indie film uncovered

one, you don’t have to wait around for other people to like your stuff.  if you made a good film, and you didn’t have Brad Pitt, you’re either going to need to get into Sundance or something similar or discover that your Spielberg’s illegitimate child.

PUSH IT OUT THERE.  believe in your work.  keep doing it, you’ll get better, you’ll get faster and eventually that enthusiasm will give way to blind luck which will help you on your way.

Make a production company.  Get a business card.  DO IT!

BUY OUR FILM!

You can buy a DVD or do a digital download. DO IT!

Right, so you have a film, and you want people to see it.  a few crucial steps:

1. get a facebook page and pester all your friends to join it and post it so that others may see it

2. get your trailer and some clips on youtube and vimeo

3. get a blog (like this one!) and blog your heart you

4. post comments on other blogs, forums etc about your film

5. remember, keep posting links to your website, the more links, the better you score on Google, the more people can find you, that’s important

After you have all that done, you can start to think about online distribution.  You need to have a solid background in terms of internet presence before you can give your film a decent push.

So, you’ve a few options:

ITUNES

chances are, its going to be impossible to get on iTunes.  now, there is a lot of stuff on the internet about this being some kind of Apple conspiracy because they only want to deal with studios, but really its down to content quality.  fact is, it costs a MOUNTAIN of money to make a really high end, well put together feature film, and if you’re seeking to self-distribute, chances are you didn’t have a mountain of money to begin with, and though your film might be really good, REALLY GOOD, it won’t be as good, technically, as what Hollywood pumps out.  Now, story is a different story (pardon the pun) and you might have an amazing story, but contrary to popular belief, that, on its own, is not enough.  Remember that iTunes works and makes money through selling.  As much as you might hate films like PS I Love You and Bring It On 7: Rockin’ Geriatrics, they sell, and sell big.  Apple make money from that, justifying their own costs.  Your film might be good, but without a large volume of purchasers, it doesn’t pay Apple to even watch it.  Don’t be offended by that, its just hard facts.

Now, all is not lost, if your film is in the $50k and above budget range, you have a very good shot at iTunes.  Go on to indieflix.com and check those guys out, they distribute to all manner of digital media, including iTunes, and offer an industry standard deal in terms of acting as a sales agent.  They’ll want to review your film, but the process is good, its free, and they are an extremely well organised company.

VoD

Various services here, most of which work through ripping your DVD for you.  NewFilmmakers, which run various festivals, do a good service which has a $45 set-up fee though to be honest, while we put our film up there, the quality isn’t amazing and the company (the other films up there) are, in large part, fairly amateur, ultra-low budget efforts.  Not to impune those filmmakers, they did their best I’m sure, but a lot of them aren’t amazing.  An important consideration.  The great thing about Newfilmmakers is that they charge no commission on any sales after the set-up fee, so if your film does well, you will get paid, directly into your paypal account also, which is nice.

FREE

You can apply for a producer account with YouTube and bang your film up there for free.  Advantages are that probably quite a few people will see it, as its free, and people love free shit, also, YouTube is like a culture of germs, it spreads and multiplies because of the community, that is very good if your film is good.  It’ll leak everywhere.

The disadvantage to YouTube is that you’re giving your film away for free, obviously, this means you’ll make no money.  Money is useful for paying bills and making movies.  Something to think about.  Personally, I believe YouTube is for shorts and shorts alone.  But that’s just me!

so, you make your film, you bring it to festivals (we submitted to about 30 top rated festivals, got into roughly 10, won 4 awards), you get a sales agent, they sell it to tv, you make some of the money back.  chances are, you still haven’t exactly set the world on fire (i know i didn’t).  more than anything, you want people to see your film, so you set about trying to get a bigger audience.

there are two ways to do this, dvd and the internet.  i know prince says the internet is over, but i really do disagree.  the internet, as you may know, is huge and is used by billions of people every day.  a lot of them use it to illegally download films and tv shows and read facebook.  see the connection? movies and facebook.  it just so happens they go good together.  more on the internet later.  for now i want to concentrate on self-distributing a dvd.

CREATE SPACE

Createspace.com is a company, owned by Amazon.com, that allows independent artists to distribute their work via the internet.  they take your movie (or your music for that matter) and have it ready so when someone orders it, a little machine makes a copy and mails it to them.  that way there is no bulk ordering of dvd’s, no storage costs, no logistics management and all that.  they allow you to sell from a customizable page (with low commission) and/or from Amazon.com with absolutely outlandish commission.  i mean outlandish in the strongest possible terms, however, amazon is probably the biggest dvd retailer in the world, so you know, you can’t really complain too much.

we’ve done the create space road recently and it works quite well, they are fast and have a good system.  the end product is good quality and is turned out quickly.  its also pretty easy to spread the word, and the best bit is, ITS FREE.  yup, it doesn’t cost you anything to get your title set up on create space, as long as you can make your own artwork (we did and it worked out fine).  i think this is a huge advantage to this system.  at the end of making your film, you probably have $0 left in the kitty, so free opportunities are a really good thing.

more info on create space on their website, and if you want to see how the end product looks, just order our film by clicking here.

We linked directly to the create space page from our film’s website at www.satellitesandmeteorites.com