Category Archive

okay, so you’ve seen the poster and the trailer to our film.  now lets talk about how it all went down.  ill keep it short and sweet.

1. production

we shot the film on super 16mm film in summer 2008.  it took 18 shooting days to film 120 pages of script, with roughly 8 actors playing 14 parts (you gotta see the film to understand it) in multiple locations.  we had a full complement of crew, though many of them were not massively experienced, they did amazing work, for low pay and really did hold the entire project together.  this section of production cost roughly $150,000 including all the salaries of the cast/crew and location fees.  as writer/director i did not take a fee, neither did the producers who waived their fee to profit participation.  headline participants like the director and producer must defer their fees on a project like this if it is to have any chance.  it is also unfair, in my opinion, for a director/producer to get more than the rest of the crew considering they benefit the most if the film does well.

2. post-production

we did a deal with a post-house in dublin to do the sound and picture work but not before we applied to the irish film board for finishing finance.  well, we didn’t apply, we went in for a meeting with an assembly edit and they basically told us not to apply.  i have a beef with the film board over this, since, again in my opinion, they have given funding to a large amount of films which have had large budgets, poor stories and have done very poorly in terms of sales afterwards.  we were looking for approximately $50,000 (im keeping it in dollars for you Americans ) out of a total post budget of $100,000 and we got a polite no.  post production took approximately 18 weeks, we had to re-shoot one scene because of a camera problem (shooting on film is difficult AVOID IT), there was some adr and a lot of foley work.  we mastered to HD and SD and got 4 digibeta tapes under our arm.  its a little deflating to see $250,000 sitting as 4 tapes in a small box in the back of your car.

3. cannes cannes cannes

in europe, when you make a film, you can either send dvd’s out on spec until your blue in the face or you can get on your bike and go to a market.  we chose cannes, because lets face it, its the biggest and its in the south of france which is pretty nice even if you have nothing to do.  we booked 2 screenings for the film at the market (that cost about $2k) and bought ourselves passes (another $1k for me and a producer).  the market is huge and attended by about 20,000 delegates, most of whom (as far as I could see) were also trying to sell their films.  it was great fun, but ultimately, we were pretty disappointed by the whole experience, meeting after meeting after meeting and you hand over the dvd never expecting to hear anything again.  the big surprise came on the last day when we got a phonecall (while in another screening) from a sales agent who wanted to meet us having seen a lot of the film.  we ran (literally) all the way down the croisette to their office and listened as they blasted us with rhetoric about wanting to take on the film for TV sales (they said it wouldn’t run well theatrically).  it was the only offer on the table at that point, which was a pity because one of the other distribs later offered us a $25,000 advance for TV sales, when we signed with who we signed with for $0 and 75% of the take.

4. distribution

i won’t name names directly, its not fair to do that, but suffice to say, we did a deal on the basis of the above.  its a pretty standard deal, sales agent takes 25% of the revenue, gives you the rest.  what you have to know is that before you get ‘the rest’ the sales agent has to spend money marketing the film.  in our case, since we were with a package of other films going to MIPCOM (that’s a big tv market, also in Cannes) our marketing costs were close to $15,000.  so that has to come back in in revenue before they’ll pay you anything at all.  let me tell you something, unless you have leonardo di caprio in your film to sell it quickly to big tv networks, it will take A LONG TIME to get even the marketing costs back.  our sales agent, in fairness to them, managed to do a good level of sales with the film and its worked out okay for us but i can see how it majorly wouldn’t given a small bit of bad luck.

more to follow, im going to see shrek now.

poster is also important. bright colours that catch the eye are a good idea, so when you’re at festivals plopping it up all over the place among the hundreds of other posters, it will stand out.