by Andrew Einspruch
Filmmaker Andrew Einspruch recently attended the Australian International Documentary Conference and wrote a series of articles for the event, which he’s graciously allowed us to reprint here. These articles originally appeared in Screen Hub, the daily online newspaper for Australian film and television professionals.
Screen Australia data showing an overall improvement in the documentary sector was shown at more than one session at this year’s Australian International Documentary Conference. Since the Producer Offset was introduced in 2007, production budgets and hours are up.
That’s good.
For some.
According to Sue Maslin, currently an Investment/Development Manager with Screen Australia, and a long-time producer with her company Film Art Media, the problem is that these improvements are not evenly distributed. That’s because the trend is decidedly toward series over one-offs, and series heavily favour the larger, more established players.
“We’ve experienced profound changes in the past five years, particularly in the documentary sector,” she said. She pointed to changes in five main areas:
- Market – increasingly broadcaster-driven and international, which means markets are opening up.
- Programming priorities – rise of series, factual entertainment, and formats.
- Policy – Producer offset in 2007, as well as the Screen Australia Enterprise Program.
- Technology – New platforms for production, distribution, and audience engagement and conversation.
- Production activity – more production across a range of platforms and niches within the doco sector.
Maslin said that the Enterprise program had worked well for the 21 or so companies involved, many of whom are heavily weighted toward factual slates. “While Enterprise makes sense for the few, what is the future of the many?” she asked. The “many” being the many other smaller producers who make up the diversity in the sector.
“If you look at this idea of sustainability … it is a producer’s capacity to remain viable, and it’s been traditionally linked to turnover – to a turnover of productions that in turn generate fees – and then the ability to recoup revenue from those productions during the active life of distribution,” said Maslin. “So with current broadcaster trends favouring series and the available funding base being spread across bigger productions, not all producers are going to be able to rely on higher production turnover to generate increased fees and increased access to the Offset.
“Consequently, I think documentary filmmakers need to be increasingly savvy in finding other ways to sustain their businesses. I believe that our capacity to exploit the long-term content rights with new markets, new access to audiences, new engagement with audiences, new technology can make an important contribution to that sustainability.
“My point is that all producers need to think along those lines, and grow revenue through clever management of those rights.”
In other words, the long tail can help wag your business over time.
Her company Film Art Media has been doing just this. With the rights available to them, especially with older back catalogue titles, Film Art Media has re-released and repurposed films, often sprucing them up with a bit of extra content, or creating a tie-in to events. For example they re-released the DVD of Thanks Girls and Goodbyewith new artwork to tie into the 70th anniversary of the Australian Women’s Land Army.
They also re-released their 15-year-old documentary The Edge of the Possible about Jørn Utzon and the Sydney Opera House. However, they first had a conversation with the Opera House shop (which gets over a six million visitors a year, with 1.1 million of them buying something), and based on that, re-authored and repackaged it to create an up-market collectible that would be a well-targeted addition to the Opera House shop’s offerings at $10 more per unit retail.
By exploiting the rights that her company has in their work, they are able to generate income outside of production fees or garnering money during the main distribution phase.
Maslin suggested you start by cracking open a spreadsheet and doing an audit on the rights you have in your work, making a list of everything. “Look at the underlying agreements you’ve got that were put together in the course of financing the work. Do a thorough audit of not just the program itself, but all the material that went in to making the program. It does have value. It doesn’t date.”
Notice, for example, whether or not an agreement is coming to an end (say, at the end of a distribution agreement), where rights are due to revert back to you. Maslin said it was sometimes possible to go to your distributors and point out that there aren’t any sales coming from your older titles, and ask if they would go ahead and let the rights come back to you.
Maslin listed key markets you can target when trying to generate new sales, including:
- Retail and wholesale shops. The Opera House sale is an example of this. Or perhaps it would suit the ABC shop.
- Online sales. These are good, as if you sell from your own shop, you sell at full retail.
- Educational sales. This was discussed at length in another session at this year’s AIDC. See AIDC 2013: making money under the education Kanopy. Peter Tapp from the Australian Teachers of Media (ATOM) was on hand to talk about study guides and the opportunities available through his organisation to help you address the education sector.
- International non-theatrical licensing.
- Pay TV.
- In-flight sales.
- Sub-licensing to specialist distributors. Could a cookbook distributor sell your DVD on the history of sushi?
- Footage licensing.
- Book tie-ins. Maslin said they were able to sell a book based on their documentary about Justice Michael Kirby, and the filmmaker got a healthy advance to write it.
- Apps, iBooks and ebooks.
But you have to do your research and looked at the market potential of what you have. Not everything will be worth fiddling with.
From there, do a business plan, and work out what market opportunities are bigger than the costs involved in shaping the product to that market. It is all about time and money.
And there will be costs – authoring, design, production, marketing, maintaining sales contacts, and fulfilment. So you have to be reasonably sure that what you are doing will be profitable for you.
In summary, Maslin said her key strategies for sustainability are:
- Develop and produce screen content across all platforms.
- Secure and exploit their screen content rights.
- Build audience and market awareness of the activities and available screen content.
- Provide services as well as content.
- Reposition and repurpose content as new platforms and new technology becomes available.
For the smaller players in the field, this seems like a sound set of options.
Andrew Einspruch is a producer with Wild Pure Heart Productions . His current project is the low budget feature film The Farmer.
