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Truly Free Film

A Quick Word On Exploring Your Film’s Essence Through a Financial Lens

Financing an independent film is no joke. For those of you who have gone through this process, you know just how grueling it is — taking meetings and phone calls with potential investors, entering your script into conferences and competitions — it gets overwhelming.

We’ve seen and experienced this firsthand with the films we’ve put together, and with clients as well. The process for our films and our colleague’s  films begin with a process of cutting, compromise, and parring the script down to the very essence of the story.

While attending this fall’s film festival circuit and working with writers across the globe in mentorship programs, we saw a lot of great stories get wrapped up $50m-$100m bows.

Coming from film finance and production backgrounds, we were able to help these writers par their screenplays down to reasonable budgets while keeping the essence of their story in tact, and conveying one simple truth — the essence of every story costs nothing.

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Truly Free Film

Buffalo 8: First Time Directors — Getting From “Who” to Tarantino

Bigger film budgets continue to dwindle. Smaller film sets continue to appear. Camera technology and film centric software continue to evolve. Through all the change, one aspect of film production that has remained the same— difficult directors. As a producer, I understand this. Filmmaker’s are passionate people by nature. Their work is the ultimate fruit of their labor, and they only want to make quality of the highest caliber they’re capable of. Of course, there are a few directors in our industry who have a license to demand their perfected vision — David Fincher and James Cameron have proven their artistic credibility, skill set, and commercial viability through consistent quality work and perseverance.  Yet, as an independent producer, I’m often presented low budget films helmed by first time directors with an unrealistic approach to execute their vision on a budget — most often due to lack of experience. This serves not to lessen ambition, but to provide guidance for amateur, working or budding professional directors.

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Truly Free Film

BondIt: Speciality Film Financing Updates

UploadLending Club offers a great consumer solution — loans, lines of credit and access to capital that traditional banking and institutional lending cannot provide.  Additionally — Lending Club offers individuals the opportunity to make investments through the providing of capital to said consumers. As banks continue tightening their abilities to service specific opportunities (especially those in media, entertainment & technology) — BondIt has found an opportunity to provide value and customer service in the growing independent market place. As film & media producers we knew the realities of getting a project financed, produced and recouped — it is never a pleasant ride. Combining this reality with the financial and technology background our team brought to the table — BondIt continuing to expand by offering additional services, industry value and a growing fund.

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Truly Free Film

BondIt: Filling the Gap in Entertainment Financing & Offering Liquidity to Filmmakers, Sales Agencies and Sales Agents

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After the collapse of 2008 – entertainment banks began taking less risk – which in turn meant it became more difficult for independent film producers, filmmakers and film sales agents to access the capital (whether equity or debt) they needed to complete, gap, bridge, leverage or develop their project.

Today in 2014 – these same entertainment banks have adjusted their mentalities and aren’t necessarily “evacuating” the niche’s they once partook in — but they are certainly not re-visiting the previous opportunities of the pre-2008 era.

When we launched BondIt in early 2014 – we wanted to provide liquidity for union deposits (SAG, DGA, IATSE, etc…) and we expanded on that model as the demand grew for our services to broaden.

In the past few weeks we’ve begun beta testing our newest form of financing by offering liquidity once more – but this time to filmmakers, sales agencies and individual agents.

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Truly Free Film

BondIt: Expanding Cash-Flow Opportunities to the Sales Side of the Independent Film Business

UploadBegan as producers & recognized problem

Before launching BondIt – our speciality financing operations to cover union deposits for feature films and theater productions – our team at Buffalo 8 Productions produced over 30 feature films.

Ranging in budgets and sizes — we dealt with the development, pre-production and post-production process — and branched in to the sales side of the business out of the necessity to build a revenue stream capable of sustaining a functioning business model.

As we grew as producers the company grew as well — offering new projects, larger budgets and further opportunities for the model we had built to pivot, adjust and expand.

More than anything – we recognized that capital allocations had changed for many of our colleagues as producers and production companies – with tight operating budgets and even tighter margins of profitability.

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Truly Free Film

Buffalo 8: How To Produce a $1M Feature Film & Actually Profit

By Matthew Helderman, & Luke Taylor
 
Introduction — shrinking budgets & rising expected production values
At Buffalo 8 Productions, we’ve produced over 30 feature films ranging from $100,000 budgets to $8M budgets with the average project settling around $1M.
 
We’ve seen budgets shrink, projects come & go and expectations shattered or met with disappointment during the process.
 
Through our experiences we’ve gathered and built a manifesto for the do’s & don’ts of making low budget projects. Some are obvious, others are elements we picked up after handfuls of wrong turns.

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Truly Free Film

BondIt: Launching & Expanding BondIts Film Financing Solutions for the Independent Film Business

By Matthew Helderman, & Luke Taylor

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Launched officially in January of 2014, BondIt found an audience fairly quickly. Liquidity (ease of cash-flow) proved to be a major issue for a large portion of the independent feature films being produced in North America – which was our target audience.

Providing cash-flow/financial coverage for union deposits was a new idea – a concept we devised after producing 30+ feature films between $200k – $4M budgets, We recognized a need to utilize union performers and workers – but the deposits (surety bonds) required often crippled the productions liquid assets.