Tag: Guest Post

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Truly Free Film

What is The Future of Web Series?

By Paula Hoffmann, Director of Development, Vancouver Web Fest

When I first started working with the Vancouver Web Fest, I kept hearing the phrase “web series are the future”, but nobody seemed to know what that actually meant. What does that future look like? Everyone can agree that the entertainment industry is facing tremendous change brought on by technology, but the public’s desire for good stories hasn’t changed. What has changed is the way entertainment is distributed, how it is marketed, and how it is monetized. Once upon a time there were 3 networks, and then came cable and that changed everything. Now we have the internet and everything is changing again. I also keep hearing about the “death of television”, but it’s not dying, it’s evolving.

Web Series are becoming more sophisticated as audiences for this genre continue to grow.
Web Series are becoming more sophisticated as audiences for this genre continue to grow.

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Truly Free Film

Buffalo 8: How To Produce a $1M Feature Film & Actually Profit

By Matthew Helderman, & Luke Taylor
 
Introduction — shrinking budgets & rising expected production values
At Buffalo 8 Productions, we’ve produced over 30 feature films ranging from $100,000 budgets to $8M budgets with the average project settling around $1M.
 
We’ve seen budgets shrink, projects come & go and expectations shattered or met with disappointment during the process.
 
Through our experiences we’ve gathered and built a manifesto for the do’s & don’ts of making low budget projects. Some are obvious, others are elements we picked up after handfuls of wrong turns.

Continue reading “Buffalo 8: How To Produce a href=”https://hopeforfilm.com/2014/06/buffalo-8-how-to-produce-a-1m-feature-film-actually-profit.html#more-12761″ class=”more-link”M Feature Film & Actually Profit”
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Truly Free Film

Lean World-Building

By Karim Ahmad

This is part 3 in a series of posts I’ve been obsessively writing on storyworlds. Part 1 was published on Indiewire, where I discussed the advantage of creating a spreadable storyworld for any piece of content. Part 2 was published right here, where I shared some takeaways from ITVS’ first major foray into building an immersive fictional web series – our fifth and final season of FUTURESTATES. Here, in part 3, I want to talk about another approach to building community through storyworlds that we’ve just recently adopted. A leaner approach.

The biggest drawback to the FUTURESTATES model was that we had to spend a lot of time and money before anything launched. And when you spend more time building in silence than you do sharing your creations, you can’t maximize sustained community engagement. But what if you could iterate an interactive story like FUTURESTATES over time? What if you could develop and prototype an immersive web series like any piece of software, and then audience test them like a TV pilot?

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Truly Free Film

BondIt: Launching & Expanding BondIts Film Financing Solutions for the Independent Film Business

By Matthew Helderman, & Luke Taylor

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Launched officially in January of 2014, BondIt found an audience fairly quickly. Liquidity (ease of cash-flow) proved to be a major issue for a large portion of the independent feature films being produced in North America – which was our target audience.

Providing cash-flow/financial coverage for union deposits was a new idea – a concept we devised after producing 30+ feature films between $200k – $4M budgets, We recognized a need to utilize union performers and workers – but the deposits (surety bonds) required often crippled the productions liquid assets.

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Truly Free Film

How to Build a Storyworld of Content. And How Not To.

By Karim Ahmad

This is part 2 in a series of posts I’ve been obsessively writing on storyworlds lately. Part 1 was published on Indiewire last week, where I discussed the community-building advantages to creating a storyworld of content around any single piece of IP. Part 3 is now available here.

What I want to discuss here is the how. Assuming you already want to, how do you reboot your process to allow for multiple interconnected stories to exist within a singular storyworld? Well, that’s the first challenge, is that you have to really want to. Innovation is hard, it’s time-consuming, and you have to be willing to question all aspects and habits of your storytelling process. Easier said than done. It takes discipline. And often times, it required working way outside your comfort zone. But if you’re like me, that prospect will excite you as much as it terrifies you. So what does that process look like? What are some of the challenges and pitfalls to avoid? Here are some of the takeaways from our process reinventing FUTURESTATES series from an anthology series of scifi shorts into a collaborative and immersive storyworld of content. Our goal was to make the series stickier by creating interconnections between stories and by creating multi-platform access points for users to engage with the content.

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Truly Free Film

IndieStreet Post #13: What Are Films Without An Audience

By Jay Webb

Screen shot 2013-08-19 at 4.51.06 PM

Previously: Making A Film? Why?

Audience building interview 1

There is no such thing as art without audience.  A motion picture does not even exist without its impact on human viewers.  As an independent creator without established lines of distribution, how do you build an audience that yearns for your specific stories? How do you keep them excited about your stories of the future?  In today’s market, your response to this question may be the difference between a “one & done” and having a long, sustainable career as a filmmaker.

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Truly Free Film

BondIt: Product Launch: Influx of Project Submissions, Needs, Variation of sizes and Interpretation on Usage

By Matthew Helderman, & Luke Taylor

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Determining specifics on the success of a product’s launch is always speculative. We’ve seen the same story countless times — a studio primes their latest release to be a massive box office success, only to watch the film crash and burn into box office bomb oblivion. Cloud Atlas, Mars Needs Moms, John Carter, Battleship, The Lone Ranger— we’re all familiar with these recent examples of big-budget bombs that were projected for success and proved to be poor investments.

The reasoning and research behind the cause of these failures and successes is endless — timing, marketing, money, foreign sales, lead actor status, direction, writing, length, acting — any of the above can be blamed for poor results. The reality is, it is simply impossible to determine the exact needs of an audience or consumer before any product is launched. Market research, development, and beta testing can certainly provide some statistics to lean on — but there is unfortunately no exact science until you are out there in the marketplace.

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