Filmmaking is a team effort… but it also takes individual leadership, hustle, passion, vision, tenacity, grit and perhaps pathological optimism. Most filmmakers think they have. Not all do. But Simon Cox does. Simon spent nearly two decades making his passion project, a movie postcard back to the kid inside him, the one who fell in […]
The film market can sometimes be seen as a battle for eyeballs between the studios and lowly independent filmmakers – a kind of David versus Goliath showdown. There is no way your no-budget indie will ever make as much money as a studio film. No way you’ll ever be as well-known, and no way you’ll […]
What EXACTLY will you need to deliver to your sales agents in order that they can sell your film? We just ran the hugely successful Film Distribution Summit and as part of the weekend, we discussed sales agents delivery lists. I said I would share a list and here it is – this is by […]
By Tom Kerevan In 2014 Tom Kerevan wrote and produced his first feature Tear Me Apart with director Alex Lightman and DOP Ern Herrmann. Made for £75,000 with no known actors, they eschewed the traditional sales route and made a tactical play for Amazon. Here’s how they did it and what they learnt… This is […]
Following a suggestion by local filmmaker Brendan O’Neill of Stickleback Productions (@Stickleback_Pro) Tracey Flynn is now organising a screening in at The Giant Screen in Birmingham. Tracey, one of the screenwriters from 50 Kisses, has taken it upon herself to get 50 Kisses played on the BIGGEST screen in the midlands… She is also on […]
Copying and sending out DCP drives and the importance of naming conventions is something that can bite you on the ass as you enter distribution and your films festival run. I am prepping DCP’s of 50 Kisses for cinemas now, and I am sending it out on 64gb USB 3.0 pen drives. The DCP itself […]
Guest blog by producer Bethany Clift We have read a lot about how hard is to get independent films out there, especially films on the kind of budget we made Heretic for (£30k), so I wanted to counter this with our good news story. Yup, after three years of toil, tears and tragedy our no-budget […]
Guest blog by Richard Holmes The Kid/Food/Baby/Horse Stays In The Picture “There’s always ONE, isn’t there” Or, in filmmaking it’s, “There’s always THE THING.” In Jadoo it was, of course, The Food. And lots of it. We’re warming up for Jadoo’s release right now (jadoomovie.com) and everyone who laughs and cries throughout the movie also […]
Last week, filmmaker Greg Hall laid out his plans for his own London theatrical release for his micro budget movie ‘Communion’ (blog here). He is halfway through and I promised I would share his experiences, so here they are… On the first night we sold out! We are halfway through our London cinematic run. So […]
Guest blog by Greg Hall / Broke But Making Films In less than a week my new feature film COMMUNION opens in London at the Portobello Pop Up Cinema and begins it’s journey of self-distribution. I have made three feature films previously (my first being the micro budget film ‘The Plague’, which got some national […]
When nearing completion of our films, we are so fatigued, so pissed off at how things turned out, so financially vulnerable, so emotionally strung out that we often make poor choices about distribution. We have learned SO much, I mean SO SO SO much on our filmmaking journey that all we can often think about […]
‘Create your own power…’ That’s one key piece of advice from filmmaker and now self distributor Marcus Markou. ‘Disrupt’ is another central idea his. If the system doesn’t work for you, create a new system, disrupt the old. This is how future thinking Marcus managed to get his low budget family comedy drama ‘Papadopoulos and […]
Small pond with BIG FISH… Theatrical distribution in the UK for indie pics is a very limited game. There are only a few players who would even consider your movie, and more often, new filmmakers opt to do it themselves. Whether you chose to use a distributor, or do it yourself, you will inevitably become […]
This morning I got this email from Rob Millis from Dynamo Player with the news they are shutting down. I wrote about the shock waves Dynamo sent through the distribution world a few years ago, after which Distrify and Vimeo also joined the game by offering pay-to-view services. It’s a sad day as Dynamo were […]
HMV and Blockbuster both had it coming, we should not be sad about their passing, we should study their failings and learn from their arrogant and blundering mistakes. I have be reading lots of messages with people reminiscing about the past, and how the internet had killed both companies – some blamed changes in customer […]
I am sure you have seen the headline “Worst performance at US box office in 10 years” (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-19541737) and maybe you saw this as further proof of disaster for our industry. I asked Stephen Follows to do an analysis of this article as some of it felt a little headline grabbing to me. Over to […]
I asked my pal Amir who has worked as a film maker AND in UK distribution, to offer some notes for film makers entering the market. I didn’t realise he would pen an epic and essential guide to film distribution… Blimey! Over to Amir… Film distribution is pretty much the final frontier that the independent […]
Are you a digital native or a digital immigrant? Some people take to the internet, to social media, online connectivity and community, like it’s their first language, like they are literally hard wired into it. They are digital natives. To them, using this technology is effortless, almost like a reflex. But for the rest of […]
Iron Sky is the most famous crowdsourced / crowdfunded / crowdinvested feature film to date. One key member of the Iron Sky team recently shared his top seven tips to Crowdsourcing with distro guru Jon Reiss, which Jon just shared with us in his London TOTBO workshop. And here they are… 1. Communicate with the […]
When I heard my friend Danny Lacey was figuring out how to make a DCP at home, I asked him to share what he learned! WOW! The DCP is the last technical hurdle to overcome when you want to get your movie into a professional commercial cinema – over to Danny…! Up until now the […]
I asked Jon Reiss, who is running the Distribution Masterclass this weekend to give me some pointers about distribution in 2012 as many filmmakers had been asking me – the most salient point I think is his first, that Self Distribution is NOT about putting DVD’s in bags, it’s about collaboration with industry, be it […]
Yesterday I started a thread on Facebook about some filmmakers and their often lack of enthusiasm for getting involved in distribution. Boy did I light the blue touch paper! Here was my main point… Why are some film makers resistant to getting involved in distribution? Why do so many avoid even thinking about this until […]
The strategies for how you can monetize and exploit your film should be developed at the same time as writing a screenplay, not after. Listen, I get it, filmmaking is a long haul and most filmmakers think that distribution is the final hurdle to success… let’s make a great movie first! If you look at […]
Film marketeer Sheri Candler presented a great session on Sunday at the Practical Producer Masterclass, on new-media and the way we can now connect with audiences. She showed this video as an example of how a filmmakers work caught the imagination of the web, but also how much prep went into it too. For filmmakers, […]
Last night I attended a top secret test screening of a feature film at BAFTA. It was an incomplete cut of the movie, exported from Avid (DNxHD36 codec) at 1080P and transcoded to an H.264 Quicktime file at 8000kbps, with audio in AAC at 320kbps (entire file size just under 6gb). This file then played […]
