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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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Truly Free Film

Diary of a Film Startup Part 14: Early Results

By Roger Jackson

Previously: Indie Film Inspiration

Quarter Million Views
I thought I’d share some results — as in numbers — for a feature that is having a nice run on YouTube Movies. The film is called Time Expired, and won a silver award for Comedy Feature at WorldFest Houston. It was submitted to KinoNation last week. And in fact the master ProRes file (71GB) is currently being uploaded by the filmmakers to our cloud storage servers. What immediately caught my attention is that Time Expired has almost a quarter million views on YouTube Movies since it was placed there by director Nick Lawrence 12 months ago. That’s the full length (93 mins) movie, not the trailer — an average of 20,000 per month, and accelerating. Nick has kindly agreed to share the extensive stats that YouTube provide. It’s interesting and quite instructive, I think, as YouTube Movies becomes an increasingly significant — and profitable — option for indie filmmakers.

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Truly Free Film

Diary of a Film Startup Part 13: Indie Film Inspiration

By Roger Jackson

Previously: Doubling the Upload Speed
 
First Looks
This is an important week for KinoNation. Well, every week is crucial for a startup, but this feels extra critical. We’re submitting our first tranche of films to several video-on-demand platforms. We haven’t finished the dashboard for our VoD partners yet — that’s scheduled for December — so the submission process is old school. That is, we’re sending them a spreadsheet with details of films, trailer, IMDb link, festivals & awards, and the all-important written pitch. The results & feedback from these submission — whether VoD platforms accept 10% or 30% or 65% of the films we show them — will give us the early data we need to solidify our business model. I’ll keep you posted.

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Truly Free Film

Diary of a Film Start-Up Part 12: Doubling the Upload Speed

By Roger Jackson

Previously: Ranking System for Indie Films?

Twice as Fast
We’ve made big strides at KinoNation over the past week. Klaus has been pulling late nights building the cloud-based Transcoding Engine. This automatically encodes films to the specs for each of dozens of VoD platforms. It’s complex work that’s normally done manually at encoding houses — and costs several hundred dollars per film. It’s a non-trivial challenge, so I was pretty psyched to see it working — and to see how fantastic the encoded films look! Not wanting to get too techy, but this means the huge ProRes files being uploaded by filmmakers are auto-checked on completion, queued and then transcoded into the Preview version that VoD platforms can watch and review.

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Truly Free Film

Diary of a Film Start-Up Part 11: Ranking System for Indie Films?

By Roger Jackson

Previously: Three Months of Work

Ranking System
Consistent feedback from VoD platforms: it’s tough for them to decide whether to accept — or reject — an independent film. And how useful it would be to have some sort of independent films ranking system, to give them some indication of how well a movie might perform on VoD. We agree. So we’re building it. We found the perfect person to create what is quite a complex real-time algorithm — an indie filmmaker with a math PhD from Harvard.

Here’s the concept: For every film uploaded to KinoNation we gather dozens of data points. Film in a festival? It gets points, based on the prestige and importance of the festival.

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Truly Free Film

Diary of a Film Start-Up Part 9: Filmmakers Festival Feedback

By Roger Jackson

 

Previously: Time to Go Live!

 

Card-Counting Christians
Just back in Los Angeles after 4 days in Arkansas at the excellent Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival. So great to have a deep immersion in indie film, watch back to back movies and hang out with passionate filmmakers. I loved Holy Rollers, the true story of a tight-knit group of  Christians running a very successful operation dedicated to beating casinos at Blackjack. Motivated not just by their multi-million dollar winnings, but by a deep hatred of the rapacious casino industry, this is a superbly executed movie by filmmaker Bryan Storkel.

 

Paper Lion
I was invited to the festival to speak at a workshop on “New Waves of Distribution.” Talked to lots of filmmakers about KinoNation. Universally positive feedback. Everyone just wants their films watched, and make a little cash back. Hopefully we can revolutionize the process. So

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