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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.