Tag: DIY

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Truly Free Film

DIY Chronicles: THE WAY WE GET BY (Part 4 of 5): Minimize Your Loss & Hope For A Greater Payoff In The End

Today’s guest post is from filmmakers Gita Pullapilly and Aron Gaudet.

With film prints in hand, it now changed our game plan. Though we knew likely we’d lose money realizing nationally in theaters, we were banking that the film reviews and national press would bring a greater exposure to our film—and if not help our bottom line—at least help our careers.

In the end, we decided to alter our business plan, aware of the risks, and launched a national theatrical run.

The money we had made in Maine allowed us to bring on International Film Circuit as our distributor for a national release.

 

Our national non-profit partners couldn’t provide any financial support to us, however they shared film and screening information with their members by email, on their websites, and on their social networks. Now it wasn’t just us tweeting something or adding an event to our Facebook fan page to our few thousand followers. It was a large network of organizations reaching hundreds of thousands of people.

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Truly Free Film

DIY Chronicles: THE WAY WE GET BY (Part 3 of 5): Going Local and Maximizing Your Distribution Window

Today’s guest post is the third of five from filmmakers Gita Pullapilly and Aron Gaudet concerning their experience making and distributing THE WAY WE GET BY.

The students at Harvard Business School realistically saw no way for us to do a theatrical run without a significant investment in film prints and print and advertising. But they noted that by leveraging our POV broadcast with a DVD release, we could feasibly make our first real revenue stream. That coupled with a strong educational and community screening plan showed that there was perhaps some hope of making a living. However, they all agreed, it was going to be A LOT of work.

The one date we knew we couldn’t move was our broadcast. The Way We Get By was going to be a common carriage POV Special on Veterans Day (November 11). We knew we had to come up with a strategy to market and promote the film leading up to the broadcast and direct our audiences towards the DVD.

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Truly Free Film

DIY Chronicles: THE WAY WE GET BY (Part 2 of 5): Timing Is Everything

Today’s guest post is the second of five from filmmakers Gita Pullapilly and Aron Gaudet concerning their experience making and distributing THE WAY WE GET BY.

In November, we got a call from POV. We were being picked up for the 2009 season. Around that time, we also found out ITVS LINCS had approved us for funding. With a national television broadcast now in place, we were on the path to reaching our goals.

Now, we had to figure out the festival, theatrical, DVD, digital and online markets. Surely with a broadcast in place, other outlets had to at least be interested?

We started reaching out and calling theatrical and DVD distributors, trying to see if maybe with a television broadcaster in place, they would want to acquire our film. Our eagerness quickly turned to despair as we began to place more calls to distributors.

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Truly Free Film

DIY Chronicles: THE WAY WE GET BY (Part 1 of 5):Finding A Spot In the Line-up

For the past five years, Aron Gaudet and I dedicated our lives to making and distributing our film, The Way We Get By. Our story takes place in Bangor, Maine and profiles three senior citizens, who have dedicated their lives to greeting troops heading off to war and returning home. The story is about finding purpose in your life and the role service plays in helping overcome your own personal obstacles.

 

For our three subjects, greeting troops changed their lives, and in many ways, this film changed our lives—personally and professionally. We want to share with you the journey that we took—to inspire you to find your own business model to extend the life of your film and reach the largest possible audience.

 

FINDING A SPOT IN THE LINE-UP

 

Aron and I had certain goals we wanted to accomplish with our first feature-length project. We wanted to make a quality film and get it in front of an audience, but we also wanted to establish our careers as filmmakers. This meant some of our choices would be made because it was the best move for our film, and some would be made to help our careers.

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Truly Free Film

DIY’s Distro Numbers Vs. The Corporate Giants’

Jeremy Juuso has an interesting post on Baseline Intelligence that Phillip Lefesi tipped me to.  Jeremy analyzes the 1st & 2nd weekend returns of DIY vs other specialized releases.  The DIY films hold their own on the first weekend, but are surpassed by the corporate releases thereafter.  What is not mentioned however, is that the DIY films are not only probably more profitable, but the DIY films are still owned by the filmmakers (presumably).  If the exhibitors take 50% of the gross, the differential for rentals is only $25K between the two over the first two weeks. You have to figure that the corporate releases are spending more than $25K over the DIY films in marketing costs.  The DIY team would thus be making more money as well as owning their film and controlling their release. Check it out.

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Truly Free Film

PMD Rising

As some of you may know, I coined a new crew category titled the Producer of Marketing and Distribution (or PMD) in my book Think Outside the Box Office. I came up with the idea when trying to think of a solution to the enormous amount of work that distribution and marketing can be for filmmakers without a distributor. The concept boils down to: you didn’t make your film on your own – why should you release it on your own. You can read about the concept of the PMD in one of my other posts. I am happy to report that this concept is gaining traction. I was spurred to write this post after 25% (20 out of 80) of each of my Perth and Adelaide workshops indicated that they wanted to be PMDs (this is before my upcoming classes in Sydney and Melbourne). In Adelaide, the SA Film Corporation has plans to set up an in house PMD to help support the distribution efforts of independent filmmakers in South Australia.

Also just this week Adam Daniel Mezei who in January wrote a great blog post about the responsibilities of a PMD, has set himself up as a PMD for Hire. One of the attendees of my Amsterdam workshop has another PMD site and is already working on a Dutch film as a PMD. A group of Vancouver attendees formed a PMD support group this past month.

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Truly Free Film

Coping With Symposium/Workshop Brain Fry

Today’s guest post is once again courtesy of Jon Reiss.  Back before Jon wrote the book on DIY distro in the digi age (literally), he and I started brainstorming on the need for a marketing & distribution lab for filmmakers, somewhat modeled on the existing screenwriting & directing labs that many organizations run.  We had some real specific goals on this and pitched it to several key entities.  Everyone wanted to do it, and I believe everyone still wants to do it.  Money and time still are limited supply though, and our dreams have been deferred.  Yet, the initial steps have been taken by a couple of organizations, and most recently Film Independent put together: Seize The Power last weekend.  Jon’s post below, is a bit of  an extension from that remarkable collection of speakers and participants and information.

I heard a number of comments after this weekend’s LAFF Seize the Power Symposium that people where overwhelmed – that their brain’s had been fried by so many ideas and so much information.  To me that’s a sign that we succeeded.  When Film Independent and the Los Angeles Film Festival asked me to help them devise the Symposium (and accompanying Distribution Boot Camp for competition filmmakers) we were in immediate agreement that the event would focus on: 1. Nuts and bolts practical information for filmmakers.  2.  Forward thinking thought leaders indicating what the future might be.  3. Practical case studies of filmmakers who were using the new tools of distribution and marketing.  We wanted to avoid people sitting on a panel rehashing how we got here.   I also get the same brain-fry feedback when I give my weekend workshops – and I’m delighted.  This is what I suggest to people:

1. Focus on the Inspiration and Creative Potential

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