By Matthew Helderman, & Luke Taylor
Determining specifics on the success of a product’s launch is always speculative. We’ve seen the same story countless times — a studio primes their latest release to be a massive box office success, only to watch the film crash and burn into box office bomb oblivion. Cloud Atlas, Mars Needs Moms, John Carter, Battleship, The Lone Ranger— we’re all familiar with these recent examples of big-budget bombs that were projected for success and proved to be poor investments.
The reasoning and research behind the cause of these failures and successes is endless — timing, marketing, money, foreign sales, lead actor status, direction, writing, length, acting — any of the above can be blamed for poor results. The reality is, it is simply impossible to determine the exact needs of an audience or consumer before any product is launched. Market research, development, and beta testing can certainly provide some statistics to lean on — but there is unfortunately no exact science until you are out there in the marketplace.
Introducing a new service to the film industry — BondIt faced the similar hurdle of speculating how consumers would use the service. Given our first-to-market status, we only had our experience, market research, and beta testing period to determine how our service would be utilized and the actual demand. Dissimilar to the release of the film — we have the ability to pivot and adjust our service to best fit the needs of the user-base.
During the course of the first quarter of 2014 — project submissions grew exponentially as our exposure increased. BondIt was first utilized by very small productions — 30-100k budgets with very small, yet crippling, security deposits. We had speculated early on that these cash-tight productions would find the service appealing given the importance of every dollar in their bank account. By the end of the quarter, productions up to 5M were utilizing the service — proving the demand existed for a large user base.
Upon launch, we were not only introducing ourselves to potential consumers — we were also a new stakeholder for the unions. How would they react? Would they find the service useful? Would they view us as additional clutter in an already convoluted space?
Interestingly, we’ve discovered that BondIt can be used and interpreted slightly differently than we had anticipated upon our launch. We’ve learned that streamlining communication between producers and the unions proves nearly just as valuable as the cash-flow. The opportunity cost of spending time and energy with union paperwork and correspondence during those critical weeks before principal photography is high — BondIt is able to shoulder a significant amount of the responsibility as well as answer questions regarding the signatory process that a producer may have had difficulty reaching their union rep in a time crunch.
Aiding in this facilitation of paperwork is also appealing to the unions themselves — representatives are typically overloaded with dozens of films, BondIt’s presence allows a bit of breathing room and educates amateur producers on the process itself.
Determining this demand for ease and streamline of communication — it has become apparent that the industry’s needs are shifting faster than the current institutions and infrastructure allows. With budgets shrinking and the number of films produced each year escalating, it is obvious that changing and re-visualizing the standard process is necessary for further advancement as an industry.
Much like the rest of the economy, it seems the future of a thriving film business lies in the hands of entrepreneurs seeking to rectify fragmented pieces. Companies such as Slated — a recently launched web-based community that brings filmmakers and film investors under one professional hub — are seeking to mend these fractured facets of the industry that desperately need a boost of progressive technology to match the needs of the economy.
As BondIt continues to prove out the market — we continue to focus on these broken pieces and seek to fix them through the use of technology. As an industry, we cannot rely on antiquated processes to cater to our needs — we’ve all witnessed the decline of multiple industries due to rejection of new technology, rather than acceptance and integration. It is required of us, as members of the New Age of the film industry, to progress the industry norms and seek improvement.
BondIt was founded by independent film producers Matthew Helderman & Luke Taylor of Beverly Hills based Buffalo 8 Productions. Having produced 30+ feature films, the team recognized a dilemma in the production process — union deposits — and launched BondIt to resolve the situation to assist producers & union representatives alike.
