39 posts tagged “distribution”
Check out the story of the guy who made a YouTube video for $300 and landed a $30M deal with Sam Raimi's Ghost House Pictures. He put up the video on a Thursday and by Monday, he had a bidding war going for him. Pretty cool.
Here's the video:
1) He bought premade 3D models of a robot and a spaceship. You can buy this stuff for pretty cheap over various 3D model sources on the Internet. Actually, you can get a lot of this stuff for free--it just depends on whether you find the model that works for you. He then duplicated and animated them in a 3D program like Cinema 4D, Maya, 3ds Max, Lightwave, etc. If he's a desktop creator, he may have used a program like Adobe After Effects to combine the live video with the CGI. It may have cost him $300 to make the movie, but there's a good chance that he needed about $10k worth of gear to bring it all together. That's assuming it's all done on the cheap with a desktop or three (the render time has to be horrendous for something like this--he would need to work in parallel).
2) He bought a collection of premade explosions. This stuff can be cheap or expensive, depending on where you get it. The explosion that impressed me the most is the domed building. Either he bought one premade (you can sometimes buy a 3D model that comes premade with an animation of it exploding), or he had to make the model of the building (which you can do with the 3D programs listed above), then create an animation of it exploding. If those buildings are not actual models of the buildings in Montevideo, then I'm less impressed. But I'll bet it is.
That animation looks professional. What strikes me as odd is that the green screen of the kid with the robots behind him is not perfect, which tells me that maybe he doesn't do that kind of VFX for a living. But the 3D stuff was great. Getting that kind of smooth motion and explosion action takes some practice...unless he bought it premade. But $300 is not a lot, even in Uruguay, so I'm guessing he had to make at least some of that himself. Very nice work.
3) If he was using After Effects or some such program, he can duplicate actors into a crowd, or maybe he managed to get a lot of people to act for free with no food (feeding a crowd that size would eat his whole budget up in no time). He can also create fog.
The water splashing, and the dust puffing when the robots stamp their feet are nice touches, and probably not easy to do. The camera work is great too because it not only increases the tension, it doesn't let you look too closely at the CGI, which is very important for suspension of disbelief. He got a lot of things right beyond the technical stuff.
Overall, it's great, and he obviously put in a lot of work. Kudos to him. What's strange to me, though, is that so many studios would come to him and offer up so much money over a cool video that had...um...no story. Maybe 2012 did so well (biggest box office hit in the history of both India and China) that they figured stories are overrated (and so darn hard to get right!) so long as you have engaging destruction. Well, they may be right, up to a point.
Susan Ee
www.feraldream.com
I just got word that TOOTH FAIRY will be included in a 3 hour Halloween TV special produced by Dark Carnival Film Festival and HorrorHound Magazine! It will air on October 24 at 8pm (EST) on Time-Warner channel 991, which is a local independent network that plays in Ohio and southern Indiana.
Considering that Tooth Fairy is playing in both family film showings and horror showings, it's perfect for a TV Halloween special!
Yay!
Paranormal Activities (a film made for $10,000 that ran the festival circuit and eventually got picked up by Paramount) reached a million requests for it to open in people's towns. Paramount used Eventful to set up a website in which fans can ask for the movie to open in their towns. Paramount promised that if they get a million requests, they will open it nation-wide.
Eventful will set up a request website for your film too, if you're willing to shell out $30,000 -$250,000. Or, you can donate $100 to Arin Crumley's OpenIndie project so you can do a showing in a town if you get 100 requests.
A lot of people are asking "When is Tooth Fairy coming to my town?" Since Tooth Fairy is a short film, I plan to put it up on YouTube as soon as the festival rounds finish. But it got me thinking about indie features and their distribution. If a film gets picked up by a traditional distributor, then great. It'll get distributed in the traditional way (hand-waving, without going into details :-). But if the filmmaker ends up self-distributing or the distributor puts out the film in a limited release, one option I've heard is to do a simultaneous limited theatrical and online distribution via a digital distribution company like Gigantic Releasing.
According to Indiewire, Gigantic Releasing streams your film in cities you don't have theatrical distribution. For $2.99, a viewer can have streaming access to your film for 3 days. It's basically the same price as the majority of the indie movies on Amazon's video on demand.
It's unclear to me what the advantages are of going with a streaming company like Gigantic Releasing that tries to tie the timing of the availability of the movie with your theatrical release. Will a reporter or reviewer be any more likely to mention your digital "release" than a video on demand release? Not likely.
Possible advantages that I see with going with a digital distributor like Gigantic Releasing as opposed to just releasing it on Amazon's VOD is IF they do a whole lot of marketing on your behalf, AND they don't charge you much, if any, for their marketing expenses. OR they pay you enough money upfront for the distribution rights to make it worth your while. OR they get your film on Netflix (doubtful since Netflix has its own streaming program).
If they don't offer any of these advantages, I'm not sure I see the added value.
On Amazon's video on demand, the filmmaker gets 50% of rental price. For Gigantic Releasing, I couldn't find their filmmaker royalty or any other contract details on their site or via Google. This lack of public information is very old school. So much for the new new distribution model.
One could say that Gigantic Releasing's movies are curated while Amazon's VOD is not. But that only matters if the world knows about it. So in a couple of years, when the new new model may be the standard, there may be advantages. So if your film will be ready for distribution in a couple of years, it might be worth checking into at that time. But for now, my choice would be to go with Amazon.
Susan Ee
www.feraldream.com
Today at 2 (noon on the west coast), TOOTH FAIRY will premier at the Chicago International REEL Shorts Festival! Tooth Fairy will play as part of Kids Shorts at Film Row Cinema, 1104 S Wabash, 8th Fl., Chicago. It sounds like an awesome program! Wish I could be there.
It cracks me up that TOOTH FAIRY got into both children's programs and horror programs. Here is the schedule of upcoming showings so far:
Chicago International REEL Shorts Festival – Sun. Sept 13 at 2 PM, Film Row Cinema, Chicago http://www.projectchicago.com/
Tacoma Film
Festival – Sat. Oct. 3rd at noon, Grand Cinema, Tacoma, WA
http://www.grandcinema.com/page.php?id=43
Dark Carnival Horror Festival – Oct 2-4, Bloomington, IN, final schedule yet to be determined
http://www.darkcarnivalfilmfest.com/
Independents Film Festival – Nov. in Tampa, FL, final schedule yet to be determined
http://independentsfilmfest.com/
Utopia Film Festival – Oct 19-25 in Greenbelt, MD, final schedule yet to be determined
http://www.utopiafilmfestival.org/
Click! Network - Tacoma’s cable TV network, video on demand, Oct.
The Education Channel – Tampa’s cable TV network, Nov.-Dec.
http://tecc.tv/educationchannel.org/index.php
Check it out if you're in the area!
Susan Ee
www.feraldream.com
There's been a lot of talk about the Redbox Effect lately. Redbox vending machines are cropping up in supermarkets and Walmarts everywhere. You can rent a DVD for $1 from these machines. They rent Hollywood movies and half the big studios have signed on with them while the other half are bickering with Redbox over their desire to release videos onto these vending machines only after 28 days after they arrive in stores.
The prevalence of $1 movie rentals could completely change the indie scene. At that rate, there's pretty much no hope of making your money back unless you could magically induce millions upon millions of viewers to watch it. A big Hollywood film with a big Hollywood marketing budget may be able to make a profit (and that may be in question right now, which is why half the studios are in law suits with Redbox), but a little indie movie with a tiny marketing budget is going to have to come up with another strategy all together.Today, indie filmmakers are relying on downloads more and more as the DVD market gets tighter and tighter. According to a study by SNL Kagan, a service providing Internet downloads of movies can, at best, only make pennies per download at $1 per download. And that's only in the lowest quality downloads. At higher qualities, there's no profit. If it was priced at $3.99 per download, the service provider can make a profit at every level of quality (dial-up to broadband). But that's 4X the price of a Redbox rental. SNL Kagan assumed a 70 cent cut to the studios, which sounds high to me.
Yet another reason to keep production costs low and get creative with marketing. Think cheap, think millions of viewers.
Susan Ee
www.feraldream.com
DVD sales are notoriously hard to predict. According to Variety, studios are adding and subtracting points in their tea-leaf reading method to predict DVD sales of a certain film. Here's an example of the current point system (which can change tomorrow):
Plus: action DVDs with perceived strong packaging and a favorable street date
Minus: films in the over-saturated horror genre
Plus: installments within existing franchises
Minus: anything in the notoriously inconsistent areas of drama, comedy and romance
Assuming you buy their point system for predicting your DVD sales, the minus for the horror genre is a problem for the micro-budget filmmakers because it's also one of the few genres that don't require a recognizable actor to get distribution. The micro-budget filmmaker is also heavily relying on DVD sales for revenue. If you're lucky, the market will have changed by the time you get your film out there.
As a side note, I've noticed a surprisingly frequent call out for indie science fiction scripts, and hardly any for low budget horror lately. This strikes me as unusual in that it normally takes a real budget to do a sci-fi movie. If I could come up with a science fiction story that could be done well with a micro-budget, I'd be pretty excited.
Susan Ee
www.feraldream.com
Sundance has announced a new section called, "Next." Next is for lo-no feature films. According to Variety, Sundance has already received 4,964 applications and 3,689 films for the 2010 festival.
Good luck to all you potential lo-no budget Sundancers!
Susan Ee
www.feraldream.com
Just got the program for the Chicago International REEL Shorts Festival. Tooth Fairy will play as part of Kids Shorts on Sunday, Sept 13th at 2PM at Film Row Cinema, 1104 S Wabash, 8th Fl., Chicago.
The logline for the film is:
In the heart of suburbia, a little boy sets a trap for the Tooth Fairy and discovers that even innocence has a dark side.
Looks like a great festival. If you're in the area, check it out!
Susan Ee
www.feraldream.com
I just got notification that Tooth Fairy got into its fourth festival! It's great fun getting congratulations notes from festivals. The Utopia Film Festival runs Oct 19-25 in Greenbelt, Maryland.
Susan Ee
www.feraldream.com
