2 days left to help make a movie

There are two days left for you to help our indie film team finish and release a feature film. Read this for how you can help! I would love it if you help by following that link and clicking 'follow' on the Seed&Spark campaign page. If we get 500 likes, we unlock a lot of great services to help us distribute the new film.

The dream we were chasing, for too long, with The Right Juice was to get picked up by a distributor. 

They would love the movie so much that they would invest a bunch of money to do some marketing and release it in cinemas.  The Right Juice would be seen all around the world.  This was the dream. Well, we did get into cinemas in Portugal and in airplanes, but our dream didn't happen as big as we hoped.

After submitting to a lot of festivals, and getting into a bunch, we actually hired a sales agent to pitch the film to potential buyers. (Note to self and others: NEVER pay for a sales agent again!) We got about five potential buyers, but quite honestly we turned them down for various reasons. One buyer was convicted in the US for tax evasion in the film industry. Pass.  

Finally, we decide to go 'do it yourself', which again is easier said than done. What does DIY mean in indie film distribution? Well, there is getting into cinemas, getting into online platforms, and marketing. We've now figured out how to do the first two!

Although we didn't do it in the end, there are some really cool services out there which allow indie filmmakers to crowd sell tickets and get into cinemas. In the US, there is Gathr and Tugg, and in the UK there is Ourscreen and various others. The best, after all the research was Ourscreen, as they were really transparent and helpful. Will definitely keep them in mind on the next project we decide to release theatrically. However, even if we line up some cinemas, then we still need the marketing.

Getting into Video-on-Demand (VOD) platforms like iTunes, is actually much harder than it sounds, and much harder than I think it needs to be. If you want to get into iTunes, you need to work through an Aggregator, who you pay $1500 or more for them to play the middleman. Granted, they do some QA on the deliverables, but it seems to be an artificially high barrier for indie filmmakers. Our first test with an Aggregator was a total write-off.  Juice Worldwide was a total disaster for us. They didn't have an online portal, their contracts and documentation were totally confusing, and after more than a year we walked away from our money. Next I tried Quiver Digital, which worked a charm. They have an upload portal and things were clear and straight forward. They also, for a fee, pitch to other online platforms.  In the back of my mind, if we can make another 10 films with the Longship method, or get rights to more films, then we can apply to be an Aggregator ourselves. That's for later.

There are also a lot of other platforms which we can access directly. Having self published books myself and for others on Amazon, it didn't take long to crack that nut. Vimeo on Demand has a great service and is known and trusted in the filmmaker community. Done. There are bunch more like VHX and Reelhouse which also work pretty well. I'm still struggling with the user experience of Pentaflix in Germany, and we finally got accepted to IndieFlix.  The future, I think, will be in these more boutique platforms that creators can access directly.

In hindsight, iTunes is simply for vanity. The user experience of watching movies on iTunes is horrible, and unless you are a top production you won't be suggested by Apple to their subscribers on the landing page. Plus, they take 30%. Amazon takes 50% on actual sales and you get pennies if you publish via Prime. Vimeo is great, with a wonderful experience and they take only 10% (after a $199 set-up fee).

What about Netflix? My opinion about Netflix is that it is not a friend of Bootstrap indie films like ours. I understand that we could expect to get $10-15k for our film, and they would push it to their almost 200 territories. It would destroy the need for people to buy the film on other platforms. Maybe in the future, as our films get better and better, we could push to Netflix after an initial launch.  Side note is they did announce that they would buy any film that makes it into Sundance for $100k or something. If we can make our films for less than half of that (or less), then this would be a great deal for us!

As I continue to test these platforms, things we look for are the ability to get the contact details of viewers and the analytics of the viewers experience. So far, none of the platforms provide this really well. It would be much more valuable if we could get the metrics on who is watching it, from where, their details like gender and age, etc. We could get to know who our audience is. This will come over time with the platforms because it has to.

As a CIO/CDO, what I enjoy about this process is the figuring out which of these digital platforms produces the best results. How to use these technologies to get the best user experience and best return for the film team. It's like a huge puzzle with ever moving pieces.

Next area of adventure in the VOD space is boutique international platforms. I'm starting to hunt down platforms in Asia and Africa, for example, and am preparing to test machine translations of subtitles. If we can get good enough subtitles in exotic languages, we might be able to get some viewers in those special markets. 

If you are a bootstrap indie filmmaker - and film distributor - you've got to get creative with reaching an audience.

Everything I have written above has no value whatsoever. Forget about all of it. Well, at least until you are able to achieve some sort of marketing, outreach or audience creation.

This is where the story is starting to get real. What I'm working on is applying ExO (Exponential Organisations, for which I am a certified expert) approaches and Growth Hacking techniques (which I attended a master class by the Growth Tribe - highly recommended!). Check in tomorrow!

You can start at the beginning of the story here.