Tag: DIY

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Truly Free Film

Seize the Power – Why You Should Pay Attention to the LAFF Symposium this Weekend

We are now treated to another Jon Reiss guest post.  Jon holds the world record for the most comments on a single TrulyFreeFilm post, but he is one of our New Model Gurus, helping to pave the path to the emergence of a sustainable Artist/Creator Middle Class.   We he speaks, I listen.

Two weeks ago I wrote a guest post here about the need to educate filmmakers on distribution and marketing their films.  This weekend the Los Angeles Film Festival is hosting a truly wonderful event which I am proud to have developed in collaboration with LAFF and Film Independent (with strong push and support from Ted):  Seize the Power: A Marketing and (DIY)stribution Symposium.

The Symposium is designed to focus on the nuts and bolts solutions to the current distribution and marketing malaise plaguing our industry.  The intention is to provide an introduction to a wealth of new tools for filmmakers (and all artists/media content creators) as well as strategic guidance from many of the key practitioners and thought leaders in our field.  It is an antidote to the concerns of too much talk talk talk on this subject with little true education.

In addition there is a non-public component that you can participate in via twitter.  I will be giving a distribution and marketing boot camp to the LAFF competition filmmakers Friday June 18th 9am – 12:30pm and 2:30pm – 5pm and Saturday June 19th from 9am-11:30am.  All times PST.   We will be tweeting bullet points on #totbo  We have done this in the workshops I have given in the past month – and we have found that people around the world start to participate and chime in – creating a global discussion around these topics.

The Symposium: Starting Saturday afternoon at 1pm – Ted kicks it off with a presentation on the need for the artist entrepreneur to encourage filmmakers to think expansively about their creative output in order to create sustainable careers.  

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Truly Free Film

Seize The Power: LAFF’s Film Financing Conf Now TWO-DAY DIY MARKETING & DISTRIBUTION SYMPOSIUM

Film Independent sent out the following email:

We have spent the last ten years making the Film Financing Conference an invaluable experience for filmmakers, and as the industry is swept by very significant changes, we want to rise up to meet those changes with programs that meet filmmaker needs at this moment.  With that in mind, the Los Angeles Film Festival has created Seize the Power: A Marketing and (DIY)stribution Symposium, a new program specifically designed to help filmmakers navigate marketing and distribution in the growing age of new media and to promote an open dialogue on the impact and exciting possibilities the changes in our industry bring.

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Truly Free Film

Jon Reiss on Proper Prior Planning Prevent Perplexing Problems

Today’s guest post is from filmmaker / hybrid DIY distro guru, Jon Reiss.

Over the last several months an argument has arisen within the independent film community as to how much (and whether) filmmakers should focus on the distribution and marketing of their films.

I am rather surprised that there is an argument.  I am very surprised that lines have been drawn in the sand, armies joined and deployed.  I feel that the discussion to date misses two very important points.  First – there is no one kind of independent filmmaker.  There is no one kind of filmmaker.  Never has, never will be.  Thank god.  Each person who is involved in independent film has his or her own desires, interests, passions, loves, hates.  Each filmmaker has different motivations for making a film.  Some want to make a statement, change the world – whether it is social or artistic.  Some want to make money.   Some want to express an idea or emotion to as many people as possible.  Most filmmakers want it all.   However if push comes to shove, filmmakers will prioritize what they want from their films.  And these desires are different for different filmmakers.

Similarly not everyone in independent film wants to be a director, or a writer-director, or a writer-producer-director.   Some filmmakers just want to direct and prefer to collaborate with scriptwriters and producers.  Some filmmakers don’t want to direct, but want to be producers, DPs, editors etc.

Second, the debate implies that directors or multi hyphenate writer-director-producers should be primarily responsible for these new tasks.   I will always be among those that directors should not be solely charged with the distribution and marketing of their films.  As a filmmaker, I know how incredibly difficult this is (especially while making a film) – Frankly one of the reasons this blog post is perhaps a bit late to the debate is that I have been involved with shooting Bomb It 2.

However, I do believe that distribution and marketing should be woven into the filmmaking process just as preproduction planning, casting, scriptwriting, editing, sound mixing are all a part of the filmmaking process.  

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Truly Free Film

The Living Wake: The How & The Why Of Our DIY (pt. 3 of 3)

Today’s guest post concludes Sol Tryon’s tale of some of what he learned and loved from making and distributing The Living Wake.

Having seen the challenges of indie films hitting theaters with little to no marketing budgets, we have set a theatrical schedule that allows us as the filmmakers really support the film in each market where we release it.  We have set up a network of influential people and companies to support us by doing hosted screenings for nearly every single screening we have.  This creates more of an event type of feel to the traditional theatrical experience as well as the opportunity to cross promote with our host for each particular screening.  The way it works is that the host targets their friends, fans and supporters to come to their specific screening while we market to our networks as well. The idea being that we are able to bring awareness to our host and their work as well as them bringing audiences we wouldn’t have necessarily been able to reach ourselves into the theater.  Ultimately what it all comes down to is a targeted grass roots network that will hopefully spread through word of mouth.  While we don’t have unrealistic expectations for our theatrical box office numbers, we do believe we will significantly raise the awareness for the film in general and hopefully that will lead to larger interest in the DVD, TV, VOD, digital and foreign rights.

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Truly Free Film

The Living Wake: The Path To Self Distribution (Pt2 of 3)

Today’s guest post is the second of three from filmmaker Sol Tryon, whose The Living Wake is currently in theaters.

Like many indie films, with The Living Wake we were continuing to raise money as we went and post-production was no different.  We used the dailies from the shoot to show new potential investors what we were creating.  Fortunately, Charlie Corwin and Clara Markowicz from Original Media saw our vision and believed in us enough to finance the completion budget and help escort us into the next phase of our journey with the project.  After an extended post-production due to schedules, we had a film that we felt surpassed all of our initial expectations for the project. We were sure this was going to be a darling of the film festivals and people all over the world would appreciate our bizarre little movie.

While we knew it was a very particular film and that it wasn’t really headed for big mainstream success, we felt that the film was well crafted, had an amazing combination of comedic wit and emotional sensibilities and that the cult classic potential was off the charts.  Unfortunately, we were hitting the festival circuit right at the time when the bottom was falling out of the industry.

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Truly Free Film

Sol Tryon on “The Living Wake”: Doing it differently (Pt. 1 of 3)

Today’s guest post is the first of three coming from the filmmaker Sol Tryon.

The Living Wake has been a truly original project from the get go.  With a creative team of first time filmmakers we knew every phase of getting this film made and distributed was going to be an immense challenge. Peter Kline, Mike O’Connell and myself developed the project from its origins as a 20-page one-man show into a full-length feature film.

Once we had the script ready to go, we knew it was going to be something that we were going to have to make on our own to prove ourselves to the film community.  We shot a short film based on the characters from the feature to help us show investors that we had a distinct voice and vision.  From there we were able to raise our seed money to get us going.

The three of us moved to Maine intent on making this film however we could.  

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Truly Free Film

Remembering The Past, Segueing Into The Future

Today’s guest post is from filmmaker Bette Gordon (whose Luminous Motion I produced, and will screen at the IFC Center in NYC on Monday night.  I plan on being there, and hope to see you there).  Everything old is new again!

In the current culture of independent filmmaking, most of us are plugged in to the idea of DIY distribution. This is not a totally new idea.

In 1983, I had just made my first feature film, VARIETY. Its about a woman who sells tickets at a pornographic movie theatre and becomes obsessed with following one of the clients from the theatre into the world of men, money and lower Manhattan. We shot on a very very low budget, with friends and friends of friends. The theatre I used as a location, The Variety Theatre, was a porn theatre on 13th Street and Third Avenue, and after a week of shooting there from 11pm at night until 9am the next morning, we had developed a good relationship with the owner. The projectionist even played the part of “the projectionist” in the movie.

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