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Truly Free Film

Rethinking Your Key Art Game Plan Part 2

By David Averbach

Note: This Key Art series is intended for micro-budget filmmakers whose crew is not under a union contract. If your film’s crew is under an IATSE contract, you will need to abide by the rules regarding still photographers on set as forth by the union. We have been advised that there may be penalties involved by bringing an intern or PA in to shoot stills.

Yesterday, in Part 1 of this blog series, I discussed how relying solely on 1920×1080 pixel frame grabs was a bad idea if one wanted to create a poster that featured some sort of main image. In an ideal world, your entire film would be shot on a 5K camera, and you could pull as many frames from the footage as you wanted. That would be Plan A. But in the real world, many filmmakers emerge from their shoots with only 1080p frame grabs, and that’s not going to work.

Another problem is about marketing. During the chaos of a film shoot, filmmakers often forget to think about the art they might need to support a variety of possible marketing ideas and concepts, and are therefore left with fewer choices and placed in an ultimately weaker position vis à vis possible options on how to market their film without an expensive and inconvenient reshoot.

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Truly Free Film

Rethinking Your Key Art Game Plan Part 1

By David Averbach

Over the next several days, The Film Collaborative’s Creative Director, David Averbach, who has worked with dozens of TFC Clients and other filmmakers to help them create and refine their key art, will talk about ways you can avoid the problem of finding out all too late that you don’t actually have the proper materials to produce the key art you want to make.

Note: This Key Art series is intended for micro-budget filmmakers whose crew is not under a union contract. If your film’s crew is under an IATSE contract, you will need to abide by the rules regarding still photographers on set as forth by the union. We have been advised that there may be penalties involved by bringing an intern or PA in to shoot stills.

Takeaway: For narrative feature films, understanding the technical aspects of producing key art and thinking ahead to your key art while on your film set can save time, money and a heck of a lot of aggravation down the line.

If I had a nickel for every narrative feature filmmaker who has told me that they got a photographer, professional or otherwise, to come to their film set and shoot photos but in the end they didn’t show up or didn’t do a good job, or was only there for one day out of a sixteen day shoot, and therefore there was nothing to show for that effort in terms of producing images that could be incorporated into a poster, and therefore were only really left with the prospect of using frame grabs from their film, I’d be rich I could probably buy a Starbuck’s gift card that would last me a week or two.

I hope this series of posts can offer some helpful suggestions for you to avoid this situation for your next film.

First let me say that while I design movie posters, I don’t really have a background in filmmaking itself. If there is anything incorrect/inaccurate, generally unfeasible included here, or if you have anything you think I should add, please feel free to let me know. That said, it’s clear to me that in the heat of the film shoot, filmmakers often forget to think about or are so focused on the film shoot that they can’t get around to thinking about the art they might need to support a variety of possible marketing ideas and concepts, and are therefore down the road left with fewer choices and placed in an ultimately weaker position vis à vis possible options on how to market their film or sell it to a potential buyer without an expensive and inconvenient reshoot.

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These Are Those Things

Another Awesome Film Poster By Chris Ware

Chris did The Savages poster for us, but, wow, check this out. (Via Vulture & HeyYouGuys).

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Uncategorized

Favorite Poster of 2011 (So Far)

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Truly Free Film

Should Movie Poster Tag Lines Be Transformed

“Earth.  It Was Fun While It Lasted.”  Armegeddon’s tag line sticks with me, because I instinctively substitute “Earth” for “Indie Film” when I read it.

In these days of RampantFilmBizChange,  everything is ripe for reconsideration.  MCN hipped me to AdWeek’s collection of “66 Great Movie Taglines“.  Sure the list gets a smile regularly from me, but I walk away deadened and jaded.  The sell is obvious.  The dominant clever factor feels like a child beauty pagents’ related icky. “Look at me!  Look at me!  Give me a trophy!  Now!!!”.  Get me outta there.

Can’t we do better?  Or at least do different?

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Truly Free Film

Take A Lesson From The Master

It seems to be pretty much the gospel now that Slumdog could never have rewritten the rules as it has without Searchlight’s help.  Everyone marvels at their marketing campaigns, and how well they work.  People say they’ve trademarked color, to the point if you use a bold singular shade in your campaign, folks feel you’ve copped a page from Ms. Utley.

Titles are always a difficult thing in the positioning of a film.  Posters however make titles look easy.  When our films are handled by one of the top distributors we often see over 100 different mock-ups.  And it’s rare that by the time a choice is made, I frequently feel we made a wrong decision, or rather never found the answer.  One of the real challenges is finding a poster that not only serves the campaign in terms of positioning the film and enhancing desire to see it, but also serves the test of time and rests comfortably on the wall years later.
All the tests though are compounded when you have little or no funds like most indie filmmakers.  I recently posted on TheNextGoodIdea about CrowdSpring where you offer a prize and hold a contest among designers to see who will make the best poster (or logo or whatever).  It certainly is a good way to get a lot of interesting ideas.  Searchlight, the undisputed master, takes up one notch with their campaign for 500 DAYS OF SUMMER.  They are using the multiple images to increase pre-release buzz by holding a poll regarding four different posters, apparently pulling the audience into the process, and cementing allegiance to some degree in the process.
The contest for a final image campaign seems like something all indie filmmakers should put in their playbook.  When would be the right time to run it?  Seems to me that if your film has played one of the major film festivals and garnered some good attention, right before the next big festival would be the ideal time.   Hey, isn’t that exactly what Searchlight is doing?  500DOS played Sundance and will soon be screened at SxSW and now the SL poster poll is go.  Which basically means that if you are going to have 4 images to select you need to start to get them in at least a month prior to first fest screening.
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Truly Free Film

Printing: Posters & Postcards

As mentioned a few days back, our Film Festival Strategy brainstorm continues…

Jon Reiss offers this up:

A very necessary expense in your publicity campaign are postcards and posters. These can be expensive but fortunately there are a number of on-line printers that are relatively inexpensive (eg 4000-5000 postcards for $100). One hidden cost when it comes to printing is shipping so I do recommend using a printer near you – so before you buy – make sure you include shipping in your cost estimate. I actually send an assistant or intern to pick up my printing from “Next Day Flyers” since the shipping almost costs as much as the printing. Sometimes your local printer will even match an on-line printers prices – or come close enough to make it worth your while. But they won’t cut their prices unless you have a comparison price.

Regarding Postcards – they are cheap enough online that you could print them for each festival or theatrical screening even if you only print 500 at a time. The old way of doing this was to order a ton and then use stickers for your specific screening time. Unless you have some slave labor around – buying new postcards for $50 is going to be cheaper than paying someone to print and apply stickers to each post card – you have better things to do with your time.

Three important notes about posters:

1. Most on-line printers will not print one sheet size posters.

2. Printing standard film size posters – 27″x41″ – is very expensive (for film festivals you only need one or two which will cost about $50 each – but for a theatrical release you will need more than that). The reason that these posters are so expensive to print is that they are too large for standard offset printing (the cheapest kind of bulk printing). However nearly all theaters (all the ones that I dealt with) will accept posters that are 24.5″x37.5″ which is the largest size that you can have printed offset. This will save you thousands. (Although the best price I found was $1200 for 2000 posters – a pretty good price).

3. You can get a lot of mileage from 11×17 posters. Most storefronts won’t put up a standard or near standard one sheet when you are promoting in a town. But they will put up a 11×17 poster. And these are much cheaper. You can get a 1000 for around $300. They are also good for wildposting/wheatpasting as they fit on most electrical boxes. (18x24s are also a good size for this) But be careful with wildposting – you can be fined thousands of dollars for illegal posting if there is anything on the poster that will track back to you or the theater!)

Printers:

Next Day Flyers based in Compton California

Got Print based in Burbank California

jon@jonreiss.com