RYAN is a perfect balance of form with content. It is an expressionistic documentary, an animated essay film. It respects life and our struggles. It is about the creative process and inspiration. It is not to be missed. It won an Oscar in 2004.
Month: August 2013
Maybe they just built it completely backwards… Or rather: the way the world is now compared to the way it was then is so profoundly different that it might as well be the Bizarro world where red is yellow and yellow red. Backwards is forwards, and forwards backwards?
It certainly seems like it is backwards. We spend all our money and effort to get people together AROUND existing content. We try to make them WANT
By Jay Webb
Step 1 to building a street: Clear the Brush and raise the land.
1. The Tycoon.
So it seems appropriate to start this series of posts by explaining how IndieStreet came to be. Last year, I was completing a screenplay that I had been working on for a few years, and was about ready to start the daunting fundraising process. Before I started sending out the business plan for the film, a friend of mine, Chris, told me that he wanted me to first meet his old boss who had just sold his contracting/tech company for a cartload of cash. He said that this Tycoon was looking for an alternative investment, so maybe this film raise was going to be simple. HA!
By the second month of presentations and dinner meetings, it seemed to both my friend and I that the Tycoon was our guy. He met with us on numerous occasions and seemed in many ways to actually be courting us. More importantly, each meeting resulted in more synergy and productive dialogue than the previous.
By Roger Jackson
Previously: VoD: Frequently Asked Questions
We continue to ramp-up deliveries of Kinonation films — we’ll have 100+ movies live on beta partner VoD outlets by the end of August. So now I have 100 producers asking about VoD marketing. I’ve been working on a marketing plan — not a gimmick, but an actionable, effective system to really launch a film, every time it goes live on any VoD outlet. The “launch” metaphor is apt, I think, because a film needs a booster-rocket to get things rolling. VoD outlets are driven by algorithms — you need maximum thrust in the first days live to get a film onto their best-seller list. Today, writing this post, I decided to nix the “secret plan” thing — it’s not like it’s rocket science anyway — and share pubicly.
Here’s Part I of our 19 point plan. The real secret is to get this done in a very compressed time horizon — a few weeks at most — so it has the biggest impact coinciding with each time your film goes live on an outlet. Executing on this plan is NOT a trivial amount of work, probably 100+ hours.
-
IMDb: staggeringly important, everyone from consumers to VoD outlets to distributors make this site their first stop — and therefore their first impression of your film. Way too many films don’t even have a poster here. You must. It’s mission critical. I know, it costs $35. You have to do it. Next, get some people (cast, crew, friends, family) to rate AND review your film on IMDb. You need a credible # of people…9/10 is meaningless if it’s from a total of 4 people. Here’s the IMDb page for a successful Kinonation film. 8.9/10 from 80 users. Check. Forty critic reviews. Check. Only 3 user reviews. Needs work. Note that this film, like every film we distribute to Hulu, is now automatically available on IMDb via an embedded link. Cool.
-
Poster: it’s my opinion that poster art is the single most important factor in getting “organic” sales on VoD platforms. By which I mean viewers who are just browsing. Keep it simple, big, bold, readable. Sexy helps too. Or gross.There are many reasons why the health doc Fat, Sick & Nearly Dead is a VoD best-seller — love it or hate it, this is a provocative poster.
by Kirsty Stark (Producer), Ella Macintyre (PMD) and Victoria Cocks (Writer/Director)
Part 1. Development: Creating the Storyworld of Wastelander Panda
One of the first questions we’re asked when people hear about Wastelander Panda is “How did you come up with the idea?” It’s a strange concept – the meshing of two ideas that don’t necessarily fit – but this seemingly incongruous pairing is one reason we believe the project has had so much attention so far. Our initial three-minute Prologue, designed to test the concept and see if we had an audience, had over 100,000 views in its first three days online. However, our success hasn’t all come down to luck, but is due to a carefully planned process that saw us create a story world from scratch and go on to implement an online distribution strategy.
Rubix by Chris Kelly from Dezeen on Vimeo.
The internet has given us an abundance of great nature shorts. And it is fantastic. Sometimes I need my beauty and transcendence delivered devoid of human life. Here the bugs and snails traverse the green in splendor.
Life on Moss from Boris Godfroid on Vimeo.
