About 3 months ago we made the decision to self-distribute BLUEBIRD in North America. From the beginning, our goal was to make an intimate, quietly affecting ensemble drama. For writer/director Lance Edmands, there was a specific kind of feeling he was trying to express with the film. There was a unique sense of loneliness, solitude, and isolation that was linked directly to a region of Northern Maine and the culture that permeates the area. Lance grew up in Maine, and he felt that these melancholy emotions stood in stark contrast with the great rugged beauty of the state. We wanted to explore that conflicted feeling in way that would resonate personally with a viewer. It was important to us to maintain the subtle, quiet tone of the film both in the way we made it and the way we brought the film to an audience. With that in mind, we spent the last year considering various distribution offers and scenarios as we traveled with the film to festivals.
Tag: Guest Post
Market figures
Different sources provide different figures but the bottom line is the same — too many films are being made on an annual basis.
“Too many” seems like a very broad term – but it isn’t. A recently conducted study resulted in a finding that the international community of audiences (those able to attend theaters, view content remotely traditionally as well as on mobile) was able to absorb 1,000 film per year.
The problem — roughly 8,000 films we produced/released in 2013.
With the markets therefore over-saturated by 87.5% – the cliched adage once again applies: something’s got to give.
By Christina Kallas
One thing’s for sure: people don’t go to writing to be rewritten. But they still are, first and foremost by the showrunner. The showrunner is the writer who tells the writers what to do, and who will eventually do it herself.
So should a showrunner polish the final draft of every episode to preserve the “voice” of the series, or should each individual writer be allowed to use their voice to bring out new sides to the characters and the series?
Began 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.
By Matthew Helderman, & Luke Taylor
At Buffalo 8 – we began our careers in the film business working as Assistant Directors on smaller independent sets, bouncing from project to project in the lower indie space.
Not only did AD’ing offer great insight and experience in to the the filmmaking process — but it also enlightened the reality that the film business is heavily driven on contracted labor that constitutes/requires the laborer to be present to continually earn wages.
As we began working 14-16 hours days – the hype and glamor that often surrounds the entertainment business was nowhere to be found — and so began our true education into the world of film production.
By Beanie Barnes
Data is a funny thing. It can, at once, confirm and discredit the exact same theory. For example, if a $500m film makes $100m at the box office on its opening weekend, it could mean that the film is a) a bust or b) gaining momentum. Such was the case with Avatar. By the end of 2009, several people were calling the film a “flop,” but by mid-2010, it was obvious that, of all the words to describe Avatar, “flop” was not one of them. And although the film has been hailed as a marketing and technological success, if it had failed, it very likely would have been called it a marketing and technological bomb (with marketing heads rolling at the studio).
Misreading data is prevalent in film. It isn’t so much that we misread the tea leaves, so much as it is that, rather than reading the tea leaves as they are, we’re more prone to read the leaves the way we want to see them or only read the leaves at the surface while overlooking others hiding below.
By Christina Kallas
Paddy Chayefsky once wrote that “television is an endless, almost monstrous drain” (The Television Plays, 1955.) And he continued: “How many ideas does a writer have? How many insights can he make? How deep can he probe into himself, how much energy can he activate?” Furthermore, “he (the writer) has no guarantee that his next year will be as fruitful. In fact most writers live in a restrained terror of being unable to think up their next idea. Very few television writers can seriously hope to keep up a high-level output for more than five years.”
