion #3: There’s money to be made in theatrical distribution. Filmmakers get starry-eyed at the thought of their flims playing metroplexes around the world, but when all is said and done even the major studios rarely make their money back after prints and advertising. Theatrical runs these days are basically promotional campaigns to sell DVD copies. There is a direct correlation between the number of people who see a film in the theaters and the eventual sales success of a film on DVD, but the revenue from the theatrical run itself is almost always negligible. (Harry Potter flicks and Spider-Man sequels aside.)
What does it mean for filmmakers? Well, if the festival circuit is the only “theatrical run” your film is likely to get, you’d better make the most of it. Gear up the marketing machine and pack those screenings, because the more people who see your film now, the more people who will buy it on DVD later. A more interesting idea buried in here is the thought that there is a direct correlation between the number of people who see your film (under any circumstances) and the number of people who will eventually buy it. This sounds obvious and simple, but some filmmakers behave as if exactly the opposite were true. They fret about piracy (you should be so lucky!), dither about putting their films online, and withhold screeners as if the discs were made of gold. If your film is that good viewers will pay for it — but they have to know about it first. Try viewing every “free” screening of your film not as a sale you lost but as a marketing opportunity you gained.
I’ve written more about this elsewhere and expect to do so again, but it’s a concept filmmakers need to wrap their heads around: hiding your light (or film) under a bushel for fear of “overplaying” it or tapping out a limited audience is old-school thinking.
Notion #4: Most films that play festivals deserve wider audiences than they get after their festival run is over. This notion follows on the idea that if a film plays a festival it must be a good film. Anyone who has been to a few film festivals can tell you that simply isn’t true — there are plenty of sub-par films playing festivals, especially those whose directors rely solely on a few hundred submissions to program their entire event. You can’t really fault festivals for playing the best from a limited pool of submissions, but it doesn’t make them good films and it certainly doesn’t make them candidates for widespread distribution. As a filmmaker, you need to be prepared to recognize that even though you made a movie and even though it played the festival circuit, it might not be good enough ever to pay for itself.
Even technically “good” films can fail to find distribution after their festival runs. In casual conversation at festivals you occasionally hear the phrase “I’d even recommend that film to my mom.” It’s a telling phrase: it implies that the majority of movies one sees at festivals aren’t suitable for mom, and poor mom is the metaphorical stand-in for the mainstream moviegoing populace. There are those distributors whose mission is to support indie filmmakers, but reality often intrudes: selling a movie that people don’t already know they want to see is hard, expensive work. Wouldn’t it just be easier to sell the movies you’d recommend to your mom? I believe that there is a layer of indie films in between the top 5% that get distribution and the 90% of indie films that are mostly unwatchable. But there again, you’re only talking about a thin slice of movies that get overlooked or need extra help to find the right audience. The vast majority of even festival-selected films — quite likely yours included — aren’t going to get picked up.
Discouraging? Yes, but not quite cause for despair. Since the dawn of filmmaking, indie film has relied on an influx of cash from outside the system to survive. The filmmakers who eventually make it are the persistent ones. They continue to find sources for that outside cash (investors or day jobs or medical experiments) and continue to make movies until they create the picture that everyone wants to recommend to their mom. And who knows? Once you’ve done that, maybe you’ll be able to sell your back catalog.
Just don’t ask for a cut of the festival receipts.
By chris, April 10th, 2008 in festivals, marketing | Comments Off
Film festivals are justifiably infamous for gluttonous parties, craven swag suites and break-the-bank bidding wars. But does having played the festivals actually help sell tickets when the movie finally hits theaters? The makers of two movies opening this week — “Young@Heart” and “The Visitor” — pray that the answer is yes.
Read the rest of ‘Juno’ set high box office standard for fest fare.
By chris, April 8th, 2008 in distribution, festivals, marketing | Comments Off
As promised, a quick recap of the panel I sat on at the Ann Arbor Film Festival a couple of weeks ago, called “Multiplying Eyes: Film Distribution.”
Panelists were myself, moderator Debra Miller (of Outfest & AFI), Bob Alexander of IndiePix, Mitch Levine of The Film Festival Group, and filmmaker Brooke Keesling.
The panel ostensibly concerned distribution but ranged to any number of topics related to making a living as an independent filmmaker. Below are some of threads of the conversation based on my notes and fuzzy memory. A lot of these ideas came up during the panel but I’ve also included my thoughts since then.
• Mitch Levine introduced his 3 essential questions as a starting point for the distribution of any film:
» What are your goals for the film? These should be as concrete and actionable as possible — do you want your film shown on TV? How important is theatrical exhibition? Do you want to make all of your production money back, or is it enough to get the film “out there?” How long are you willing to wait before you move on to other forms of distribution? Don’t close the door to opportunities you didn’t think of, but you should definitely think about what you want.
» Who is your audience? Beyond just “moviegoers,” think about specific segments of the populace who appear in or are otherwise represented by your film. Does the film appeal to senior citizens? 20-something skateboarders? Ice fishermen? Identify particular interests, hobbies, occupations, and pasttimes that appear in your movie.
» How do you reach that audience? Not just “by email,” but what specific groups already exist to reach those people? Those groups have existing mailing lists, often segmented by geographical location, that can help you fill your festival screenings and sell your film. Are there current movements in popular culture related to your film or upon which you can capitalize? Exploit them.
• Brooke Keesling’s Boobie Girl went to 80+ film festivals, and she went to as many of those film festivals as she could. Meeting so many different people helped her secure not only more festival appearances but also distribution for the film itself. Brooke emphasized the importance of keeping a short short – under 12 minutes if possible.
• My main launching pad for conversation in this panel was a pair of concepts I encountered recently on the Technium, one of Kevin Kelly’s blogs. The first is the concept of the concept of 1000 true fans — that an independent artist could be supported for life if he captures the true fandom of 1000 people. A “true fan” is defined as a person who loves your work so much that he’s willing to spend about $100 a year on just about anything you put out there. Read the whole thing, it’s a compelling and thoughtful blueprint for the future of independent artists.
• The second concept is the idea that internet is a giant copy machine, and that trying to hold back anything that can be easily copied is essentially a losing proposition, especially if there’s a large demand for it. Hence the decline of the music industry and (one guesses) the film industry, because their business models traditionally depended on selling things that couldn’t be easily copied. This area is a huge tangle of laws and conflicting desires that I won’t get into here — read Better Than Free instead. Kelly argues that selling copies on the merit of simply having a copy is a business model that will diminish (if not evaporate altogether) — rather, adding value around the copyable object by selling things that can’t be copied (tangible and otherwise) is the winning move.
Kelly presents his ideas in a way that can be applied to many disciplines, but it is especially relevant to filmmakers, in particular those who specialize in shorts. (The ideas will be more applicable to features when they can be copied, transferred, and consumed in a way more convenient than is currently possible.) It’s a fairly safe bet that your short film will be co-opted by YouTube or similar at some point in its life, so you’re better off including YouTube in your plan instead of policing all the different video sites.
The ways that these two concepts can be applied to independent filmmaking are manifold and I’ll continue to write about them. For now though, I’ll simply point out two examples of filmmakers who have applied these principles to their work and seem to be doing fairly well at it:
Lone Sausage/Beyond Grandpa – the folks behind the amazing “Doctor Tran” series of films. The concept is simple but the execution is so amazing that true fans are created in mere minutes. In Doctor Tran, Breehn Burns and Jason Johnson have created a beloved character, but the real star of these short films is their warped sense of humor — that’s what people keep coming back for. So long as they continue to churn out depraved animated material (and it’s been a while since the last short, though I hear another one is on the way), these guys could probably sell t-shirts and compilation DVDs until the end of time.
Bitter Films – Don Hertzfeldt may animate his films the old fashioned way, but he makes good use of the internet to connect to his fans and to offer them incentive to buy his shorts on DVD. And when it comes to selling things that can’t be copied, Bitter Films is a great example: when the collected works “Bitter Films Volume 1″ came out, Don included goodies (like strips of film cut from the 16mm prints and hand-drawn sticky notes) with the DVDs of those folks who pre-ordered. Not only are the shorts brilliant, but the marketing and delivery of the work (the DVDs are crammed with extras, etc) is top-notch.
• Some of the questions that came up in the panel were pretty basic. It’s obvious that there’s a hunger for the simple facts about film distribution — how it works, what a “standard” deal looks like, etc. This is very likely because there don’t seem to be any good, free resources about film distribution out there on the web. Those resources that exist offer sketchy, imprecise information up front, and often hide the real information behind a wall of paid membership or in the pages of a book or ebook you have to pay for.
This is not to say that information about film distribution and ideas about how to accomplish it for your film aren’t valuable things for which one could logically expect to pay. However, I find it interesting that you can find reasonably good information about most other aspects of filmmaking for free. This makes me think that 1) film distribution is a murky and unpredictable subject about which few solid “facts” are known and 2) when money enters the picture, the knowledgeable are reluctant to give up information without compensation.
The facts of film distribution aren’t that difficult to understand but are beyond the scope of this blog entry — I promise I’ll write something to illuminate the subject soon, and hopefully a bit more research into the subject will reveal some good web resources on the subject too. (Feel free to email me good sites if you know of them.)
• Don’t be intimidated by the festival “rules.” One of the better takeaways from the conversation was a reminder of the fact that festivals are desperate for great films — if you have a real winner on your hands (and so very few filmmakers really, really do), a festival will bend the rules for you, especially if you’re polite. Festivals put their submission rules into place for a reason, but a quality film will always trump a rule. The trick comes in convincing the festival staff that you have a really great film.
• Take advantage of whatever prizes you get for your film — use it as leverage with distributors and other festivals. Do it quickly and don’t be embarrassed by an award from a smaller festival.
• Use the low budget of your film as a selling point, not something to hide. Don’t run down your own film by saying it was “only” made for $800, that you “only” had non-professional actors, etc. etc.
That’s the extent of my notes and after-panel thoughts; thanks to my fellow panel members for their expertise, to those who attended (standing room only!) and to the Ann Arbor Film Festival for putting me on a panel and for creating an amazing event. I wish I’d had more time to spend there.
By chris, March 27th, 2008 in distribution, festivals, filmmaker tips, marketing | Comments Off
The panel went remarkably well, and I’ll do a better writeup when it’s not 3 in the morning. The room was packed, somewhere between 75-100 people in a standing-room only crowd, about a third of whom identified themselves as filmmakers.
If you’re visiting the blog based on your attendance at the fest, the relevant links are listed below (in the entry just prior to this one) as promised. I’ll have some links to the other panelists’ work and some other resources in the next few days once I return to Austin.
Ann Arbor’s a great town and the festival is amazing. I sleep now.
By chris, March 26th, 2008 in distribution, filmmaker tips, marketing | Comments Off
I’m going to refer to some particular links during today’s panel, so I thought I’d link to them here so when panel attendees want to read about them there’s an easy way to find them. So here they are:
Don Hertzfeldt’s Bitter Films
Dr Tran (Lone Sausage films)
1000 True Fans (Kevin Kelly)
Better Than Free (Kevin Kelly)
TubeMogul
I’m sure there will be more links as I think of them but these are the ones I plan on referencing now. Soon I will also provide some context for those who won’t be able to make the panel.
