As per Saul Bass…
Categories
Year: 2013
Each day I become more and more convinced that staged financing could be a cure to much of the Film Biz’s ills. Staged financing? What? Is the phrase not exactly center of your conversations right now? Why not?!! Whatsamattawidyou? Don’t you know a good solution when you see one?
By Jay Webb
Previously: Post #1: Introducing “Group” Distribution
A problem with our construction: Our street must be built on the active tectonic plates known as the Film-Tech Fault.
So how do we build a film/tech company when the dimensions & planes are constantly shifting?
By Roger Jackson
Previously: Secret 19-Point VoD Marketing Plan, Part I
Here’s Part II of our 19 point plan…
This post was going to be Part 2 of Two. But I try to avoid overly lengthy posts. And feedback over the past couple of weeks has convinced me to focus this post on just a couple of points: VoD Windowing, and Facebook Marketing. So…here are points 11 & 12 of the 19 point plan, with the final 7 to follow in a fortnight. It’s not bait & switch, just that, as the Dude said, “new shit has come to light.”
11. VoD Windowing: The film industry is adept at double, triple and quadruple-dipping. They are one of the few businesses that have found a way to sell the same product to you over and over …and over again. It’s genius if you think about it. You pay to watch a movie in theaters, and then maybe you buy or rent the Blu-Ray or regular DVD, or you catch it on Cable VoD or subsequently online Transactional VoD. And even on iTunes or Amazon or Vude there’s a form of mini-windowing by this oh-so-devious business — the choice of watching the film in Standard Definition, or pay a buck extra for HD. A few months (or, these days, weeks) later it’s on television pay-per-view, which more or less lines up with Subscription VoD, like Netflix. And somewhere in there you also “pay” (via your airline ticket) to watch it on that flight to Paris. And while this is definitely a business model under pressure, with shrinking windows (and therefore profits) it’s still very much the way Hollywood does distribution…and VoD is no exception.
by Kirsty Stark (Producer), Ella Macintyre (PMD) and Victoria Cocks (Writer/Director)
Part 3. Financing: Generating Certainty Online
Once we had proven Wastelander Panda was a viable concept and had an audience (through the success of the Prologue), we needed to find a way to finance future stages of the project. Still aiming to eventually take it to television, we looked at what we had done so far, and assessed the likelihood of getting funding, keeping in mind that we were first-time filmmakers. Speaking to experienced producers from the local industry, as well as looking at the questions being raised online from viewers, we realized that we still had a lot to prove before we would be able to attract any kind of significant finance:
American films — both fiction and doc — are dominated by a tendency to tell you what you are seeing; often they tell you even why you are seeing what you are seeing. And it doesn’t stop there. Many filmmakers feel compelled to even tell you haw you should feel about what you are seeing. We have lost the opportunity of using confusion as a narrative engine. We diminish our capacity for joy in the chaos. Dang. What a shame. Truly.
“The rules on what is possible and impossible in the arts were made by people who had not tested the bounds of the possible by going beyond them. And you can.”
This is a line from a great commencement speech Neil Gaiman gave at the University Of The Arts. You can read the whole beautiful thing here:
http://www.uarts.edu/neil-gaiman-keynote-address-2012
Or watch it here:
