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.