Tag: distribution

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Truly Free Film

Alternative Finance and Distribution for Documentaries

by Andrew Einspruch

Filmmaker Andrew Einspruch recently attended the Australian International Documentary Conference and wrote a series of articles for the event, which he’s graciously allowed us to reprint here. These articles originally appeared in Screen Hub, the daily online newspaper for Australian film and television professionals.

Cathy Henkel is a producer, director, academic and researcher. She brings all of those skills to bear on her documentary projects, and recently has been looking into what it takes to navigate an independent path as a filmmaker. In a session called Riding the Freedom Streams at this year`s Australian International Documentary Conference (AIDC), she invited documentary makers to brave the waters of a freer path.

Starting off with her nautical theme, Henkel said that you have to decide what kind of vessel you want your business to be.

One option is to wade into the main stream, the province of vessels she called the Good Ship Enterprise. The AIDC is primarily devoted to established and wannabe Enterprise ships. These businesses get their money from three main sources: broadcast pre-sales and distribution advances, government (grants or investments), and the Producer Offset. They are larger businesses with larger staff and larger overheads, and they have worked out how to get deals with the broadcasters and distributors, whose pre-sales and advances are needed to trigger government money.

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Truly Free Film

The Film Distribution Spigot Is Not A Slow Drip But A Torrential Flow

We have lived so long in the era of the inverted pyramid that we don’t yet recognize that the pipes have all burst.  For the last twenty-plus years the number of movies made each year increases, but the number of movies theatrically distributed remained around the same. But theatrical release — or even a festival premiere — does not a movie make.  

No matter what camp you sit in — artist, audience, or industry — the onslaught of titles now available to you is nothing short of devastating.  We miss more than we see, and forever will.  It is a flood and no one is throwing us life rafts.  

All the new digital platforms and social media tools have effectively crushed the dam.  It was a barrier that needed crushing, but

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Truly Free Film

Training Our Producers For Failure

Let’s try this experiment: 

  1. Gather 5 producers:
  2. Ask them if they can do a budget and schedule for your film;
  3. Ask them what that means;
  4. When they tell you it will be a budget and schedule for the production and post of a film, tell them you are looking for a producer who can do one that will take the movie all the way through release;
  5. Want to bet that no a single one of them will know how to do that?
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Truly Free Film

The Independent’s Guide to Film Exhibition and Delivery 2013

By Jeffrey Winter

2012 was a profound and often painful year in terms of the rapid technological change impacting the delivery and exhibition of independent film.

2012 was the year we wrapped our heads around the idea that there are virtually no more 35mm projectors in theatrical multiplexes, and that the Digital Cinema Package (DCP) has taken its throne as king – right alongside its wicked little stepchild, the BluRay.

2012 was the year it became clear that the delivery and exhibition formats we’ve been relying on for the last few years (especially HDCAMs) are no longer sufficient, and that in order to keep pace with the marketplace, we must now embrace the next round of digital evolution.

There are many filmmakers who will now want to stop reading, thinking “ughh, techie-nerd speak, that’s for my editor and post-supervisor to worry about.” You may believe you are first and foremost an artist and a storyteller, but in today’s world your paintbrushes are digital capturing devices, and your canvas is the wide array of digital delivery systems available to you. To shield yourself from the reality of how technological change will affect your final product is to face sobering and expensive complications later that will dramatically impact your ability to exhibit your film in today’s venues (including film festivals, theatres, and other public screening venues), as well as meet the needs of distributors and platforms worldwide.

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Truly Free Film

How To Get Ready For That Film Festival

You are in, and now you have all sorts of wonderful problems — the kind most filmmakers wish they could enjoy.  You know, you have to do all the things you have to do for a film festival.  I have tried to collect the various blog posts I have written or have found written by others that will really prepare you.  There’s a lot more to be written.  But this is a good start:

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Truly Free Film

Diary of a Film Startup Part 16: Top Ten Lessons, So Far

By Roger Jackson

Previously: Film Marketing Tools

Train to Stockholm
We get amazing indie films submitted to KinoNation almost every day to our Private Beta launch. Here’s one that’s beautifully shot, with a theme of cross-border connectivity that will, I think, appeal to many video-on-demand platforms. Keep submitting movies!

10 Lessons
As we close in on year’s end — and 4 months work on KinoNation — I thought I’d share some lessons we’ve learned that really apply, I think, both to startup ventures AND to indie filmmaking. They seem obvious to me with hindsight, but they weren’t obvious when we started just a few months ago.

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Truly Free Film

Diary of a Film Startup Part 15: Film Marketing Tools

By Roger Jackson
Previously: Early Results

50 Ways to Sell Your Movie
KinoNation now has a library of almost 100 feature films and documentaries in our Private Beta. As I spend time showing some of these films to various US and international video-on-demand outlets, I am more and more convinced of the need for a step-by-step template that helps filmmakers with the the business of selling & marketing their films. So last week I spent some time creating a “back of an envelope” plan for a section of KinoNation where filmmakers can be guided through a series of fifty steps to give their film a better chance at finding an audience. The idea is to have one page on KinoNation.com for each of these fifty steps, along with an overall Progress Bar — so a filmmaker can review what percentage of this marketing checklist has been completed. This is deliberately rough — I just want to get the discussion started.

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