Demystifying the delivery process
The news of deals being struck is beginning to filter out of Park City. But behind the deal making that has become legendary is the reality of having to deliver the film. Long after the buzz has dwindled producers will start the long haul of delivery. For some outlets it can be minor but for others it can be a labyrinth that will take money from you at every turn.
It tends to be a dry subject but is critical to the sale and distribution of your film. This is especially true if you intend to have some type of traditional theatrical, VOD, TV or foreign distribution. Tani Cohen is an established producer who has delivered numerous narrative and documentary films. This is the first in a series of articles that will attempt to demystify the delivery process.
DIY distribution value added
For anyone who isn’t reading Brian Chirls’ blog you are missing out on a valuable resource. He’s a self professed Indie Nerd Filmmaker (Director, Distributor, Technologist) with a unique perspective on the emerging digital DIY movement. In addition to contributing to the Workbook Project he is also the Head of Theatrical for From Here to Awesome.
by Brian Chirls - Here at SXSW, I’ve met a number of cool, smart, ambitious filmmakers, some of whom even have great films. Even as I attend premieres and parties that fit the fantasy, the sad reality of distribution prospects for the films is all too evident. That’s why I’m working with the From Here to Awesome team to build a strong case for DIY distribution. Maybe, rather than drag filmmakers kicking and screaming, we can see a DIY distribution as a positive opportunity.
Inspired by our roundtable discussion, I pulled out a couple of old distribution contracts I had and took them apart to look for the value that the distributors brought to the table in exchange for the rights granted. A typical distribution deal will offer the following:
- Physical distribution
- Cutting the deal
- Promotion
- Cash advance and/or minimum guarantee
If we can understand what this value is, we can evaluate whether these distribution deals are the best option. Here is a look at what each of those means and which rights and costs to the filmmaker are associated with each service.
Physical distribution
Getting your film (and soundtrack, posters, t-shirts, etc.) to an audience is a clearly necessary and valuable service. It includes replicating and shipping DVDs and placing them in stores (online and offline); theaters and film prints or digital cinema; and digital download or streaming services. Most of the above services are commodities, in that there are many competitive companies from which a filmmaker or distributor can choose, so prices tend to be reasonably close to the actual cost of time and materials. For physical distribution, the filmmaker often pays either a fixed fee or a small percentage of revenues. Exclusivity is almost never required, and contract terms are for short periods of time.
DVD replication is a great example. Depending on volume, you can pay about a dollar or two per DVD. Shipping costs are fixed, as is the amount per unit that a retailer will usually pay. Download services are not quite there yet as far as deal terms. ITunes is pretty good, passing along 70% of gross revenues, though you have to go through an aggregator, who will take their own small cut. (See the next section.) Other download services have yet to come on board with reasonable terms. It is fair for a download contract to lock you in for a certain amount of time to cover encoding costs, but those costs are always falling and terms should become shorter. (The term should be somewhere from zero to no more than three years, but about one year is fair.)
Cutting the deal
Unfortunately, many distribution platforms won’t work directly with filmmakers, so you need someone to close the deal for you. This could include a lawyer to double-check your contracts. Again, iTunes is one such example; they require that you go through an aggregator, though it’s very possible that they’ll eventually drop that requirement as they learn how to scale the acquisition process. Think of these people as agents, whose services might be worth about 10%.
Promotion
Promotion is perhaps the most illusive and tricky of all the value points distributors will claim to offer. They will often incur costs for advertising, though incurring cost is not the same as providing value. Unless you have the kind of movie that is well represented by newspaper ads, billboards and trailers on television, a distributor is not likely going to know better how to promote your movie than you do. To look at it another way, you can spend $30,000 (guesstimate) on a quarter page ad in the New York Times. For a truly independent film, that might bring ten or twenty people to a screening. (For Four Eyed Monsters, it brought one.) Now, imagine what you could do spending the same $30k on a web video series, where your audience can subscribe and interact repeatedly directly on your website.
Promotion is particularly nasty because it’s the primary reason for someone to demand exclusivity. The idea is that if a theatrical distributor pays for a newspaper ad, someone might see that ad and then buy a DVD instead of going to the theater. So they need to not only get a cut of that DVD but also determine how and when you can sell that DVD. You can get around exclusivity by working with companies that don’t do much or any promotion, though there are many that will claim that they promote your work but don’t really. A buried listing on a website or in a catalogue is not sufficient promotion to justify exclusivity. You may want to offer very limited exclusivity (e.g. on a given platform for 30 days) in exchange for a great promotion or placement opportunity.
Cash advance
At the point that a film is picture locked and ready to screen, filmmakers often find themselves desperate to make a deal that will cover their budget. Such desperation gives any source of said cash undue negotiating power, and the whole situation should be preventable by preparing distribution funding in advance. Consider that a distributor’s advance/minimum guarantee is simply time-shifting of money and sharing of risk. It happens that these are the exact services that financial institutions and equity investors provide. So why would you go to a movie company for financial services instead of to a financial services provider?
Typically, before shooting a single frame, a filmmaker will raise money from one or more investors - perhaps private equity (like a dentist uncle), from a production company or by credit card. At that point, the investor is taking on a great deal of risk and will expect an accordingly high share of the profits. Maybe the film will stink; maybe the production will go catastrophically over budget; or maybe the director will get hit by a bus. But once the film is completed, much of that risk has dissipated. The movie has been delivered, and maybe it’s even pretty good. Any further investment from then on should take significantly less ownership, corresponding to the lower risk.
Given an investor-filmmaker relationship that has been successful enough to make it to picture lock, a filmmaker might be best served to return to the original investor(s) to fund delivery and distribution until revenues start coming in from box office, retail, etc. Better yet, one might prepare a business plan to receive a first round of production funding with a high-risk return, followed by a second round of distribution funding at a pre-determined lower return rate once the picture lock milestone has been reached. This is no different from how start-up companies prepare for venture funding.
Build vs. Buy
Whatever resources I need for a film project, I’m always asking myself whether to build or to buy. I look at the costs and benefits of hiring another company provide a service for me, compared with the costs and benefits of putting together the resources to do it myself. Once you break down the real costs and added value of any distribution or other deal, you can determine at each step whether you really need someone else to do it for you. Depending on what you find out, a distributor may be the best way to go, or maybe it’s just better to DIY.
Brian Chirls is a filmmaker and technologist in New York. He has worked on the film Four Eyed Monsters as Manager of Distribution and Marketing. Brian is currently consulting on the distribution of John Sayles’s latest film, Honeydripper, while continuing to develop and write about ways for independent artists to create and distribute their work. Brian has also produced and directed a number of short films, video blogs and a bit of machinima.
Before becoming a filmmaker, Brian built financial software and worked in construction management on subway stations and highways. He graduated from the Jerome Fisher Program in Management and Technology at the University of Pennsylvania and is the least successful member of his graduating class.
To learn more about Brian’s work, see chirls.com.
Adventures in Self Distribution at the Power to the Pixel Forum in London
In an effort to share information FHTA will be organizing a number of panels, keynotes, and tutorials. If you have knowledge around a certain subject and would like to share it with the FHTA audience please let us know.
Our conference / educational partners are the Workbook Project and Power to the Pixel. PTTP is a gathering of filmmakers, technologists, and media creators that takes place multiple times a year in various locations around the world. The Workbook Project is a free resource project for filmmakers that attempts to bridge the gap between tech and filmmaking. Together PTTP and the WBP we will be releasing a large volume of FREE educational content to FHTA’s global audience. The following is a glimpse of things to come.
Getting started
We’ve started this help site to breakdown the various steps to getting your submission up and running with FHTA. But this information isn’t limited to just the festival it can be used to establish an online presence for your film, one that can help spread the word about your film while building an audience for your work.
STEP ONE - create an FHTA account.
STEP TWO - READ THIS and create a submission video and upload it to blipTV, myspace, and youTube — NEED opening graphics
STEP THREE - come back and finish submitting your project
We are still finalizing the submission part of the site - it will be live next week. If you’d like to send us a submission in the meantime drop us an email info@fromheretoawesome.com with “submission vid” in the subject line - please include your contact info, title of the film and your myspace and youTube video links.
Cutting through the static
Last November the internet hit a major milestone, over a 100 million sites with registered domain names and active content. The web is considered to be the great equalizer for filmmakers, one which promises cost effective promotion and distribution. But where do you start and what’s the best way to design a cost effective online promotional campaign that can help you build an audience for your work? Here are few suggestions to help you get started.
It is never too early - There’s an old adage, don’t seek publicity too early for a project because the press won’t cover it twice. For some reason people apply the same theory to their online strategies and often wait until the last minute to create a site for their work. By waiting until the last minute they loose valuable time that could have been used to build their audience. For instance I used the audience that I cultivated for HEAD TRAUMA to help me promote the movie at my festival showings, during my theatrical runs across the country and most recently with the Cinema ARG screenings.
Identify your audience - This might sound simple but you’d be amazed how often filmmakers say, I made the film for people like me. Maybe this is true, but you need to take some time to identify your audience. Who are they and what will attract them to your work? Once you know who the audience is you can start to figure out the best way to reach them online. In some cases you will also be able to find partners to help you amplify your reach.
Know your hooks - You want people to keep coming back to your sites. What is it about your project that will get people to return or better yet subscribe to your RSS feed or join your mailing list? Is it capturing the process with updates on production or post? Or maybe creating additional content in the form of a video podcast? FOUR EYED MONSTERS created a podcast that’s been viewed over 1.5 million times, and helped to drive large numbers of people to the project. The podcast turned the cameras on their struggle to find distribution. Other hooks could come from storylines, characters or topics that could relate to your film. In many cases the hooks you need are the same ones that sets your project apart from the pack. Chances are the hooks you use to promote will also be the hooks that you can use when it comes time to do a press push.
The power of RSS - Break the static site trend ( trailer, news, cast, crew etc.). If people can not subscribe to your sites, then you are going to loose a large part of your audience. RSS (really simple syndication) allows your audience to subscribe to your sites. Most blogs for instance will kick out an RSS feed. The value of RSS is that people will be notified every time you update your pages without having to visit your site. The odds of someone returning to your site on a regular basis, without being notified of any new updates is low. RSS will notify them in a variety of ways - via a news reader likebloglines, or browsers like firefox and IE) OR via email thanks to services like feedburner and feedblitz. Allowing your audience to pull your content will make things much easier for you in the long run and most importantly keep your audience engaged.
Embed and Spread - Another cost effective way to promote or distribute your work online, is to give your audience something that they can take with them. For instance when it came time to promote HEAD TRAUMA, I created a variety of digital swag that could easily be embedded into my audience’s sites, blogs, and / or social networking pages. Once it was embedded it helped to spread the reach of my efforts. In a sense I was crowdsourcing my promotion, so that people could discover my content over the web. I created web shorts, an audio player with interviews, banners, and wallpaper. Not only does this help to reach more eyeballs, it also helps to engage the audience. It entertains, informs and most importantly is infectious.
Getting started
Blogs
- Blogger.com
- Wordpress.com
- Typepad.com
- MoveableType.com
Social Networks
- Myspace.com
- Withoutabox.com
- Webjam.com
- IndieLoop.com
Video hosts
- YouTube.com
- Blip.tv
- videoegg
Embed and Spread
The following article was published in Filmmaker Magazine.
Web Savvy BY LANCE WEILER (director, Head Trauma)
“Do it yourself” is a simple phrase. Filmmakers have been “doing it themselves” for years, especially when it comes to production. However, the concept of DIY distribution, often considered to be a last resort or even a sign of failure, has recently become a first choice for many filmmakers.
The digital video revolution of the late ’90s ushered in a new wave of filmmaking by making the tools of production accessible to the masses. That democratization has, in 2007, become a bittersweet reality. While producing new voices and stories, it has overloaded the current system, flooding festivals, distributors and theaters with movies. The old adage that quality work floats to the surface is quickly becoming a myth, especially with the thousands of films produced every year.
With so many independent films pouring into the marketplace, how can indie filmmakers hope to break through the clutter and get their work seen? One answer is to build value around films through the Internet. Falling storage and bandwidth costs combined with a boom in user-generated content and social networking sites have created a number of free tools and services that can be used to promote and build audiences for independent movies. Below is a discussion of these new tools, many of which I used to promote my own latest feature, Head Trauma.
HEAD TRAUMA MAKING-OF SHORT AND COMIC.
WEB SITES
For any filmmaker the first Internet marketing material to be created should be a simple Web site. When building a site, create something that embodies the spirit of the movie. Also, make sure the site has hooks to keep the Web audience coming back. For example, when it came time to distribute my feature, everything started with a Web site that reflected the story, mood and style of the film. The site was our anchor point. Head Trauma tells the story of a drifter named George Walker who returns after many years to stake a claim on his deceased grandmother’s abandoned house. Struggling to build some semblance of a normal life for himself, George tries to clean up the place by day. But his nights are uneasy and plagued by troubling visions of a mysterious hooded figure. Despite his best efforts things grow worse as the house is condemned and his nightmares refuse to remain in the dark. To capture the feeling of the movie we designed the Web site — www.headtraumamovie.com — in the style of an interactive comic with a number of things hidden under the surface. Visitors were teased by an immersive experience that told a story.
SYNDICATION
Filmmakers can use syndication tools to reach large audiences with information about their films. Most famously, Arin Crumley and Susan Buice created a video podcast for their film Four Eyed Monsters which has been viewed by over 1.5 million people in just one year. The podcast was syndicated using a RSS (really simple syndication) feed. RSS can be read by feed readers known as aggregators, certain browsers and services like iTunes. But RSS is not just limited to podcasts; it is often possible to pull a feed from your blog. For example, your audience could subscribe to your RSS feed. Every time your blog is updated, they will receive a headline, or the whole blog entry. The updates can be delivered and read by a feed reader or as e-mails by using services like Feedburner, Zookoda or rssFWD.
Syndication allows your audience to receive updates without having to travel to your site or blog. RSS feeds can also be embedded into your fan’s sites, blogs and networking profile pages, which means your fans can “broadcast your feeds” and help amplify your message.
GETTING FOUND
Search-engine optimization is a big business. Firms and consultants get paid large amounts of money to help companies rank higher within Web searches. But there are a number of simple and free things that one can do to help increase a film’s Web site ranking, which in turn makes the marketing materials contained within easier to find.
Since search engines crawl for links, they look for link activity in the form of hyperlinking. Basically, the more a site is linked by other pages the more you, the site owner, link to them and the easier it is for a search engine to find you. One important tool for discovery is keywords and tags. When you prep your site and blogs you can add keywords to the title section of your HTML pages. Tags can be used to identify your media within social and video-sharing networks. These keywords and tags are picked up by search engines, which then direct surfers to your site.
When thinking about keywords and tagging it is important to consider your own searching and viewing habits. Netflix’s recommendation engine, Movies You’ll Love, pulls from over a billion users’ reviews and ratings in order to service each customer with a unique set of movie recommendations, recommendations that account for about 75 percent of the DVDs that Netflix ships in a given month. Although most filmmakers do not have the luxury of such a robust system, one thing is obvious by the Netflix example: the true power of a viewer’s recommendation. When coming up with your own keywords and tags, consider how you might recommend your movie to your friends and embed accordingly.
THE SCATTERSHOT APPROACH
One Web strategy that we used for the promotion of Head Trauma was what we called a scattershot approach. All told, we created and maintained the following 13 domains:
headtraumamovie.com official site
htmob.com/blog official blog
htmob.com/vlog a podcast site called HT radio
myspace.com/headtraumamovie social-networking site
audience.withoutabox.com/users/headtrauma social-networking site for filmmakers
social.indiewire.com/userprofile.php?u=Lw social-networking site for filmmakers
iklipz.com/headtraumamovie social networking site
tagworld.com/headtraumamovie social-networking site
pageflakes.com/lw.ashx Ajax-based startpage
headtraumamovie.suprglu.com Web site that allows you to combine RSS feeds
flickr.com/photos/headtraumamovie photo sharing
youtube.com/headtraumamovie video sharing
del.icio.us/htmob/news social bookmarking site
We hyperlinked between all these domains and, where possible, pulled RSS feeds from one domain into another. We also used an effective keyword and tagging scheme based on a series of terms we felt would hit our target audience. Our goal was to scatter the domains all over the Web, and then by hyperlinking pull them back together again.
Before we started the scattershot approach it was impossible to find our site using Google because the term “head trauma” was so generic. A search would spit out a ton of medical documents and sites but no mention of the movie. But as we built out the domains and interlinked them “head trauma” began to climb within search results and now sits on the first page of a Google search.
DIGITAL SWAG
Movie promotions usually involve swag — posters, T-shirts, coffee mugs and the occasional kids meal. Most swag is well beyond the budgets of the majority of filmmakers, but digital swag is easy, cheap and sometimes even viral. For Head Trauma we adopted an “embed and spread” campaign and created a number of digital assets to help promote the movie.
EMBEDDABLE VIDEO
Thanks to the abundance of free video-sharing sites (YouTube, Google video, MySpace, etc.), it is easy to find places to handle your hosting needs. Once you have uploaded your video, you can easily embed the video into your Web pages. With a little bit of extra work, you can place the embed code right below the video. Then it can easily be copied and placed into other pages.
For Head Trauma, we created experimental loops, behind-the-scenes shorts and two different trailers. Most of the media was open for anyone to take and use, but for certain outlets we created exclusive content. One successful outlet for an exclusive behind-the-scenes short was Amazon.com. We worked out a deal where Amazon would feature the behind-the-scenes short and a trailer for the movie on their main DVD page, the DVD horror page and also give it placement on the sales page for the actual DVD. In other cases we would offer embeddable media to online horror and movie news sites to accompany an interview or review of the movie.
AUDIO PLAYERS
Numerous social networking sites allow you to place audio players into your profile pages easily. Once you have the player in place you can point it toward audio files that can help promote your film. For instance, you can let fans listen to songs from your soundtrack or interviews with your cast and crew.
An option that worked extremely well for us was the creation of our own flash audio player. By using the XSPF (musicplayer.sourceforge.net ) open-source music player, once people embedded the player, which we called HT Radio, into their pages, we could easily update it via XML files. The new audio would then automatically play in all the places that had embedded our player. In effect we created our own broadcast channel, and HT radio players started popping up all over social networking profiles in addition to people’s blogs and sites. As the audience quickly grew listeners started to ask questions and I would answer them “on air.” I even worked out a way to update HT radio from my mobile phone. I could call in from the road and the audio would be automatically uploaded.
GRAPHICS AND PHOTOS
A very simple form of digital swag is banner links. Banner links are excellent tools for social networks because they can be used as a giveaway to fans who can place them in their pages, profiles or within a comment section of a page. For example, we created banners and wallpaper for the film that have been extremely popular within social-networking sites and on portable devices like the PSP. By downloading these simple digital assets, fans felt they were discovering something they could share with their friends and thus increased the film’s exposure.
EMPOWERING YOUR AUDIENCE
The Internet enables filmmakers to build audiences for their work in a cost-effective manner. Over time an audience can grow with a filmmaker and, if cultivated with care, enable the funding and distribution of future work.
One emerging trend is filmmakers using their audience to fund and assist with the distribution of their projects. Robert Greenwald’s work is an example of this new model. For his latest film, Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers, Greenwald and his team at Brave New Films reached out to their audience with a special fund-raising request. Via a mass mailing to their fan base, they asked for donations. Within 10 days they had raised over $200,000. During the production of the movie they turned to the audience to gain their insights on certain topics, and some audience members even assisted with the creation of bonus features that can be found on the DVD. When Iraq for Sale was released earlier this fall, it was available for screenings at house parties organized by audience members. The success of the house parties has lead to the formation of a new division of Greenwald’s company called Brave New Theaters. Brave New Theaters allows filmmakers to tap into a screening system they have created. Filmmakers looking for screening venues and audiences looking for films are paired together in what is becoming a grassroots screening network.
In one final example of what some are calling Cinema 2.0, or open-source cinema, a group called Swarm of Angels (aswarmofangels.com) is harnessing the Internet to raise its own production funds for two feature films. When an individual joins the Swarm for a small fee they become an Angel, a contributor to the project; they have access to everything from script to screen and can vote on key decisions in the film’s production. When a project is finished everyone in the Swarm will assist in the seeding of the film across the Internet for download by all of the members, who are then able to remix the film or use elements of it in their own projects.
In the end, there is no one right way to distribute or market your film. But if making Head Trauma has taught me one thing, it’s not to lose the sense of empowerment experienced during the production of a film when you get to the distribution phase. With the new tools of the Web you do not have to be powerless once you finish.
