By Reid Rosefelt
I’ve been a film publicist for 35 years and have worked on hundreds of movies. Whether a film ended up grossing a hundred thousand or a hundred million, my approach has always been essentially the same.
1) Be Consistent With Positioning
The most important task for a marketer is to find a description of the film that accentuates its strengths, minimizes its weaknesses, and makes you want to see it. In the trade this is called “positioning.”
By Roger Jackson
Previously: How to Make Your Film a HIT on Hulu
At Kinonation we get asked certain questions all the time — important issues that deserve thoughtful answers. Bottom line: the world of video-on-demand is new, developing fast, rather complex and full of nuance. Thus, there are no dumb questions. Here are the most frequently asked.
Is my film guaranteed to get on all your outlets?
No. The outlets cherry-pick the films they think will do best for them. The exception is Amazon Instant Video, who believe that curation is the job of the consumer. So any feature film is guaranteed to get onto Amazon, assuming it meets minimum tech standards.
How long until my film is distributed?
Part 3 of How to Make Money in the Age of Abundance
By Jon Reiss
Theatrical is Dead Long Live Theatrical. The holy grail of a theatrical release still rings as a delusion for many. Fighting words still for untold thousands of filmmakers. Who doesn’t want their name in lights – long lines around the block – a packed theater of adoring fans. I believe this live engagement with fans is crucial for artists. But traditional theatrical is probably not the way you are going to do it.
In the first post in this series, I indicated that filmmakers need to create scarce resources in order to compete with the abundance of digital. Today’s post will focus on events – or what I have termed Live Event/Theatrical. The essence of this renaming is for filmmakers to reformulate and to reclaim what the industry calls theatrical – for more on that see Think Outside the Box Office. (PS – I first said this was a two part series – then I said three parts – well I lied again and now it will be four parts – with Part 4 tomorrow).
When films were only available in a movie theater – that was a scarce resource that could be charged for – it was the only way to see films.
By Colin Brown
Summertime and the living ain’t easy if you are in acquisitions. Whether you operate in film or tech, the fish are now jumping and your scouting alerts are on high. Movie distributors have already been shadowing – and in some cases preemptively buying – films pegged as potential breakouts from an upcoming festival season that is anchored around those eleven September days in Toronto. Similarly, venture capital and angel groups are currently busy doing the rounds at various “Demo Days”, stalking promising startup ideas that have been incubated through TechStars, 500 Startups, Y Combinator and the myriad other mid-year accelerator programs that now include Warner Bros’ newly graduated Media Camp. No matter the season, it is clear that both film and tech remain fixated on landing The Next Big Thing. But how each world goes about that pursuit is a study in contrasting deal-flow mechanics.
Where they differ most markedly is in who it is that actually leads the early chase. In film, the gestational life cycle of even the biggest festival hit is typically spent banging on endless investor doors, submitting grant applications and combing through production incentive schemes, all the while trusting that the script will attract the level of talent that in turn attracts the right level of money. It is only once all that hard pitching, cajoling and juggling is over, and there is film footage to show, that most distributors then come waving their checkbooks. The solicitation onus, in other words, falls squarely on producers’ shoulders.
In tech, however, it’s the money itself that does much of that initial sweet-talking. Sure, startup entrepreneurs have to pound the Silicon Valley pavement in search of backers but they do so in an inviting ecosystem where investors are very much the driving force. VCs want to see absolutely every startup idea out there. And so, increasingly, do seed investors, which is why so many have aligned themselves into angel groups in the hope of leveraging an advance look-see at the hottest investments prospects.
Such is this tech obsession with “proprietary deal flow” that investors go to great lengths to steal a march on competitors and differentiate themselves in the marketplace for ideas. Referral grapevines are cultivated, industry events aggressively mined and positional think-pieces constantly offered up on websites all in the quest for an inside track. Early-stage tech investor Mark Suster says he first relied on lawyers as his own advance warning system, since they are the ones entrepreneurs turn to in order get their company registrations done. Today, he views blogging as his “best source of high-quality deal flow imaginable.” We know this because Suster blogged about it earlier this year.
Now compare tech’s open courtship displays with what happens in the movie business. Other than the occasional yacht party at Cannes, film investors are leery of even announcing themselves, far less tweeting about their financing strategies, for fear of being swamped with pitches. They just trust that the industry’s inner circles will beat a path towards them and deliver the goods.
Of course, a proactive investment stance does not necessarily translate into greater “deal velocity.” For all their come-hither attitudes, it is not unusual for VCs and angel groups firms to fund less than 1% of the hundreds of business plans they review in any given year. But by virtue of sheer volume, they can lay claim to ever-greater deal-making intelligence. Having sifted through a mountain of proposals, Silicon Valley players have developed an exquisite nose for what constitutes the real deals – and, just as crucially, a strong stomach for failure. The fact is Silicon Valley is way more crucible than it is cradle. More than 90 percent of start-ups flame out and yet setbacks are embraced here, not so much as friends, but as teachers.
Paradoxical as it might sound, investment history has tended to side with those who have made those bold, early leaps into the dark. Their secret sauce, at least according to the various VC general partners I have interviewed, has been based around “pattern recognition.” Certain characteristics are common to even the most life-altering, game-changing, mold-breaking ideas. Research backs this up. An often-cited 2006 study by Harvard Business School academics demonstrated how serial entrepreneurs who have made money once are the ones most likely to be money-making the next time around. Regression analysis also done by VCs investigating which entrepreneurial attributes are linked to repeated successes found that a team’s interpersonal dynamics as an operating unit hold the key. The ability to spot such salient tendencies is what gives tech investors the comfort to back even the most outlandishly disruptive propositions in their embryonic stages.
The same should also apply to film investing. This summer’s string of studio box office misfires is another reminder that audiences still like to be surprised. You can only force-feed so many facsimiles of yesterday’s spectacles before people clamor again for unexpected characters and stories told in unforeseen ways. The problem here is that financiers don’t like surprises – which is why it is so important that the most original ideas in cinema come wrapped in creative teams that signal success through their collective track record in making films that industry buyers crave. Just as with startups, these producer-led teams are the quantifiable elements – packages, if you will – worth banking on. And the more that investors learn to reach out and find them, the better they will all become at identifying the real deals well before those festivals and demo days start selling them off at handsome, auction prices.
Editorial Director of Slated
It was a rare opportunity. And virtually everything went right. True, the gunk we used to make the icicles (a mix of hair product and other fine elixirs) did not come off trains so easily. And yes, it was before they had invented texture mapping software so a few CGI additions of snow cost way too much. But I was very fortunate to get to produce Ang Lee’s THE ICE STORM. It’s great to see that Criterion is now putting some of the video extras up on the net.
We hired Mark Friedberg as our production designer. Mark was just starting out then. We were impressed with the western town he had done for THE BALLAD OF LITTLE JO. He had been the art director on the first Good Machine production, Claire Denis’ short KEEP IT FOR YOURSELF. His work was good but mostly we hired him because he was someone we felt we could trust — and he could communicate very well. In many ways, he and I had come up together. We both had been canvassers for MassPIRG back when, and some of our production philosophy had been shaped by that experience. His first Production Design credit was for a comedy compilation film I production managed. Whether we were going to succeed or fail with THE ICE STORM, I did not know, but either way I wanted some friends around me that I could trust.
As this video clearly demonstrates, Mark was the right person for the job. For this video, he speaks quite well about the intent behind the selection of the locations. When your budget is tight, locations are perhaps the biggest choice the Designer makes. It always frustrates me if people take those chases lightly.
Part 2 of How to Make Money in the Age of Abundance
By Jon Reiss
When I wrote the first post in this series, I thought this would only be a two-parter, but I decided to expand this to a 3-part series because of a little voice in my head that said I needed to talk about audience engagement more.
Yes, I said in Part 1 that I wasn’t going to address it in this series because I had addressed it before – sue me. The truth is, audience engagement is so central to this whole process that I needed to add my evolving thoughts on it. I think you’ll appreciate my change of heart.
Audience engagement is a term that I have recently come to use interchangeably with “distribution and marketing.” What else is distribution and marketing – if not enticing, conversing with, and ultimately wooing your audience?
By Fraser Brown
I’m producing my first feature film. We’re on our 10th day of night shoots and I’m delirious with lack of sleep. It’s 11pm in the middle of a New Zealand winter so I’m wearing 6 layers (3 of which I slept in last night) and a pair of ugg boots. It’s not pretty but I don’t care, I’m loving it!
