Month: October 2011

What are the top individual film websites? What are the top ones not funded by a major distributor?

What makes for a good landing page? What are you trying to accomplish with it?

How come filmmakers don’t discuss this a whole lot more? How come film festivals don’t have panels on this sort of stuff so we can actually learn something?!

I was very happy to stumble upon this blog post that outlined a series of suggestions on what makes for a good landing page for a website.
http://www.formstack.com/the-anatomy-of-a-perfect-landing-page
Thank you formstack! Thanks to Ross Pruden and Danny Dee for tweeting about this and pointing me to it.

Where can we find more information like this?

Will film festivals start to design more programming to truly help filmmakers in this transition to direct distribution?

What’s the goal? Building an audience, or making a profit? Some projects are undertaken for other reasons than getting rich. Sometimes we just want to educate people. And sometimes that noble effort, leads people to give even more.

Well, here’s Hope hoping…

I got to participate in the doc PRESS PAUSE PLAY awhile back.

The digital revolution of the last decade has unleashed creativity and talent in an unprecedented way, with unlimited opportunities. But does democratized culture mean better art or is true talent instead drowned out? This is the question addressed by PressPausePlay, a documentary film containing interviews with some of the world’s most influential creators of the digital era.

The interactive version of PressPausePlay was recently released. It includes the interview with me as well as many others so there is now ten times the original content.

You can now download the original version and the exclusive interactive player for free on: http://www.presspauseplay.com/

PressPausePlay’s interactive player includes many unseen interviews with creative innovators such as filmmaker Michel Gondry, electronic musician Apparat, and founder of Soundcloud Eric Walhforss, and me (producer Ted Hope).There are also extended interviews with those in the film such as Seth Godin, Lykke Li, Moby and many more. In the interactive version you can also view additional information about the people interviewed so you can continue to get inspired by their work. The result is an incredible amount of content and continues the conversation about hope, fear and digital culture.

The interactive player will be an evolving version with updates available as the filmmakers add more content or links to their upcoming soundtrack and other material.

Of course if people want to donate they can, but they can also purchase the film and soundtrack on iTunes, Amazon.com and many more. And hopefully those, that can, will. The filmmakers felt that the viewer should be able to decide how they see the film to get a personalized experience. How often does that happen? Hopefully a lot more.

I truly recommend you watch the entire film. Of course, if you have only ten minutes now, or have a boring conference call coming up, just press mute on your microphone and start watching just my interview right here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKEmp19WewA

Tech Crunch wrote about the film recently, so you know it’s important:
http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/01/buy-presspauseplay-or-legally-download-it-for-free-your-call/

Back in August SherI Candler introduced us to the new curating and distribution service here.

Today, we get the inside view from a filmmaker’s perspective how one might make best use the service from JUNKIE NURSE’s Jeff Orgill.

JUNKIE NURSE: Anatomy of a Prescreen Launch

We’ve all been wondering if somebody would figure out a way to successfully release films online. Shari Candler’s recent article on this site mentioned that Prescreen was taking a stab at it. I sent in our movie Junkie Nurse (Boppin’ at The Glue Factory).

Lee from Prescreen called and said they wanted JUNKIE NURSE. I was jazzed about being featured. I’d been mired in some contractual BS and this was the kick in the pants I needed to get back into the groove. I had an attorney review the contract, he gave me the thumbs up, and I got to work.

Shari Candler looked at our film’s materials and gave detailed suggestions for preparing our release. Her biggest note was get our website up to speed.

I’d met a web designer / filmmaker, John Irwin @Robison Hope Creative, through a FIND meeting in LA. He’d done the site for Jon Reiss’ doc BOMB IT. Irwin suggested a customizable WordPress site which would be easy to update myself down the line.

I’d seen lots of sites that were very focused on selling. They felt empty — if I wasn’t ready to buy immediately there was little to snag my interest. A hard sell tone could be a turn off to a first time visitor. The “come explore” tone of our new site really suited JUNKIE NURSE’s tone of dialoguing with the audience rather than just talking at them. This is the kind of film I loved to see, wanted to make, and our site reflected that. Check it out here: JUNKIE NURSE

People love movies! But they are carefully hunted by big budget marketing. It’s a special animal who seeks out and takes a risk on a tiny film like Junkie Nurse.

If indie filmmakers think of marketing their film as wooing their audience, as a flirtation, it becomes clear that you’re not after a one-night stand or drunk sex here, you want a deeper relationship with your audience.

With all this in mind, and a full time job in tow, I decided to get help with marketing and publicity.

Another Hope For Film blog post had a list of PMD’s for hire. I started calling, and Audrey Ewell understood what I needed to do. She created a press release, and an important thing she did right away was to set a goal. Another film on Prescreen had just set a record for the first day — 100 buys. Our goal – beat 100 buys.

Marketing techniques I learned from Audrey:

1 • TWITTER: follow people with interests related to your film. For Junkie Nurse I Twitter searched addiction, rehab, narcotics, nursing, senior living, elder care, indie film, filmmaking, jazz, swing, big band, Bebop and other related terms and followed the Tweeters (Twits?) I found. There was a gold mine in nursing and elder care which are two key issues Junkie Nurse skewers. Several of these people and orgs followed back. Others read our description and learned about our film.

2 • FACEBOOK: message FB friends with a brief request that is Tweet friendly (under 140 characters) i.e. JUNKIE NURSE, relevant info, the link and a joke in the tone of the film. I left the joke in or took it out depending on who I was sending it to. At first I was shy about asking, thinking it was embarrassing to even ask. But YOU HAVE TO ASK! The 36 people who directly re-posted the link from my request had over 23,000 FB friends amongst them. Not to mention all the other posting and re-linking and “likes” that start flying around when you have that kind of chatter going on. I noticed that each time somebody posted our link we’d get another buy on Prescreen.com. We marched toward our goal click by click.

At about 6pm on launch day my brother Jayson swooped in with both marketing barrels a blazin’!

3 • TEXT: A phone contact, even a text, can cut through the noise. Jayson texted everybody in his iPhone about JUNKIE NURSE.

4 • PARTY: create an event around your premiere. Jayson threw an impromptu Friday night Worldwide Online Premiere bash at his place inviting all his friends over for drinks to celebrate our launch and asking them to buy our film online right there at the party.

5 • EMAIL: On our new site I needed an email sign up. My producer B.Scott O’Malley suggested MailChimp – it’s free! With the Chimps help I did 3 emailings – one before launch and 2 on day of – to my existing personal list of about 1400.

6 • INVITE: The day of the launch I discovered that Prescreen had implemented a new feature called INVITE which allowed users to send a link to buy the film to their Facebook, Gmail, AOL and other contact lists. If you get 3 users to buy a film on Prescreen you would get a credit for a free film. Now there was a real incentive for strangers to promote films to their social networks.

We worked hard launching JUNKIE NURSE on Prescreen.com. I hired a web designer and a PMD. I took 3 days off work. Two brothers and a sister pounded the FB pavement, and I spent about $1,600. I know, it’s not the millions a studio can spend, but it was what we had and we worked it best we could.

And worked it did! JUNKIE NURSE is Prescreen’s biggest seller yet and our conversion rate from our trailer views to purchases was 24% — the highest of all the 19 films on their site. No new lesson here: your trailer is still key in convincing people to watch your movie.

Successes:

• Exceeded our goal of 100 buys
• Guest blogging for two of my favorite film blogs (No Film School and Hope for Film)
• Social network chatter grew from 12 to 180 conversations (we only made 36 direct contacts so it expanded on it’s own)

Things I’ll do differently next time:

• Bring marketing / press person on “the earlier , the better” to pitch press and do blog outreach. We’ve barely scratched the surface of potential interest groups for JUNKIE NURSE (search terms above)
• Enlist and coordinate cast, crew, family and close friends on social networking techniques above
• Instruct the team on using Prescreen INVITE function
• Test your MailChimp emails and have others check them, especially the links.

The goal of Prescreen is not an end all for the run of your film — it’s a first step in determining your audience and your marketing plan. At the end of our 60 day run on Prescreen they will send me a “Performance Report” outlining the audience that did buy JUNKIE NURSE including things such as: age range, gender, top cities, favorite websites, top keywords, and many other stats that you’d use in further marketing with Google and Facebook ads, Youtube tags, SEO and so forth. This is the main reason I got on board – I’m partnering with an internet savvy company mining demographic data about our film’s audience that I’ll use to best situate our film in the long tail for the long haul.

There is an audience out there for our films. We just need to find out who they are, hunt them down, and drag them to see our films.

JUNKIE NURSE (Boppin’ at The Glue Factory) has its Worldwide Online Premiere on Prescreen through December 7th.

Jeffrey Jay Orgill, writer / director, Junkie Nurse (Boppin’ at The Glue Factory) lives in Santa Monica, California with his girlfriend and baby daughter.

It seems Film Financing Conferences are not so much exclusively about film financing, but about the state of the industry and much of what factors in to it. Last week Gary Baddeley reported on attending one such conference, and today he continues to share what he learned. To me it is precisely this process (aka sharing knowledge) that will lift all our boats. It is this process that motivates this blog. We have a great deal to learn and unless we accept how dependent we are on each other to learn it ASAP, our options and opportunities will soon grow far more limited.

Thankfully, today, Gary extends his generosity still further.

In Part 1 of my report for Hope For Film on the 11th Annual New York International Film & TV Summit, organized by BNA / ATLAS, I described the event as being loaded with
exactly the kind of indie film royalty a striving young producer might want to meet, with
the caveat that the conference might well be beyond their budgets. Nonetheless, for
those who could afford it, there were some valuable pieces of wisdom dispensed.

The conference was pretty old school in its coverage of the business of film, although of
course the advice on hand was up to the minute and invaluable if you are producing a
film that is capable of international presales, equity and bank finance, and so forth. Day
One left me thinking that the side of the business that I live in, and most of the people I
know in independent film operate, was far removed from the heady climes of seven-
figure finance that was discussed.

I started Day Two by attending a panel on labor issues in dealing with guilds and labor
unions. It was dominated by Susan Lowry of the Screen Actors Guild, who is a great
advocate for the guildʼs members and very forthright. For instance, she freely admitted
that the collective bargaining agreements are behind the times and donʼt reflect the
reality of film production and finance today. As such, SAG will work with producers …
but she will still insist on collection agreements that give the guilds a first position set
aside of about 10% in the aggregate.

Tom Leo of Sheppard Mullin reminded us that a producer must track the gross receipts
“waterfall” to make sure all obligations can be met at the right time. He identified Fintage
House and Freeway Entertainment as the leading third party collection companies that
will help with set asides and meeting the producersʼ obligations.

Lowry mentioned that in the absence of reliable foreign sales estimates by a sales
agent, SAG will look at the published high and low figures by territory published by the
Hollywood Reporter every six months to estimate foreign grosses. Typically SAG might
allocate 10-15% to theatrical, 30-40% for home video and the rest to free and pay TV.
Itʼs somewhat variable according to the genre, cast, and so forth of course.

The next panel focused on how to get a television series funded and sold to a network.
As the only representative from a network, A&Eʼs Alex McDowell got a lot of airtime.
Responding to the question of how to persuade a network such as hers to buy a pitch,
she advised that if you havenʼt produced for a network before, you really have to nest
your production company inside one that has done so. She suggested looking at the
attendees of the Realscreen Summit in Washington, D.C. as a proxy for a favored
production company list.

She also noted that since A&E Networks now owns Lifetime, we can expect the latter to
be buying a lot of reality and unscripted shows … so producers get your pitches ready,
but with budget included – they wonʼt look at a pitch without it. The best way to get
development execs to attend your pitch? Food – bring lunch for everyone!

John Morayniss managed not to say anything about his employer, Entertainment One,
being an acquisition target whose stock has recently done a moon shot with Disney and
Viacom amongst the potential buyers mentioned in the media. He did say that this is a
fairly good time for producers of original programming, like eOne, especially with
bidding wars for SVOD rights going on (he specifically cited eOneʼs recent experience
with multiple bids from Love Film/Amazon, Sky and Netflix in the UK).

At lunch I had the opportunity to chat with art house film distributor extraordinaire
Richard Lorber, whose name has been on the marquee of more companies than you
can count on one hand, it seems, and is now the owner of Kino Lorber. Richard was on
the post-prandial panel entitled “Latest Developments On Emerging Digital Distribution
Plaforms,” along with veteran entertainment lawyer Steven Beer and New Videoʼs Erick
Opeka.

Richard started things off by telling us that Kino Lorberʼs physical goods business (DVD
and Blu-Ray) was up 40% last year, so donʼt bother telling him that physical goods is a
dead business. As an aside, around about that moment I actually got some connectivity
on my iPhone and noticed that my company had just received our first orders from
Qwikster, which I happily tweeted about, recalling Ira Deutchmanʼs suggestion the day
before that Netflix spinning off its physical goods business was going to drive people
into theaters, to his delight. (Those Qwikster orders may be the last ones we receive
now that Netflix appears to have learned the lesson of New Coke and killed Qwikster off
before too many customers fled.)

It was suggested that Netflixʼs competitors can smell blood in the water and theyʼll
aggressively go after Netflixʼs business, but Greenberg Traurigʼs Steven Beer reminded
everyone that Netflix still represents about 60% of digital revenue. Erick Opeka reported
that it was more like 50% for New Video. Continuing with the statistics, he said that New
Video is responsible for about 17% of the movies on iTunes (about 2,000 movies).
iTunes represents about 60-80% of New Videoʼs transactional (download to own) digital
revenue, but things are shifting rapidly towards rental, where they are seeing about
55-60% annual growth.

The panel shifted somewhat towards a discussion of what they liked to call DIY distribution, which, as readers of my erstwhile officemate Nayan Padraiʼs guest blog on Hope For Film will know, should more accurately be called direct distribution. Steve Beer suggested that independent producers now have two marathons to run: making the film first, then marketing and building a community around the film.

Richard Lorberʼs comment: “DIY distribution too often turns into DWI distribution.”

Echoing Ira Deutchmanʼs comment the previous day about having your film on Netflix
and iTunes being about as meaningful as having your name in the phone book, Erick
Opeka made the point that where digital distributors can really add value is in their
relationships with the gatekeepers of the home pages of the likes of Hulu and iTunes, as
well as the programmers of the barker channels on cable VOD (“the most powerful
people in digital media”). The uplift in performance for a movie featured in the barker is
astonishing, so if you are considering direct distribution, remember that just landing on a
platform is not really enough.

As to the future of digital distribution, Opeka expects that weʼll be seeing the leading
IVOD outlets competing for exclusive rights to content. The panelists noted that
currently distributors can sell their movies and TV shows on a non-exclusive basis to
multiple outlets, but these may seem like the good old days before too long. The other
trend he noted was the emergence of massively popular niche content outlets like
Machinima.com, which is now the number one all-time entertainment channel on
YouTube, serving something like a billion video views a month. Yes, I did get that right, I
just checked: 897 million video views in August 2011.

Thatʼs hard to compete against. Thanks for reading…

– Gary Baddeley

Themes resonate with communities. Communities congregate around common themes. Communities endure whereas films perish at a certain point in time. Community interest can revive forgotten works. Many different communities are vested in similar themes. Common interests between creators, financiers, and promotional entities can exist within the themes of work.

Could new sponsorship opportunities for ambitious work exist within the common interest of common themes?

If we identify common themes found in indie film, and then identify what films have those very themes, perhaps the other entities that are vested in the themes can help support those works.

Why don’t we start with the common themes… What are the common themes found currently in Indie Film? I tweeted this question out a couple weeks back and was a bit disheartened by the limited amount of comments it generated. Nonetheless I received a few suggestions to add to my list (so thanks for that). Perhaps you can add to this now.

1. Triumph over adversity; you can do it;
2. Family is where you find it;
3. Difference is universal;
4. Tolerance/Forgiveness will teach us all; aka Open your heart;
5. Be yourself;
6. Take action; move on; just do it; don’t sit on the fence; make a tough choice; don’t wait until tomorrow.
7. Don’t settle; Raise the bar; Aim higher; dream the dream;
8. Build it and they will come; dream the dream;
9. Life is hard but our family & friends get us through it;
10. Don’t mess with mother nature. (via
11. ‎”There’s hope, but it’s not where you think it is.” (via Mindi White)
12. “Love Hurts” (via @flixfixer). Love saves. Love tranfsorms.
13. “Revenge is all-consuming” (via @flixfixer)
14. “Absolute power corrupts absolutely” (via @flixfixer)

filmDIY – The Filmmaker’s Guide To The Interweb

As always, it all started from my own personal experience and an eagerness to overcome frustration. I’ve been producing and directing films since 2000. Many of them were broadcast in TV channels around the world, some of them won prizes in film festivals. But my true love, both as filmmaker and viewer, was movies made for niche audiences.

As an Israeli based independent filmmaker, I used to rely on public funding, which is quite developed here, much like in Europe, especially compared to the system in the US. Receiving $60,000-$100,000 for a movie just by preparing a written proposal and a short trailer can get your movie project started, but there are drawbacks: competition is fierce, and you have to abide by implicit tough rules regarding both your movie topic and the way you make it.

When I chose not to obey, the answer from film funds was always negative.
There’s not much one can argue about when trying to define ‘artistic considerations’, even when you know that art is a personal choice. But since I owned a post production facility, and a production house, I could allow myself to make my own movies from time to time, even without public support.

Then in 2007 I decided produce a film about Apple fanatics, a DIY effort that I’ve put to the test. I wanted to make a movie I was passionate about knowing it will never get government support. Finally, we produced MacHEADS totally independently from pre-production to distribution. Back in 2007 it was not the traditional route to skip film festivals and go straight to digital distribution. The stigma back than for going digital, was “straight to DVD” strategy, admitting you couldn’t find a distributor to buy your movie, not something every filmmaker wants to be associated with. iTunes movie service started only in 2008. We knew we could get more audience to see our movie the digital way, so we went for it, and we were right.

From Tel Aviv in my studio apartment I was marketing and distributing MacHREADS to the world. No film festival could have achieved the same buzz created on the Internet. At some point I made a decision not to apply to film festivals, paying $50 to a small film fest didn’t make any sense.

We premiered the movie on iTunes and MacHEADS became number one in its category and number 8 at the 2009 top 50 documentaries. Hulu made 285,867 views (and still counting) And also became number one top movie in all categories/ Than the Netflix deals came and Snagfilms, and was finally broadcast on CNBC.

My personal experience with digital distribution was quite a learning experience. A lot is unknown to filmmakers even today when stats are coming out and the “wall of fear”, as I like to call the terror that agents and distributors are putting on filmmakers not to share information (They do that with contracts signed for secrecy) Is slowly overcome by many filmmakers who are sharing information with one another.

We made some fatal mistakes with distributors agents, a small distribution company in Spain sold us the idea that they will know what to do with our film. It turned out they had no clue what is the film subject and how to get distributors to buy the film not to mention they had no idea what iTunes is. We suffered with a contract for 15 years without the ability to get out. The world distribution rights were sold to the Spanish agents, and that hurt us a lot, I can’t even start to think about the damage done to MacHEADS financially. Our digital distributors in the US at FilmBUFF did their part and did what ever they could to promote MacHEADS to every digital platform and also pitched in with marketing.

In the end MacHEADS success and failure depended on my marketing efforts. Had the film been on iTunes without me pushing the movie in every possible effort, it would have never gotten the same response. So if you like it or not, filmmakers today are their own distribution and marketing managers, so why in the world would you give up your rights to get it on iTunes or even Netflix? This is where and why I set out to found filmDIY — a digital distribution platform for indie filmmakers that will give filmmakers control over the digital distribution means, and get rewarded financially as they should have been in the first place. I wanted to offer the indie film community the best possible solution I can give them.

VOD portals are not new, but we were thinking about our colleagues. The main problem with any indie sales platform is still discovery. Without marketing effectively your content won’t be discovered. So we are not settling on a distribution tool only, we are also putting an emphasis on marketing.

Here are some of filmDIY functions

• Filmmakers receive their payments immediately — there’s no need to wait for reports or ask for a money transfer or a check. Each rental or purchase creates automatically a transaction in the filmmaker’s PayPal account. We take 30% — which covers also the cost of streaming and support. The issue of transparency is our core function. We are the first service to offer automatic split payment, it’s as if the filmmaker has his own VOD tool at his disposal. We encourage filmmakers to test us and see for themselves. All they need to do is send us their PayPal email address and we create a demo to showcase the service.

• Rental and Download to Own — those two options are available for every movie. Download to own is an interesting tool, most times people rent a movie and than decide to buy also a digital copy to own, so filmmakers have more opportunities for revenues.

• Filmmakers set the price. We recommend on prices, but the final decision is made by the filmmaker.

• Personal profile page for each filmmaker, which makes it practically a mini-site for filmmakers.

• Handling all technical aspects of encoding, image optimization, costumer support etc. — As we found out, many filmmakers don’t want, or are afraid of dealing with those things. In addition, we ensure this way a unified look to the movie pages.

• Infinite distribution — a Watch Now banners can be embedded in the filmmaker’s website or in any other website. Payment and presentation of the movie are done in the hosting website, which makes it a White Label for filmmakers who want to sell the movie from their own website. In addition we help filmmakers create a Facebook app to rent movies from their fan pages.

• filmDIY is also a place for viewers to find more content, we are marketing filmDIY.com not only for filmmakers but also for audience. That’s why each movie page has reviews, festival screenings, still gallery and all the information needed. Joining filmDIY means you get more chances to get your movie the possibility to be exposed to more people.

• We are also developing an automated mechanism which matches together relevant movies to analyzed content in partners’ websites. It’s more or less the Google Ads of movies (where movies are the equivalent of ads). In this case, the partner website will receive its own share, which will further help the filmmaker distribute her movie.

Why did we choose to specialize in the indie market? — First of all, it’s often overlooked by investors, and large media companies, because it’s so fragmented. We believe this to be a mistake. True, marketing niche content is challenging, but the audience is loyal and is happy to help by spreading the word. The second reason, which is totally emotional and therefore the strongest, is that we’re indie filmmakers ourselves and simply love it.

We are not resting and always developing more solutions for indie filmmakers. The industry is in a dynamic process of technology change, and filmDIY is always on the look out to incorporate new and exciting models. We are now working with investors on a truly revolutionary system that we believe will break the current way of distributing films.

Kobi Shely Co- Founder. In January 2009, Kobi Shely launched the documentary film MacHEADS on iTunes. The buzz was immediate and overwhelming. MacHEADS generated over a millions hits on YouTube and Dailymotion. It was a No.1 documentary on iTunes, Hulu, Snagfilms, Amazon VOD and finally on CNBC. In the months after the digital launch, Shely soon came to realize that he would be the last to benefit from the profits party, and he wanted to be the first, so he co founded filmDIY.