» Posts Tagged ‘marketing’
Introducing BitTorrent Bundle: Pioneering Decentralized Digital Distribution & Marketing
BitTorrent, a tech company whose name is commonly and incorrectly associated with pirating, has been running a legitimate business since 2004 with over 2 million pieces of licensed content in the BitTorrent download manager, which serves more than 170 million people monthly. The company is now beginning to launch a new endeavor to empower those in the content creation business. BitTorrent Bundle provide a way for creators large and small to have all the advantages of the peer-to-peer protocol while also maintaining control over their content by creating ‘gates’ that must be unlocked by the consumer. We had a chance to chat with Matt Mason, VP of Marketing at BitTorrent, who is very impassioned about what this new publishing platform could potentially mean for creators. Read on for the interview and get the full scoop: More »
How to Save Theatrical Distribution After the Home Video Boom and Bust
We all know that watching a movie on a 15-inch laptop from your couch just doesn’t compare to a real movie theater experience, and yet every year the numbers of people going out to the movies shrinks – meaning, for filmmakers, so do the number of different films that get to play on the big screen. Is it because of television? The Internet? Kids these days and their short attention spans?! In the entertaining series of videos below captured by 4th Row Films at the Sundance Art House Convergence, Ira Deutchman, suggests how me might save theatrical distribution. More »
Last week I posted AMATEUR, the prequel to my forthcoming feature MANCHILD, and the response to the short has been downright amazing. Thank you to everyone who has watched it! If you haven’t seen it yet, it is embedded below, and if you have seen it, here’s how two seconds of your time can make a big difference for the project: More »
You’ve written the perfect breakout indie hit. First, the budget is small, which is great because you can easily raise it on Kickstarter from all those tastemakers who just can’t wait for a signed DVD. On top of that, you’ve got a story that is so universal, anybody and everybody would enjoy it. “FWACK!” That’s the sound of the cold brick of reality hitting you in the face. In the series of Film Courage interviews below, independent marketing strategist Sheri Candler breaks down how we screw up our films by unwittingly sabotaging our marketing, and just how little we have in common with Veronica Mars. More »
UPDATE: In response to some of the (heated! opinionated!) questions and comments on this post, we did a long video Q&A as well.
I wrote recently about finishing the screenplay for my feature MANCHILD (for now… ), but it’s been a while since I talked about what else is going on in the trenches of first-time feature filmmaking. The title of the post gives it away: we’re making a short. Why are we doing this? And why do I think this strategy makes a lot of sense for other first-time feature directors? Because there are millions of people with a screenplay, all trying to figure out how to get from here (words on a page) to there (actual finished movie). If your goal seems impossibly far off, that’s when it’s time to bite off a smaller chunk and show what you’re capable of. More »
Photographer Scott Bourne Shows You How to Build Your Audience with Twitter
Being an independent filmmaker usually requires one to wear a lot of different hats — not only during the production process — but also in the arenas of promotion and marketing. It’s hard work to build your audience from the ground up, and NoFilmSchool has covered this topic in multiple posts that will hopefully make this process somewhat easier and more understandable. But while we have explored audience building on YouTube quite a bit, we haven’t really gone into using social networking sites as much. However, in his recent webinar Richard Harrington talked to Scott Bourne — one of the most followed photographers on Twitter and Editor of PhotoFocus.com — about the best methods to use for audience building on Twitter. More »
Speaking of Sony, the company has recently made another PR move — this time via Sony Australia, and with a definitively greater amount of calculation than the Sony Japan release from earlier today. While we ’round these parts are probably focusing a lot more on Sony’s pro line of digital cinema acquisition tools, there are lots of things going on in the world of weekend-enthusiast consumerism, another niche to which the company wishes to market — in particular, their NEX series of non-DSLR interchangeable lens stills cameras. I think the idea is to make these cameras seems preferable to DSLRs in casual stills-taking contexts, or maybe not — either way, any and all readers of this site who found it by searching for something along the lines of “DSLR cinematography,” click through and see what Sony thinks about you. More »
Don't Hire Someone to Run Your Kickstarter Campaign: Or, Why Attitude is More Important than Aptitude
First of all, I want to start this post off by saying I have a tremendous amount of respect for Lucas McNelly. Not just because of the articles he’s written for numerous websites, but also his A Year Without Rent project in which he traveled to work on indie films for free for a year, as well his free VODO film Blanc de Blanc (I haven’t had a chance to see his other work yet). As someone who did my own year without rent, I feel an affinity for Lucas despite never having met him, and I think he’s great for the indie film community. Lucas, this is not a personal attack on you by any means, and I’d love to get a beer with you at some point should we ever find ourselves in the same city or at the same festival. HOWEVER, I want to take this opportunity to talk about Lucas’s criticisms of some Kickstarter campaigns — mine included — and how I believe attitude and criticism affects creativity and productivity. I’ll also talk about the rise of the professional crowdfunding consultant. This is going to be a long, rambling post with a high risk of TL;DR — don’t say I didn’t warn you. More »
Three Steps For 21st-Century Independent Filmmaking Success
This is a guest post by Jason Brubaker, author of the new book Filmmaking Stuff: How to make, market and sell your movie without the middle-man.
Independent filmmaking has changed a lot in the decade since I started my career. It sounds silly now, but back when I started, there was this collective belief that if you made your movie, you would sell it at Sundance and live happily ever after. Perpetuated by sensational headlines touting the successes of Ed Burns, Kevin Smith and Robert Rodriguez, Sundance Fever became a full-blown epidemic resulting in maxed out credit cards, angry investors and film festival rejection.
Even if you were one of the few filmmakers fortunate enough to make a movie and have an amazing festival run, it soon became apparent that you were nobody unless you could reach the marketplace. And because there were thousands of poorly produced titles flooding the festival circuit, distribution became discriminatory, abusive and monopolistic. As a consequence, many filmmakers settled for crappy distribution deals. At least getting something felt better than nothing.
Or so we thought… More »
On Feb 1, 2008 Mark Cuban posted to his blog about a far-fetched, impossible-to-execute marketing concept that he desperately wanted film studios to adopt, in order to leverage the value of free giveaways to combat the crumbling theatrical marketplace. Digital was exploding, distribution was becoming a fractured nightmare, and studios were scrambling to adapt.
The idea was staggeringly simple: give away the film’s soundtrack for free. More »
'Iron Sky' Releases Lesson in Crowdfunding and Crowdsourcing
Finnish director Timo Vuorensola’s forthcoming feature Iron Sky, which I’ve mentioned previously, has released a very nicely animated overview of their innovative production process to date. There’s a lot to be learned here when it comes to the future of film, both good and potentially bad; I’m a huge proponent of crowdfunding, but find myself hesitant to embrace the idea that crowdsourcing the creative aspects of a screenplay is a good idea. Call me old-fashioned, but I still believe in the “singular vision” of auteurs. Here’s their video highlighting the different creative and financial strategies they’ve employed to date: More »
I’ve been using a number of Gmail Labs features in an effort to prioritize and filter incoming email, and I’ve settled on a system that has allowed me greater freedom from constant email-checking. But my techniques — which rely primarily on the add-on Multiple Inboxes — are by no means infallible. Thus I found myself intrigued by Google’s announcement today of Priority Inbox, which automagically sorts your email by importance. This is a big deal for any Gmail user, but I wonder if it might create a third category of email just above “spam.” I also wonder if the emails of filmmakers are going to frequently find themselves in this third, deprioritized category. More »
NoFilmSchool has been powered by WordPress since launching in 2005, and in that time the CMS (Content Management System) has grown by leaps and bounds — while remaining 100% free. Today parent-company Automattic officially released WordPress 3.0, which adds some key features for moving the publishing platform toward a more full-fledged CMS (viable for, say, filmmakers). Video (and a hosting recommendation!) after the jump: More »
This video by Robert Pratten is a great introduction to what transmedia is and how it can be employed by the independent filmmaker (he also has a refreshing perspective on the “technological fetish” of our obsession with new camera technologies!). It’s a 45-minute presentation full of brain candy and should be required viewing for anyone thinking about telling stories across mediums. As Pratten stresses, “transmedia plays to indie’s strengths,” because delivering a consistency of story across platforms is possible for independent creators — not large studios made up of divided teams. In my opinion, his point about authenticity is even more important, because: I could care less about playing a social game if the original auteur had nothing to do with it, and I could care even less about buying a DVD if I suspect only 65 cents of a $15 purchase is going to find its way back to the original filmmaker. Creating our own cross-platform projects and retaining ownership not only gives us more creative control on all of the different incarnations of our story, it can also motivate fans to make purchases because they know we’re the ones benefiting from their support.
In addition to the above presentation, however, Pratten has written some very helpful articles at the Workbook Project on the process of developing transmedia projects: More »
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