Benh Zeitlin’s fantastic allegory “Beasts of the Southern Wild” started as a play, was grounded in a short film, cast with non-actors, filmed on the bayou, and was produced by a bunch of friends from college and before. It premiered at Sundance, won the Grand Jury Prize and got picked …]]>

Benh Zeitlin’s fantastic allegory “Beasts of the Southern Wild” started as a play, was grounded in a short film, cast with non-actors, filmed on the bayou, and was produced by a bunch of friends from college and before. It premiered at Sundance, won the Grand Jury Prize and got picked up by Fox Searchlight, then premiered at Cannes and won the coveted Camera d`Or for a director’s first feature.

On January 10, 2013, the film was nominated for four Oscars, in the categories of Best Picture, Best Director (Benh Zeitlin), Lead Actress (Quvenzhané Wallis), and Adapted Screenplay (Lucy Alibar & Benh Zeitlin). Hear from the team behind this year’s hottest independent break out about their inspiration, their collaboration, and creative drive.

I have had the good fortune to be involved in IFP’s Independent Filmmaker Labs for the past several years now and I have seen innumerable benefits to the films and filmmakers who participate.  The Labs provide an opportunity for first-time filmmakers to not only …]]>

Jon Reiss at the 2012 IFP Narrative Lab

I have had the good fortune to be involved in IFP’s Independent Filmmaker Labs for the past several years now and I have seen innumerable benefits to the films and filmmakers who participate.  The Labs provide an opportunity for first-time filmmakers to not only receive feedback on their films from their peers and experienced filmmakers but it is the first lab to prepare filmmakers for the essential work of distribution and marketing.

This year we launched the IFP PMD LAB (Producer of Marketing and Distribution) the first of its kind.  This year, the PMD Lab worked in conjunction with the Filmmaker Labs, with all the participating PMDs attached to a film in the Filmmaker Labs.

Since the end of the year if full of 10 best lists – I thought I would compile the 10 best results of the inaugural year of the PMD Lab.

1.  Defining What A PMD Is. I think this is of critical importance as this nascent crew position develops.   A PMD is not just a social media manager.  To be a PMD a person must be involved in all aspects of a film’s distribution and marketing, including audience identification and engagement, creating a distribution and marketing plan, budgeting that plan, creating marketing elements, creating and managing other assets to help promote the film, etc. All of this in concert with the filmmakers.    See this post for more.  I think the PMD trainees were amazed and excited about the scope of this position.

2.  Learning how to identify audience.  After understanding the goals of the team, the first assignment for the trainees was to identify the audience for their film.  Many of the films had already started this process in the spring Filmmaker Labs sessions.  But rarely do first-time filmmakers fully understand their audiences in the first go round.  It also takes time for the notion of niche vs. core audience to sink in – and how to view how audiences can expand from a core.

3.  Learning how to engage that audience.    This is a career-long process and can be daunting at first.   It is important again that it is not just about social media – we stress that it is crucial to know how each particular audience learns about films and then to target that source - influencers, social media, organizations, traditional media – whatever works.

4.  Develop marketing tools for the film (after understanding who the audience is).   We have the PMD trainees (and in fact all Lab films) create initial marketing materials most of which are essentials for a press kit: logline, one line synopsis, short synopsis, key art, website and, if possible and appropriate, trailer and social media sites.

5.  Workshop those marketing tools.   One my favorite parts of the Filmmaker Labs and PMD Labs are the Marketing Labs held right before IFPs Independent Film Week.  Each team presents the marketing plan for the film and it is workshopped with a panel of professionals.  Some heated discussions result.  The process either helps crystallize the beginnings of a plan for the team – or makes them realize they have a ways to go.  Either way I find that they are so much further along than most filmmakers by starting this process in post.

6.  Writing a distribution and marketing plan for their films.  The last assignment for the PMDs was to write a distribution and marketing plan for their films.  I am a broken record on this: every film is different and needs a unique plan.  It is essential that PMDs learn not only how to write these plans – but to understand all of the aspects contained within.  It is hard to teach this in a crash course (which we had in September and December).  But what I found most instructive was:

7.  Evaluating different distribution options.   In the December Distribution Labs, we had the opportunity to see each of the 20 filmmaking teams present their distribution plan, and to have that discussed by incredible experts in emerging distribution models. It became very apparent what types of distribution options are available to filmmakers and how those can be crafted for each individual film.

8. Learning how to budget that plan.   In order to execute a plan you have to figure out how much money you need to execute the plan.   Going through an extensive distribution and marketing budget can be daunting – but it is also important to know what you need to pay for in order to achieve that film’s goals.

9.  Creating a community of PMDs.  The trainees told me that one of the best outcomes of the PMD Lab was the community that they created amongst themselves.  While we had monthly phone sessions and 2 separate Lab meetings, the trainees would contact each other on a regular basis, which has continued even after the Lab’s completion.  They are even supporting other films from the Labs that did not have PMD trainees.   Several of the trainees have been so excited by the concept that they will be participating in the PMD website that we intend to put on the IFP site next year and to determine a way that PMDs around the world can find community (stay tuned!).

10.  Learning how to develop a career as a PMD.  This was a strong interest for the trainees – naturally.  What I stressed is that the PMD is just like any other film position.  You have to start small to build your way up – finding any way to gain experience.  Little by little filmmakers are realizing that they need to budget for this crew position.   One of the goals of the above mentioned site is to provide a centralized place that filmmakers can find PMDs for their projects.

If you think you can be a PMD please feel free to contact me so that I can keep you abreast of these developments.

Jon Reiss is a filmmaker, author and strategist who wrote the book Think Outside the Box Office and is the Director of the IPF PMD Lab. Follow  Like

From the IFP’s recent Industry Connect Event with DCTV and the NYTVF

Around March last year a friend of mine showed me an article about why the video game Angry Birds is so successful. The author Charles L. Mauro CHFP (Certified Human Factors Engineering Professional), was attempting to provide a cognitive scientific report on why the game has been so …]]>

Around March last year a friend of mine showed me an article about why the video game Angry Birds is so successful. The author Charles L. Mauro CHFP (Certified Human Factors Engineering Professional), was attempting to provide a cognitive scientific report on why the game has been so unbelievably successful (now with physical merchandise doing the rounds, and a feature film in the works). These sort of reports remind me of the guy who used to lease us our old studio space in Manhattan who was always trying to think of what he used to call “the next YouTube.” His desire to get rich through some cool new internet startup idea, rather than just sitting down and working hard on playing to his strengths, used to confound us a little. Similarly an analysis of what makes Angry Birds ‘genius’ with the intention of perhaps helping others reapply these findings on a project that could also be as successful, seems fairly futile. I can guarantee you the makers of Angry Birds didn’t apply this ‘science’ when creating the game. They simply wanted to make a fun game and used their intuition to do so. Mauro’s article talks about the ‘mystery’ behind the game as if it was all so calculated. We all know that when you’re deep in the development of a project like this, these things just come about as part and parcel of making it more fun to play. The objective logic that comes with so many levels of artistic ‘criticism’, is so often just an afterthought in the minds of those actually making something. The simple, prevailing fact remains that the brilliance of these things comes purely from the subconscious when making something good. A subconscious that has been trained hard by years of enjoying other art forms in all their many facets. A subconscious that is firing on all cylinders when you’re stuck into development and are becoming one with the creation of the thing.

The most interesting part of Mauro’s article, and in fact the part that lead me to get into an argument with my friend about it, was his ‘How things look’ subheading in which he states the following -

“This leads to a more interesting question: How does visual design impact success in the marketplace? I routinely get this question from clients who are undertaking large redesign or new development projects. Decades after it first surfaced in automobile design, visual design is still the most contentious aspect of designing compelling user experiences. Designers (mostly of the UX stripe) routinely sell clients on the concept that the visual design (graphic style) of a given interface solution is a critical factor in success. This assumption seems to make good intuitive sense. However, the actual working principle is counter-intuitive. In most user experience design solutions, visual design (how things look) is technically a hygiene factor. You get serious negative points if it is missing, but minimal positive lift beyond first impression, if a user interface has great visual design. When we conduct user engagement studies for clients (not the same as usability testing), we routinely see data that strongly supports this theory.”

Needless to say but I found the implications of this statement pretty unsettling and was reminded starkly of Bill Hick’s Advertising or Marketing comic routine (watch it below). Particularly Mauro’s last sentence which almost entirely echoes Hick’s line, “You know what Bill’s doing now, he’s going for the righteous indignation dollar, that’s a big dollar, a lot of people are feeling that indignation, we’ve done research, huge market. He’s doing a good thing.”

The following is a slightly polished version of what I had to say in reply to my friend, regarding Mauro’s points about visual design. It’s relevance to the IFP, filmmakers in general and the making of art of any kind will I hope be evident.

…

Mauro’s argument perhaps stands given the Angry Birds exact context, but largely speaking he’s dealing with a more more profound and complex issue. His point falls flat when you try to apply it to what I’m going to call the ‘Rags to Riches‘ argument. This argument understands that first impressions are certainly of value and that the actual experience of using something is fundamental, but in the end the psychological impact of the visual is the most important, lasting and hard to measure. The ‘rags’ in this case being of course the perceived immediate impact of good visual design, and the ‘riches’ being the powerful long-term, psychological and sociological effects of said design.

I agree that when Mauro is perhaps simply asking, “Why is this game so successful? Look how much money it made – here’s how to potentially make that money too,” then sure, what he’s saying could be of use. However when you consider how depressing people’s neighborhoods, streets, homes, offices, cubicles and online user experiences can be on a daily basis due to skimping on visual design for the sake of ‘what works’, and you then see this later turning into depression, anger and ill-will towards others, you realize we’re talking about something much, much bigger. Something which arguably could affect financial prospects more subconsciously and seriously, albeit at a slower pace.

Mauro continues later in the article to say -

“Even more important than good or bad visual design is appropriate visual design.”

I think this is the key factor here, and that people confuse this issue way too often. Angry Birds has a very appropriate, high standard of design. Without it it simply would not appeal to the millions who’ve paid for it. Guys think it’s pretty cool, girls think it’s cute, it makes kids laugh, it spaces out adults – all of this is absolutely requisite and in this regard Mauro’s article absolutely nails many of the elements that make it so enjoyable to use.

In the same fashion if you were going to design cheap housing in some backwater town, would you use materials that are going to stain, droop, crack and crumble after a few years? You know full well no one is going to revisit this place for repairs and that those living there can’t afford to repair it either. Why make anything that will rot both physically and psychologically everything around it? If there isn’t enough money to make it well, it should not be made at all. To quote the architect Howard Roark from Ayn Rand’s novel, The Fountainhead -

“Rules? Here are my rules: what can be done with one substance must never be done with another. No two materials are alike. No two sites on earth are alike. No two buildings have the same purpose. The purpose, the site, the material determine the shape. Nothing can be reasonable or beautiful unless it’s made by one central idea, and the idea sets every detail. A building is alive, like a man. Its integrity is to follow its own truth, its one single theme, and to serve its own single purpose. A man doesn’t borrow pieces of his body. A building doesn’t borrow hunks of its soul. Its maker gives it the soul and every wall, window, and stairway to express it.”

It’s about long-term psychology as much as it is about immediate success, and without discussing these decisions you can’t knock one thing and say it’s simply not as important as the other. As Mauro notes you can’t accurately put monetary value on visual changes, but in the same way that you do things to help the environment (that you also can’t see directly dying as a result of your actions), it’s wrong to imply as Mauro does that it’s simply a ‘hygiene factor.’ That hygiene factor is what I’m calling the long-term psychology of a design, and what Howard Roark calls a building’s soul.

So, to correct Mauro somewhat, I think it would be smarter to state that, “Even more important than good or bad visual design is appropriate visual design, and what is appropriate design is multi-faceted and entirely respective of context.”

Whether you like it or not, your entire world is affected by the look and feel of the things you engage with for long periods each day. It’s a designer’s job to try to overcome employers who make it less attractive and ‘more functional’ simply because they can pay you less to do this job and make more money. These people are idiots who don’t have a long-view of their general, daily, psycho-visual imbalances. I say this of course with the proviso that greater function doesn’t always come with a guaranteed decrease in visual quality – it just seems to so often be the case. The simple fact remains that cutting corners makes people suffer and if you can run away with the money and ignore the consequences, you’re a selfish charlatan. You are a part of the problem and not the solution.

I can appreciate that Mauro is largely appealing to those who want to make a buck, however this is bad advice because it assumes that the only value of good design is related to products and their markets. To reiterate once and for all, it’s our responsibility as human beings to remember there’s a lot of people on the planet who have no control over the look of the world around them and who are ruled by those who want to ‘make a buck’. Those of us that must suffer living beneath billboards towering above, promising soulless dreams, the garishly coloured junk food wrappers sitting in the gutter, the television commercials selling drugs for pains that don’t exist, the dying buildings built with cheap materials slumping under the weight of their own short lives, the angry faces and the lack of respect for anything. These people aren’t idiots. They know better than anyone that the look of the world around them massively affects their subconscious state of mind. They know it when they walk out of their rotting front door, glance at the grey sky, the paint peeling from the walls of their neighbour’s house across the street, scrape the ice from their car’s windshield with the splintering lid of a margarine tub, curse as the car won’t start and their foot goes through the rusted bottom of it as they lash out in anger. They know it when some of them later get drunk and walk around smashing windows, keying car doors, spray-painting church walls, and beating people up – all scenes I’ve witnessed in my years growing up in England in the suburbs of Cambridge, 3 years at University in Manchester and later living in Bedford-Stuyvesant in New York City. It’s a level of rage that I can support and forgive when places like that are your reality. Try getting mugged at 8:30am on your way to work, as I was in 2008, and being told by the cops that there’s no point in reporting it.

Some of these people hate the world around them. They know what the end-game is better than the thoughtless assholes who make the products, create the ads for them and leave those ads gathering mould on some rusted old bus-stop sign, 23 stops out of town in some relentless nightmare of a burnt out suburb. The sorts of places that otherwise only filmmakers dare frequent in order to make their gritty melodramas. We have got to remember that every small gesture toward making things simply functional, that disregards how much ‘greyer’ you are making the user’s day, is a very valid negative point.

There’s a lyric from the Pulp song Glory Days that comes to mind -

“Oh we were brought up on the Space-Race, now they expect you to clean toilets.”

…

Of course these arguments mean nothing until you can tie them back to money. This is the hard cold fact one must accept if you’re going to make any changes to the world these days. There are no gods left to use as any real threat to your actions, and the perceived ties between actual art and big money are mostly hanging by a string. Mauro wrote his article for people who want to make money. I am writing my article for free, with no apparent financial gain for anyone. So let me throw my marketing hat in the ring for a second here and point out how a long-term view of these things can and will actually make you money, as well as making the world a better place.

Think about how things will look retrospectively if you actually put in the time to make something visually beautiful as well as functionally sound. We only ever look back at the things that looked and performed fantastically, and cherish those particular things with heaps of nostalgia and warm hearts. We never look back at the ugly, embarrassing things that made lots of money in the same way. This might seem irrelevant, but listen up – these days heaps of money is made by harnessing that retro-active nostalgia and reaping what you can from that. More than ever we are focusing on remakes, reboots, retro-fashion, older sounding records, aging our photographs, and 80s-looking video game pixelated aesthetics.

There’s no denying that there is money in making things built to last, making things a canonical representation of the visual style of the era you’re living in and making people feel respected by giving them the finest. People want to love their past, they want to look back at previous decades with a smile, they want to relive that in every way they can and they’ll buy it.

It all comes full circle ultimately.

Everything from the look of a video game to the look of a bus-stop is relevant to people’s daily experience of the world. If you give people one moment to think you don’t care about them and that you’re not offering them in some capacity the best of what life has to offer, then you’re responsible for the slow, aching decline of civilization, the inevitable death of your company and, to paraphrase Fight Club, Brad Pitt pissing in your food at the formal business dinner where your boss raised a glass to you and offered you that huge promotion.

In the end, whatever your craft, the moment you’re thinking about the money, skimping on the quality of the design and focusing on your immediate financial gains, the worse you are making life for everyone else, and eventually yourself. So the next time you’re arguing with your designer, give this some thought. Could be they’re just a chump doing lazy work, but it could be that they’re fighting for a larger cause, one they subscribed to at a younger age when they made the connection between beauty and a better life. Rags to riches.

Sometimes I feel like a traveling salesman, going from festival to festival selling my finished films, and from market to market pitching my new projects.  I recently participated in my ninth project market on the “filmmaker” side, and I’ve done four of them on …]]>

Film Independent's Fast Track project market

Sometimes I feel like a traveling salesman, going from festival to festival selling my finished films, and from market to market pitching my new projects.  I recently participated in my ninth project market on the “filmmaker” side, and I’ve done four of them on the “industry” side, so I figured I’d write about my experiences with project markets to try to demystify them a bit.

What is a project market, you ask?  It’s basically a matchmaking program between filmmakers (writers, directors, producers) and industry professionals, with the goal of getting the filmmakers’ projects closer to production.  They usually run over 2-3 days, and are often held in conjunction with a film festival.

Examples of U.S. project markets include: Tribeca All-Access (held during the Tribeca Film Festival), Film Independent’s Fast Track (held during the Los Angeles Film Festival), and IFP’s Project Forum (which, by the way, is currently accepting submissions).

Examples of non-U.S. project markets include: Cinemart (held during the Rotterdam Film Festival), Berlinale Co-Production Market (held during the Berlin Film Festival), Hong Kong-Asia Film Financing Forum (held during the Hong Kong International Film Festival), and OMDC Toronto International Financing Forum (held during the Toronto Film Festival).

If you are a filmmaker with few industry connections, project markets are a great way to start building your network of useful contacts.  A project market essentially “validates” you and your project, and prompts the industry to start tracking you.  These markets serve as curators of new talent, which is critical because industry professionals are so inundated with submissions that they need curators to help focus their attention.

However, filmmakers who get accepted to project markets should be careful to manage their expectations. If you think your film will get greenlit within the months following a project market, think again!  Chances are, as ever, slim—I think this is because project markets tend to favor first- and second-time filmmakers and less commercial projects, and because it takes time to build a relationship and mutual trust with an industry person.

But don’t dismay: there are, of course, a handful of films that I know found a chunk of their funding at a project market. And at the very least, you’ll get a chance to meet a lot of industry folks in a short period of time, and to start developing relationships that may later bear fruit.  The value of a project market has more to do with building relationships and a network for yourself than getting a green light for your project. Hopefully, you will have other projects in your back pocket so that if you meet someone who doesn’t like your drama, maybe they’ll like your comedy instead.

So…who the hell are these “industry professionals” anyway? Below is a breakdown of the industry types a filmmaker might meet at a project market:

Production Companies & Producers

• 1. Production Companies Backed by Investors: These companies have private equity, the holy grail for independent films. Some also have first-look or overhead deals with studios.
• 2. Production Companies Connected to Actors: Some have studio deals and connections to financiers. Sometimes, the particular actor must be attached, so if you don’t want to abide by that condition, look elsewhere.
• 3. Production Companies Connected to Directors: Some have studio deals and connections to financiers. Sometimes, the particular director must be attached, so if you don’t want to abide by that condition, look elsewhere.
• 4. Production Companies and Producers With No Backing: The vast majority of “producers” fall under this category. While these folks have no money, they do often have connections to financiers, talent agents, distributors, etc., and can help develop your script, do a budget & schedule, attach cast & crew, and shop your film. Every film needs a producer, so if you don’t have one, find one.
• 5. Development Companies Backed by Investors: These companies focus on script development only. They usually acquire material (books, articles, etc.) and seek writers to do adaptations.

Agencies and Management Companies

• 6. Financing Agents: The major Hollywood agencies (UTA, WME, CAA, ICM, Gersh) and Cinetic have financing divisions that specialize in packaging and finding financing. These agencies work on commission when shopping a project to their network of financiers, and reserve the right to sell the finished film domestically. It’s rare for an agency to take on a low-budget project unless the director or actors attached are repped by that particular agency.
• 7. Domestic Sales Agent: Also called producer’s reps, these companies or individuals work on commission when trying to sell your finished film to a distributor at a festival, market, or directly. Most of them who aren’t one of the aforementioned financing agents don’t have the deep network of financiers necessary to greenlight your film (though some do). As such, these agents are most likely just tracking your project in anticipation of representing it when it’s done.
• 8. Foreign Sales Agent: These guys are responsible for selling the foreign rights for your project. Some of them can offer financing in the form of minimum guarantees (MGs) at the script or financing/casting stage, but this usually requires a big star or big director attachment, or other elements that have specific commercial appeal for certain territories. Even if you can’t get that rare MG, these agents can provide foreign sales estimates that you can show to your potential financiers.
• 9. Talent and Lit Management Companies: These companies can assist with cast attachments, and possibly represent you as a writer or director, thereby opening up their network of connections to you.

Studios and Distributors

• 10. Studios: A major Hollywood studio has the power to fully acquire and finance your feature, but chances are, they won’t do that if you’re a filmmaker early in your career. More likely (though still pretty unlikely) is a negative pickup deal in which a studio promises to pay you an acquisition fee upon your delivery of the film to them. You would still have to cashflow this deal through a bank or other financier. Note that you should expect to give up a degree of creative control in a studio deal, especially in a full acquisition. A studio executive might attend a project market to track you as a director or writer, or your project as a potential future acquisition after you’ve finished the film.
• 11. Mid-Sized and Smaller Distributors: Companies like IFC and Magnolia don’t typically finance production, but in very rare cases, they may put up a portion of the budget in exchange for certain distribution rights. But these companies are still useful to get to know since they’re among the most likely to buy your finished films.
• 12. Other Distributors: There are a whole slew of smaller specialty distributors and newfangled platforms (cable VOD, online streaming sites, etc.) that are helpful to know.
• 13. Distribution Service Companies & Consultants: Distribution service companies will release your film for a fee, and consultants and PMDs (producers of marketing & distribution) will advise you or manage your distribution, also for a fee. These guys won’t help get your film greenlit, and are probably just tracking potential future clients.

Debt Financiers

• 14. Banks and Debt Financiers: These guys can cashflow your negative pickup deal, foreign MG deal, tax credit, or similar collateral.  It’s rare for very low-budget films to use debt financing because a portion of the financing fees (bank, attorney, completion bond, etc.) are flat, so they’ll suck up a bigger percentage of a smaller budget.

Non-Profit & Government

• 15. Grantmaking Organizations: Generally, grants represent a small fraction of a film’s budget, but they’re still great if you can get ‘em!  Most focus on special interests (women, social issue, etc.).
• 16. Government Film Commissions: Whenever possible, “soft money” should be a part of every film’s financing plan as it can mitigate financiers’ risk and give you some “free” money for your budget.  In the U.S., various states have tax credits (NY, NC, LA, CT, AK, to name a few), and in Canada and elsewhere in the world, there may be loans and grants in addition to tax credits. Sadly, soft money is disappearing due to the state of the world economy.
• 17. Project Markets & Labs: Project market organizers sometimes troll other project markets for submissions.  It’s good to do multiple project markets to widen your industry network, but note that like festivals, project markets don’t like to take projects that have already “premiered” elsewhere, though there are of course exceptions. These guys primarily want to meet and track up-and-coming filmmakers, and see what other projects they might have that may be more suited to their own project markets. Also sort of related to project markets are screenwriting, directing and producing labs, which can be helpful in developing your craft and connecting you to more potential collaborators.
• 18. Film Festival Programmers: They don’t have the power to greenlight your film, but it’s good to develop relationships with programmers since so many indie films are launched and acquired at festivals. These guys want to meet new filmmakers and track future films.

Services

• 19. Post-Production Companies: Some post-production companies grant post services, or do in-kind equity deals.  Note, however, that post equity deals will value services at full rack rates.
• 20. Production Service Companies: It’s helpful to get to know the production service companies that have a lot of experience shooting in the region where your film will shoot, particularly if you’re not familiar with shooting there.
• 21. Completion Bond Companies: These companies oversee the production of a film and provide assurance to financiers that a film will be completed on time and on budget (and they’ll cover any overages). But it often doesn’t make sense to bond a small-budget film because these companies require a minimum service fee and 10% contingency.
• 22. Attorneys: Attorneys attend these things to track new potential clients. This is a good time to start shopping around for an attorney so you’ll have one when you’re ready to make deals. Note that some of them also represent investors.

* * * * * * * *

I think that about covers it!  Notice anything missing?  I do: high-net-worth individuals, who are the primary financiers of very low-budget films in the U.S.  You’ll have to find those folks elsewhere.

Some other suggestions

- Write a project summary that includes: logline, synopsis, director’s statement, bios of all cast/crew attached

- Bring a look book, or at least some visual references

- Don’t hand people a full paper script

- If your project has both a director and producer, you should both attend because I find that pitching as a team is more effective

- Be conversational and keep any formal presentations short and sweet

- Follow up over email, and include links & attachments presented at the meeting, even if you’ve already given them physical material

One last thing: before you start pitching to the industry person sitting across the table (whether at a project market or not), figure out exactly which of the above categories they fall into, and adjust your pitch accordingly.  Happy networking!

For the past six months, my company, Hybrid Cinema, has been working on the release of Bob Hercules’s new documentary film Joffrey: Mavericks of American Dance,about the history of the Joffrey ballet. This is a capsule post to explain the highlights of launching a documentary into the …]]> Written with Sheri Candler

For the past six months, my company, Hybrid Cinema, has been working on the release of Bob Hercules’s new documentary film Joffrey: Mavericks of American Dance,about the history of the Joffrey ballet. This is a capsule post to explain the highlights of launching a documentary into the marketplace when working with a modest budget. Future posts will go more in depth on certain aspects of this release.

With at least 35,000 feature films on the film festival circuit every year, by some estimates, very few films are going to premiere at one of the top 5 film festivals. When that happens, filmmakers need to decide what is the best launch for their film. We concluded that in the case of the Joffrey film (and we feel that this is the case for many films), some form of robust live event premiere would help to create awareness for the film in the over-saturated media landscape. Live events are great publicity generators, allowing you to focus marketing efforts on a specific event. Festivals are great partners for these types of events – even if you don’t get into a top 10 festival – because you can create a unique experience by partnering with open minded and adventurous festival that is already connected to press and audiences.

In creating a live event premiere, you need to consider the following:

1. A premiere that will reach your audience.

Very early in creating our distribution strategy, we identified ballet fans (and more specifically fans of the Joffrey ballet and even more specifically the alumni of the Joffrey ballet-more on audience identification in a later post) as the natural audience for Joffrey: Mavericks of American Dance. Sure, there are other audiences for a film like this – but it is essential to go after who will be the most passionate about seeing the film. For this reason, we targeted the Dance on Camera Film Festival which not only is one of the premiere dance film festivals in the world, it is based in New York City – the birthplace of the Joffrey ballet and the center of the dance world in the United States.

2. Creating an event that will garner attention for your film.

Festivals have many films to care for and promote as well as promoting the brand of the festival in general and often they have a small staff to accomplish all of this. There is a lot for the media to choose from for coverage. What will make your film unique and interesting to cover? We decided early on to partner with Emerging Pictures to simulcast the screening of Joffrey at the DOC festival not only to reach a nationwide audience, but to create a larger story for the press to pay attention to. Emerging was a natural choice because they screen live ballet performances from Europe through a digital network of cinemas throughout the US, so their cinemas already have an audience for this type of programming. They also have the technology in place at Lincoln Center that enables a netcast to happen so the venue and the festival wouldn’t have to figure out the logistics of the simulcast.

Even though a festival premiere is an event in and of itself, that is not always enough to attract attention from the media or from audiences. You should always strive to create your live events to be as unique as possible, both from the perspective of media coverage and from the perspective of the audience, to create that need to attend. Many subjects in the Joffrey film are iconic dancers in the ballet world, what ballet fan would not want to interact with them? We created a post screening panel of former dancers that the audience in the theater could interact with and meet after the screening, but we also enabled audiences even across the country the ability to interact as well. Having this panel discussion netcast live to theaters around the country allowed audiences in to ask questions of this panel as well as interact with each other via Twitter using the hashtag #joffreymovie – creating a unique event not only in the Walter Reade Theater in New York City, but in 44 other cities around the country at the same time. This is also a unique event for media coverage because so few films take advantage of the technology today that enables something like this to happen and having such a concentration of iconic dancers in one place makes this newsworthy.

3. The budget you have to work with.

We have a modest budget for the release of Joffrey so we had to do a lot with limited means. We have a small staff handling publicity, audience outreach, booking screenings and organizing merchandise sales. Bearing this in mind, we needed the most bang for the effort because we launched the film into the market during our festival premiere. We won’t have separate budgets for festival publicity and then release publicity in order to start selling.

Utilizing the Emerging network only costs at most $1000 (which can be taken off the top). Similar satellite systems through companies like Fathom and Cinedigm can cost $75,000 to $250,000 because of the cost in satellite time.

In addition, by covering much of the country at the same time – it allowed us to pursue reviews and articles in multiple markets – thereby most effective use of our publicity budget.

4. Creating assets before and during the release.

In another post, we will talk at length about the need for additional media assets to promote your film and all of the ways we have done this. One way that you can garner additional assets during release is by filming and documenting your events.

You want to film the event itself – outside the theater, crowd shots, audience arriving at seats, applause, the audience watching the film during the screening and the entire Q&A. Very important to capture audience expectation before and reaction after the screening. I recommend having two cameras so that one can be filming the Q&A and the other filming the crowd reaction outside. You also want a photographer shooting the event if possible.

What you film can be utilized in a number of ways:

• Short promotional videos that you can release on your Youtube channel to promote the film. For the premiere we created two videos. The first is about the film, opening night and audience reaction.http://youtu.be/7-glGz6lgWw

The second piece which we are now premiering with this article concerns the simulcast of the film and the audience participation.

• Still photography of the people and personalities at the event (especially those that are interesting to your core audience and some that may be interesting to society pages and other publications).
• Longer pieces of the Q&A panel discussion or even of just the filmmakers in conversation. You can use these on your extra features. Since our extra features have already been locked and since we have received numerous requests from people around the country to see these panels, we are going to put the full-length panel discussions up on the web on Distrify and charge a dollar or two for the viewing as an additional revenue stream.

5. The need to have the next steps planned.

Many times filmmakers are so busy planning their premiere, they neglect to prepare for what will happen after this. Where will all of this publicity attention go? In the past, they hoped it led to a distribution deal, but that cannot be relied upon now. There is no reason that direct distribution should not be the next step and that some kind of event theatrical screenings can be booked. In the lead up and following our premiere, we have booked over 20 other screenings and we continue to set up screenings. We also launched our online store just after the premiere and have sold several thousand dollars in DVDs/merchandise. Don’t let the efforts and the financial resources you put into the premiere stall out from waiting. In a future post, we will talk about how we prepared for sales by setting up the web store and creating the merchandise.

The Results

We ended up screening in 45 cities throughout the US to launch the release of the film. A number of these screenings actually sold out. We received press articles and reviews in a number of major markets (even though the film was only screening once). Through TweetReach, we were able to quantify the exposure via Twitter for the event. According to our TweetReach report, our hashtag #joffreymovie reached 200,549 people through 270 tweets just on that day. Some of the comments we received through twitter:

“#JoffreyMovie Santa Fe, NM – our audience loved it, thank you so much! congrats on premiering a new, high tech way of running a Q&A!”

“@JoffreyMovie #joffreymovie It’s insightful, performance history is fantastic. pic.twitter.com/tBeFP9IN.”

“The excellent #joffreymovie & panel yesterday @danceoncamera made me wistful for @joffreyballet of old. I loved taking class w Mr. Joffrey.”

The release continues and we will provide some in depth posts on this site of the different methods we have used to reach audiences and generate awareness and sales for the film.

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About Co-Author Sheri Candler

Sheri Candler is an inbound marketing strategist for independent films. Through the use of content marketing tools such as social networking, podcasts, blogs, and online media publications, as well as relationship building with organizations & influencers, she assists filmmakers in building an engaged & robust online community for their work that will help develop and sustain their careers. Currently, she is working with Hybrid Cinema to release the documentary film Joffrey: Mavericks of American Dance, a history of the Joffrey Ballet. She can be reached on Facebook, on Twitter and on Google Plus.

Passman: What is ASCAP? What do they do and how can they be a resource to filmmakers?

Devine: ASCAP is America’s leading performing rights organization. We’re a membership association owned and run by our more than 420,000 …]]> Jordan Passman (scoreAscore.com) interviews Sue Devine, Senior Director, Creative Services, Film/TV for ASCAP in NYC.

Passman: What is ASCAP? What do they do and how can they be a resource to filmmakers?

Devine: ASCAP is America’s leading performing rights organization. We’re a membership association owned and run by our more than 420,000 U.S. composers, songwriters, lyricists, and music publisher members. We’re home to the greatest names in American music, in all genres, past and present — from Duke Ellington to Katy Perry, George Gershwin to Stevie Wonder, Leonard Bernstein to Beyoncé, Marc Anthony to Alan Jackson, Henry Mancini to Howard Shore — as well as many thousands of writers in the earlier stages of their careers. Through agreements with affiliated international societies, we also represent hundreds of thousands of music creators worldwide.

We’re the only U.S. performing rights organization created and controlled entirely by our members, with a Board of Directors elected by and from the membership. ASCAP’s President & Chairman of the Board, Paul Williams is an Oscar, Grammy and Golden Globe-winning Hall of Fame songwriter.

Our core job is to protect the rights of our members by licensing and distributing royalties for the non-dramatic public performances of their copyrighted works. In other words, we pay songwriters and composers royalties when their music is played in public. ASCAP’s licensees, the people who pay us, encompass anyone who wants to perform copyrighted music publicly. That includes radio broadcasters and TV networks, bars and live music venues, websites and streaming music services (e.g. YouTube and Spotify), even Disneyland – most anywhere that music can be heard.

That’s the big picture, but we do much more than collect and distribute money. ASCAP’s Creative Services Department focuses on artist development for composers and songwriters. We interact with filmmakers frequently, helping them connect with the right film composers and songwriters for their projects, and we regularly feature our members at film/TV industry events worldwide. We also run several workshops a year that foster the next generation of professional composing and songwriting talent.

Passman: What licenses for music do filmmakers need to get? And can ASCAP help?

Devine: There are three basic music licenses related to a film or TV production. The first is the Public Performance License, administered by ASCAP and described above. The broadcaster, not the filmmaker, is responsible for this license. I can’t stress that point enough: filmmakers do not need to interact with ASCAP at the licensing level. It’s the broadcasters of film, like HBO for example, that must get a public performance license. That license would cover the use of all ASCAP music in all HBO programming.

Filmmakers are responsible for securing two other types of licenses, and must pay very close attention to them. The filmmaker must get a Synchronization License (synch) from the publisher of the work and a Master Use License from the owner of the master recording of the music (usually the record label or the artist themselves). These two licenses are not administered by ASCAP.

ASCAP can help filmmakers learn about this process. Read the ”How to Acquire Music for Films”, and “Music, Money, Success and the Movies” articles on our website for a solid overview. Filmmakers can use our ACE Title Search to find the writer and publisher information for a musical work they’d like to use in a project.

Passman: Let’s talk now about your Creative Services Department, and connecting filmmakers with film composers.

Devine: While ASCAP’s main role is to license and administer public performance royalties for our members, and to represent it legally and legislatively, ASCAP also has a very strong Creative Services Department that helps develop our members at all stages of their careers, across all genres. In addition to our many emerging songwriter workshops, songwriter retreats, and music industry showcases, several of our programs may be quite useful for filmmakers.

We run three highly competitive film and television scoring workshops. Each is an intensive program, widely recognized as a major educational and networking opportunity for aspiring film, TV and visual media composers. We feature prestigious workshop leaders, mentors and guest speakers from the highest levels of the film and television music industry, side-by-side with hands-on experience with both the technical and creative requirements of scoring to picture.

Filmmakers are welcome to sit in on certain workshop sessions, particularly the scoring sessions. I can’t emphasize enough how useful sitting in on these sessions could be for a filmmaker. When it comes to music in film, filmmakers need to feel the difference music can make, viscerally. That can be experienced in some of our workshop sessions, where you watch the same scene repeatedly with a different score each time. Having an intellectual appreciation for the film music process is very different than experiencing what music is (or is not) contributing to your film.

NYC-based filmmakers can sit in on the first two sessions of the ASCAP Columbia University Film Scoring Workshop, where we walk a select group of thesis filmmakers through the process of hiring their film composer. Anyone interested in  attending one of our workshop scoring sessions can contact me at sdevine@ascap.com.

Every year we run the ASCAP “I Create Music EXPO” in Los Angeles. It’s the premier conference for songwriters, composers and producers within the music industry, and we always feature numerous film music panels that filmmakers would find educational and constructive. It’s a great place to network with composers, too.

Additionally, we recently launched the ASCAP Composer Spotlight on our website, a powerful resource for film, television and video game producers to discover and connect with some of the best and brightest emerging composers. The Composers to Watch section highlights a select group of outstanding composers from our scoring workshops. You can find bios, resumes, website links and sample cues for each composer.

ASCAP also produces the official music programming for the Sundance Film Festival, called the Sundance ASCAP Music Café, along with the ASCAP Composer Spotlight @ Sundance. You can even listen to a Spotify mix of all the featured songwriters and composers.

Passman: Filmmakers constantly struggle with pricing the music for their projects. How do you suggest they go about this difficult process?

Devine: Director Alex Steyermark, formerly a top music supervisor on films for Ang Lee, Spike Lee, Jim Sheridan and many others, once said that filmmakers should be dedicating at least 5% of their overall budgets to music. That is a minimum. If your budget is very low, that percentage will be greater, as you must allocate a minimum budget to cover music. That will include the creative fee for the score, as well as the recording costs for the players, music editor, mixing, etc. It will also include license fees for any songs you use, and those can vary greatly depending on what songs
you’ve set your sights on.

To learn more about this, I highly recommend reading a chapter called “Pricing Your Work” out of ASCAP Board member Richard Bellis’s book The Emerging Film Composer.  While written for a composer audience, that chapter will be quite valuable for filmmakers as well.

Passman: How do filmmakers find film composers?

Devine: There are far more extremely qualified composers who want to score your film than most filmmakers realize. I have long observed a wide gap between the film and music communities at the emerging level: emerging filmmakers and emerging film composers rarely know how to find each other. As a result, many an acclaimed filmmaker has hired his next door neighbor to score a film, because he happens to play piano or slide guitar. While that may suffice, you can
certainly elevate the level of score you bring to your project. We created the ASCAP Composer Spotlight precisely to bridge this gap. Please take a look at The Composers to Watch feature and peruse the Composer Spotlight @ Sundance as well.

And now, a plug for my interviewer: I am very excited about ScoreAscore.com, as it brilliantly cuts through much of the high anxiety that a filmmaker faces that often makes them delay the process of hiring their composer (“I’ve never done this before! How do I know what works for my film?”). You post your clip, you check back in three days, and there will be sample scores for your scene. *Magic.* Right away, you get a feel for which ones work for you, and you can begin a
conversation/interview with those composers.

Beyond that, you can reach out to agents who represent composers that are further along in their careers, from mid-level all the way to the top composers in the industry. If you hire a music supervisor, they will be consulting these resources. Plus, they will have the scoop on the latest up-and-coming composers.

Passman: How do you feel about popular artists like Trent Reznor & Jónsi making a significant impact on the composing world?

Devine: ASCAP works with a wide variety of composers, both classically or otherwise formally trained, as well as songwriters/artists-turned-composers. Many composers have come from backgrounds in television or Broadway music, or in rock/pop or urban songwriting. Great scores certainly come from all of these, and keep the field fresh and exciting. You’re looking for the unique sound, style, composer or artist that resonates with the voice of your film. It’s hard to predict where that will come from.

Passman: Every filmmaker should know about cue sheets. What are cue sheets, why do they exist and how do you file them?

Devine: A cue sheet is a schedule of the music contained in a film or television program. It’s the essential document that ASCAP requires in order to distribute royalties to a film’s composer, any songwriters with songs placed in the film, and the publisher of the score (which is often the film production company). It is normally prepared and delivered to ASCAP by the production company. You can find out everything you need to know about cue sheets at the Cue Sheet Corner section of our website.

Passman: What are some of your favorite film scores of all time?

Devine: I’ll answer a slightly different question, since I was quite struck by a comparison relatively recently. This may illustrate the power of understanding what a score can bring to your film.

A favorite (relatively) recent film score was Carter Burwell’s score to Twilight. It was sweeping, dreamy and dramatic in a way that elevated the film, and held all of its moody, staring-into-eyes scenes together while propelling the movie and characters forward. I watched the film again specifically because of the score.

Compare that to its sequel, New Moon, where the filmmaker chose to have top artists/bands write songs specifically for particular scenes. While strong song placements can often work extremely well, and having the songs custom-written to scenes was intended to further fine-tune these placements so they would carry the film, in this case I feel it didn’t do the narrative justice. While any one of these songs may have nailed the moment and made for a great individual scene,
much was lost in the context of the whole.

Without unifying score/themes/melodies interwoven through these scenes, connecting them from the wider perspective of the arc of the film, these scenes remained as separate islands. Nothing tied them together and helped them build momentum or crescendo sequentially. Nothing integrated them with the scenes that did have score.

As such, in my opinion, the invisible tensions between the characters was lost, the drama was lost, and we were left with characters’ empty staring into eyes, which fell flat. In this case, with fewer song placements and more room for a proper dramatic score, I think the film might have played much more strongly.

Pictured (l-r) at the 2009 ASCAP Film & TV Music Awards: ASCAP President and Chairman of the Board Paul Williams, Twilight composer Carter Burwell and director Catherine Hardwicke, director Bill Condon, ASCAP CEO John LoFrumento. Photo by Lester Cohen/Wireimage.com.

Rule 1. (to kill expectation)

Go into the film without having read or watched anything. Trailers are acceptable, as they are sometimes created by film directors themselves, though even that sometimes is questionable.

Rule 2. (to kill projection)

Assess what the film is trying to say or achieve within the realm of what …]]>

Rule 1. (to kill expectation)

Go into the film without having read or watched anything. Trailers are acceptable, as they are sometimes created by film directors themselves, though even that sometimes is questionable.

Rule 2. (to kill projection)

Assess what the film is trying to say or achieve within the realm of what kind of movie it is trying to be. Do not project your own expectations. Let the film dictate the level of expectation, be that tonally, narratively or conceptually. 

Then, assess how well you think the film reaches whatever goals it set out to achieve.

Rule 3. (to kill hype)

Don’t talk about the film with anyone who has not seen it, except if you’re encouraging them to go see it. Only discuss the film with those that have seen it, and discuss it hard. That’s what it’s there for.

…

Consciously or otherwise, everyone has their own series of qualifications when assessing how much they’ve enjoyed a film. There are others for whom these guidelines can be reapplied to how much they appreciate other forms of art as well. There are even those who don’t consider film a true art form, but we spit on those people.

I am the son of two fine artists; my mother a painter, my father a painter. Here is their legend: they met on the steps of the Tate Gallery in early 70s London, and it was love at first sight. The legend failed to mention, of course, that my father was actually with his ex-girlfriend on those steps at the time and my mother, who had yet to win his heart, was simply being introduced to them by a mutual friend. Later they told me when going through some difficulties of my own that, whilst it was love – a great love – it was of course not the matinée movie my brother and I had in our heads as kids.

Bearing this in mind, I want to talk about a way of thinking about film criticism that led to my friend Adam and I crafting the rules above. Adam is my age and makes music. He and I met at university in Manchester, England in 2001 and we have analyzed films together, endlessly and relentlessly, ever since. I don’t see him so often these days as he lives in London, and I in New York, but the arguments are no less heated. To make matters worse, Adam was recently staying with me for a couple of weeks in New York. In the midst of yet another discourse (as we were hopping between trains on our way to some party) I found myself restating my assumptions about how one should critically assess a film’s worth. Adam, nodding his head, jokingly called them The Rules. We laughed then, but at some point later that night I made a mental note to write something about it.

…

Three key elements cloud a person’s judgement about a film. The first is hype. The second, and somewhat a byproduct of hype, is expectation, which for the most part, leads to projection.

I found out the truth about how my parents met during a difficult time. Knowing about it and about events thereafter rescued a large part of my sanity from the jaws of god-knows-what. I could suddenly see how similarly I’d behaved to my father and how my mistakes, somehow subconsciously, were identical to his given all he’d become now. Of course it didn’t excuse what I’d done, but it calmed me hugely. For years I had had no connection to their experience – they’d had this perfect thing, married young, I had not – there was no connection.

People go about their lives telling people how they met their significant other or how they got their great job or how they made their millions, and they’ve refined these stories into what one might call legends. Every detail is exaggerated for the sake of effect. These romantic sagas are indeed legends, but are also what I like to call hype, and we create them all the time to justify and cement in some way the life changing decisions we’ve made. The things we’ve decided we’re never going to take back, and if we do, know it will hurt to do so.

It is because of hype that a lot of people are in some way afraid of art. This is not because they aren’t capable of understanding it, or because they don’t want to understand it, but because they aren’t given the chance to understand it. In fact, we are more and more these days encouraged not to. For example, you walk into some art galleries in New York and you’ll see something akin to a plank of wood leaning against a wall. As you stare at it, confused as to whether a workman left it behind on his way to the toilet or whether it’s actually an exhibit, a young gallery owner will stride over, massaging his sore nostrils, and hand you an essay explaining why this plank is art. Gone is your chance to say to yourself,

“Hey, it’s just a plank.”

It’s now something about which, due to the convoluted wording of the gallery owner’s essay, you’re clearly not equipped to make up your own mind.

If you’d grown up with my brother and I you’d have had to live through years of my parents ranting and raving about the appalling nature of art teaching at the various schools we ended up going to in England. Why is art not taught well any more? Well, my parents have their views, but  I believe it’s largely because no one is trying any more to comprehend the true financial value of an artistic eduction, and therefore assume people will struggle to employ those with that alone. This is sad because it implies that they make no connection between how things look and how people feel. In today’s “money or nothing” world, most stuff pretty much looks like shit, and that plays a part in why people are depressed, break everything around them and want to kill themselves.

So this is where advertising features in our problem. What is the one thing that thinks it’s art, but in fact simply tries to squeeze money out of people by emulating art for financial ends? That’s right, advertising, and nothing comes close to the psychological mess that is advertising actually advertising art. Nothing.

Films are ruined daily by advertising and hype is their big, blood-letting knife. I stopped buying film magazines for over 10 years the day I accidentally saw a film called Fight Club, without knowing anything about it. You might know it. What you might also know is the feeling I had that night when watching it. The feeling of experiencing something incredible for the first time without knowing a single thing about it. The purity of an idea, a story, a climax that is in every way a surprise to you is almost overwhelming. It’s narcotic. Adam and I use it like a drug. You’d think, given that obvious metaphor and the general propensity to track down “good coke,” “straight dope” or “strong-ass weed,” that other people might not choose to cut their art with anything either. You know, to keep it pure. You’d be wrong.

In fact, all joking aside, it’s actually more serious than that.

Hype not only ruins the impact of the art, it undermines the very value of art itself in the first place. Every day our faces are filled with reviews, star ratings, adverts screaming “It’ll make you laugh, it’ll make you cry,” “Critics are saying this is X’s best film in years” and “Empire Magazine calls it ‘Amazing’”. All of this, not to make you enjoy the film any more, but to simply make sure you give them some money for it, and not just money for it, but to better pay back that misused advertising budget. Of course, none of what the advertising is saying is true. None of it can be true. Much like reading a film review, it’s misguided to think that someone you don’t know, possibly wouldn’t even like and particularly someone who’s job it is to write shit like that, could dictate what would make you laugh or cry.

Here-in, hype (by its very nature) takes whatever is remotely good about something and amplifies it beyond all rational levels, thus creating our second problem, expectation.

I once got into an argument with someone at a party about a film, which I was insisting was good and he was arguing wasn’t. In the end it turned out he’d not actually seen the film but was basing his opinion on what he’d read on Rotten Tomatoes, and therefore didn’t want to see it. The fact that people allow the votes and opinions of other people they don’t know to help them decide upon a unique, personal experience such as a film, is somewhat ironic.

Advertising companies are paid to sell things. Hype for a film gets people into the cinema seat and so therefore counts as a sales tool. The main method people use to hype something these days is to give you more and more of it in fragments before you actually see it. This, with reference to my Fight Club experience and the consequent drug metaphor, of course ruins it. We’ve all been there – Trailer 1, Trailer 2, Trailer 3, The Featurette and The First 5 Minutes. Each element bandied about out of context, each leading you to subconsciously make up your own mind about certain lines of dialogue or certain dramatic moments, and thus often ruining what it’s like to experience those moments first-hand, in the context of the film.

Expectation thus also leading to projection - you projecting what you expect to see over what’s actually happening, therefore destabilizing the film’s own chances to say what it’s trying to say.

I sat through a meeting a few days ago with a film director, his producer and his marketing team working on a strategy building up to the screening of their film at a major festival. The marketing team were detailing how they have a series of mailing lists they send a film’s Facebook page to just to guarantee a certain number of ‘Likes’ on a film from the moment it’s released. You wonder for a second during these moments how the director feels about such a gesture. How he can possibly know what people feel about his film when every gauge he has is blurred somehow by all this bullshit.

Just like my parents, the legend of the film is never ever the reality of the film. Just like the New York art gallery experience, you are being told what to see when you see something – for the sake of making you feel better about the money they want you to spend on it.

Alfred Hitchcock famously banned anyone from entering the movie theater after a screening of his film Psycho had begun, back in the 60s. Of course this created what is now a legendary amount of hype around the movie, but at least his approach still kept the details of the art itself a mystery. All you knew is that the director cared about the integrity of his film, which in itself is all you should ever need to know about the film.

…

So how should you yourself approach a film, to avoid these pitfalls? You know, when it’s just you and it, in a room together, no strings. What then?

[Spoilers ahead]

Somewhere at the end of the 90s. I had just finished watching The Matrix with my father. This was a film that had never sat well with me. He’d never seen it before and I’d seen it previously in the cinema. We were watching it with some other friends and of course everyone got in a discussion about it afterwards. I argued against anyone who said they thought it was a good movie as I just couldn’t stomach the ending. I felt it made no dramatic sense. To me there was no chemistry between the lead characters Neo and Trinity, so for the film to just assume he’d come back to life because she loved him, seemed like the most trite, undeserved dramatic climax.

In response my father said something along the lines of -

“No Caspar, you’re not arguing within the context of the film. You’re projecting what you want onto the film. The film clearly stated early on that Neo, if he indeed was ‘the one’, would be able to manipulate The Matrix in some way. Therefore him dying in The Matrix but still living on in reality is entirely fair based on that assumption. Sure it might not connect with you particularly, but you can’t fault them beyond that, as they have established their own internal film logic and carried that through to its logical conclusion. Therefore Trinity’s love for Neo is actually beside the point. She just happens to be saying “I love you” when he wakes up. Coincidence yes, but where do you even start with coincidence in storytelling?”

[End of spoilers] 

I really had no come-back for this at the time. What I did however have, forming in my head for future contemplation, was a set of rules for how I’d approach my assessment of art. The very same rules you see at the top of this article. Since myself and Adam’s greatest passion is film, we’ve explicitly crafted them for use in that context and they continue to serve us well. We created them so we know how to understand a film, without having to necessarily read a review, watch a trailer or pay attention to a single ad.

It’s this line of thinking that lead me to understand what the New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane famously called “good trash” in the context of one of his reviews. I also now have absolutely no fear of loving and defending whole-heartedly a b-movie horror like SAW as much as David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. The Rules make absolutely no prejudice, they allow you to love anything you want, but simply ask that you think for yourself. The Rules stop you getting confused over what you should call art and what you should not. They simply make you focus on good versus bad and help you sidestep all the hype and bullshit the advertisers and marketing types out there would have you believe will help you enjoy the experience more.

I would apply them to more examples for you, but I’m already way over my word limit here. So by all means, try them out.

See how you get on.

See you at the cinema.

Why am I a man-of-action? Because I “T.C.B.” all day long, which stands for “take care business,” because I don’t …]]> Ask anyone to describe me and they’ll say “Adam Bowers is a man-of-action.” If they say anything different, or talk about how I owe them three hundred dollars, they’re dirty liars.

Why am I a man-of-action? Because I “T.C.B.” all day long, which stands for “take care business,” because I don’t have time for prepositions. You know that moment in romantic comedies when the protagonist realizes the error of their ways, so they run across town to catch their ex before they get on an airplane? That’s me, 24/7. I’m starting to have to chase girls I don’t even know. They’re not crazy about it, but I AM A MAN-OF-ACTION (hearing this doesn’t seem to make them feel any more comfortable).

Let me describe the process of making my first movie: I wrote it, guilted friends into helping out, and we just started shooting. Bingo bango, as I wish I’d say. There are some drawbacks to this: mainly the whole “not having money” thing. But, as I tell bill collectors, what is money anyway? You know who else didn’t have money? Jesus. I’m not saying we’re one in the same, but if he also stole his roommate’s laundry detergent, we’re two-for-two.

Even without money, I still like this way of making movies. There’s a sense of immediacy to it, the way you feel when you spill a beer on your laptop. It’s a real do-or-die scenario.

But, while I wrote, produced, directed, and then edited my first movie (in that order, if you can believe it), I missed out on a crucial step in the filmmaking process: waiting to hear back from people. I’ve heard it’s where the real “movie magic” happens (by which I mean, you become so despondent about your movie that you start contemplating a career in magic). So, it’s something I’ve been sure to set aside time for with my latest feature. Luckily, I set aside A LOT of time.

(This little girl is constantly checking her inbox.)

Having recognizable actors in your film is obviously a great way to help get people with money to give you said money, so we’ve been following that angle. Like in my first movie, I’m playing the lead role, but apparently I’m not a “recognizable actor,” or even very “likable as a person.” So, we’re looking to fill out the rest of the cast with people we love who also happen to be actors that audiences care about, in the hopes that it will offset the damage done by associating the film with me any more than it has to be.

Now, my first movie played at Sundance, but, of course, I’m still very unknown as a filmmaker. Let’s just say I’m no Penny Marshall (at least, not until the paperwork clears). So, when we approach these actors, I imagine that their first response is “Who? Some guy who’s changing his name to Penny Marshall? That’s really weird.” Naturally, it can take awhile for them to get to the script. But, that’s how it is with a project like this. There’s nothing saying “If you don’t jump on this, it’ll go to that YouTube kid, Fred,” which I’ve heard is “code: red” for actors. By the way, if the next “Fred” movie is called Code: Fred, I want some sort of royalties.

But, while that’s been coming along, Adele and I have started feeling that no-budget, DIY itch coming back, so we’re getting ready to do as much as possible ourselves. That’s actually comforting, though, coming from the world we started out in. I hope I’ll always keep that mindset: that the more you can do yourself, the less you need to rely on others. That’s why my third feature will have me in a fat suit playing every role.

If that’s not taking care business, I don’t know what is.

Bingo bango.

Hi, everyone. I’ll be doing a little blogging for IFP from now on. A little background on myself: When I lived in Florida, I wrote, directed, produced, edited, and acted in a no-budget comedy called New Low, which played in the inaugural NEXT <=> section at the 2010 Sundance Film …]]>

Hi, everyone. I’ll be doing a little blogging for IFP from now on. A little background on myself: When I lived in Florida, I wrote, directed, produced, edited, and acted in a no-budget comedy called New Low, which played in the inaugural NEXT <=> section at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival and got me put on Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film the same year. Since then, I’ve made millions of dollars and now live in a mansion whose foundation is literally built on the backs of indigenous poor people. Well, I guess that’s a slight exaggeration: I live just above the poverty line in a poorly ventilated apartment in Los Angeles. Tomato, to-mah-to.

I’m currently gearing up for my second feature, We’re A Wasteland, which I wrote, and will direct, act in, and probably edit. Wasteland is being produced by Adele Romanski (however you just pronounced that in your head was wrong), a real firecracker of a producer who I was lucky enough to meet at Sundance, and Brad Petrigala, who is also the manager I got from my Sundance-related exposure. Be careful about too much Sundance exposure, by the way. You know, because of the U-V… nevermind.

“But,” you say, “why are you here, telling me all this, you skinny loser?” To which I’ll reply, “I’m trying to gain weight, so I’d appreciate your support.” To answer your actual question, though, Wasteland was selected for the Emerging Narratives section in IFP’s 2011 Project Forum, and I was also chosen to be a part of IFP’s first-ever Emerging Visions program in October… most likely because they were so impressed with how much of a skinny loser I am (it takes a lot of effort).

Because I live in Los Angeles instead of New York, my experiences with IFP have so far been unfortunately limited to those two events, so IFP is quickly becoming “that organization that sends me emails about all of the cool things they’re doing just as a big tease.” Just like my ex-girlfriend, it seems like they’re telling me about their exciting new lives with some guy named “Kevin” just to torture me.

Still, I’m excited for this blog: it’ll give me a chance to share my experiences as I get my first film with a budget off the ground, give me a chance to communicate with other filmmakers, young and old, and provide me with the perfect soapbox to go on a ton of racist, sexist, homophobic rants (only two of these things will actually happen, but you’ll have to wait and see which).

To start things off, I’ll tell a story about something that happened to me recently. I was obviously incredibly lucky to get to be a part of Sundance, and that’s opened pretty much every door that would have otherwise been dead-bolted shut forever, due to what people who defend me to others call “personality flaws.” One of these doors has led to a couple offers to direct projects that aren’t my own.

The first time was shortly after Sundance, when I was approached about shooting the adaptation of a novel. I read the novel and liked it, so, of course, the project immediately fell apart. Perhaps I was like Lenny in Of Mice And Men, I wondered (but, just the part about him being an overgrown idiot). “C’est la vie,” I said… which I’m pretty sure is Latin for “That was a real kick in the crotch.”

The second time happened very recently. I was asked if I wanted to shoot a script that had most of its financing ready to go. I got excited: I could have finally stopped slogging away on my “passion project,” whatever that means, and totally sold out for a relatively small amount of money. It had always been my dream. So, I read the script, which I would describe as The Social Network of movies that are like Weekend at Bernie’s. It seemed to be the scientifically exact opposite of my voice and the type of movies I wanted to make. I was bummed out: I couldn’t put my name on something I didn’t love, and I wasn’t even sure I’d be able to make it work. It’d be like if the school nerd had to give a presentation on why it’s great to have huge muscles and a hot girlfriend; he might be able to get through it without having an asthma attack, but nobody would buy it.

Still, should I take the job? We are in a recession, for god’s sake (or, are we not? It’s like, “Make up your mind already, economy, or should I say ‘Ross and Rachel,’ will-they-or-won’t-they, haha lol what’s this gun doing in my mouth”). I talked it over with my manager, and we decided that I’d rather continue to be broke than make a movie that might change the type of career I’d have. Sure, I could become a director-for-hire and make mediocre comedies that are easily forgotten, but I want to make my mediocre comedies that are easily forgotten.

So, I decided to pass; to continue my life of going out to restaurants with friends, not ordering anything, and then asking everyone at the table if they’re planning on taking that home with them. Luckily, things have been moving along with Wasteland, though. If things continue at the same pace as they have been, I’ll be able to make the project I really care about, which is more than I could ask for.

It might not be my dream of becoming a complete sell-out hack as quickly as possible, but it’s definitely not a bad alternative.

I saw Gus Vant Sant’s film Elephant in Italy whilst on holiday with my girlfriend of the time. It was  not long after the film had come out and we were lucky enough to find a cinema that hadn’t dubbed it; they had simply put the Italian in sub-titles in …]]>

I saw Gus Vant Sant’s film Elephant in Italy whilst on holiday with my girlfriend of the time. It was  not long after the film had come out and we were lucky enough to find a cinema that hadn’t dubbed it; they had simply put the Italian in sub-titles in instead. It was of course a beautiful, warm evening and the film, despite it’s delicate and dark subject matter, also left me with the most beautiful, warm feeling. Now Elephant certainly had it’s political undercurrents and was more topical than a film like Pavilion, but the sensation it created of simply following, watching and remaining detached from the events portrayed gave me an almost paralyzing feeling of powerlessness. It felt as if for a moment the film might actually miss the action that was so central to its genesis and leave me feeling as if it was one of those dreams you have where you can never quite see someone’s face, no matter what you try. Quite why this felt so good, I couldn’t tell you. It did however leave me wanting more.

Pavilion, from this year’s IFP crop, is one of these types of films. In fact had it not been for seeing Elephant that day, and then later seeing Terrence Malick’s The New World, then perhaps the hot and sweaty July day when director Tim Sutton screened Pavilion for us in my living room, might have been all the more uncomfortable. It was too late though, I’d already fallen hook line and sinker for films of this kind, and the fact that I knew this director wanted us to help him with this project meant that the trip to the bathroom and back, the moment the film finished, was a very exciting one. All 25 feet of it.

My co-worker Zach referred me once to a film (Portrait of Jason, 1967) where a man is sitting there smoking a cigarette for pretty much the entire film. That’s it. Talking about this on the way to get lunch one day we agreed that in a film like that, where that’s all that happens, the small things turn into huge events. Zach then stopped, scratched his head and thought for a moment, whispering to the air in front of him, “what was it that happened in that one…”. I stopped too, waited, and then finally he said “Ah yes, he ran out of gas on his lighter. Huge deal!” We both laughed and then stepped inside Jimmy’s, our regular lunch joint.

So to reiterate, Pavilion really is one of those exact films. It’s almost fair to say that if you blink or cough, you could miss the entire ‘reveal’ at the end of it. There are tiny fragmented shards of dialogue that tell you what’s happening whilst all the while you’re watching the most detached, beautiful and mesmerizing footage of kids feeling out the moments in those long, long, useless days of our youth. In fact what I said when I came back from the bathroom after Tim had screened his movie for us was ‘congratulations’. Congratulations for capturing that feeling of the abstract, aimless ennui of what it was to be young, with almost no sense of responsibility at all.

Tim then explained that he wanted a website and film posters from us, and we ended up all walking back along a hot Front Street in Brooklyn, talking all sorts of nonsense. Eventually he had to go one way, and we the other, but Pavilion wasn’t going to let us stray too far from each other in the coming months.

The next part, the actual design process, was tough. It’s always tough but this was particularly hard because we really wanted to nail it. Not because this was our ‘big chance’. Chances are people won’t see Pavilion ‘en masse’ until Tim’s next film is out and everyone is freaking out about how good he is. Then they’ll be picking up ‘that risky first movie’, you know, ‘to give it another chance’. No, we really wanted to nail this because the film demanded it. It was begging us to explain to someone who only saw the poster or visited the website for a second, what the film was about without of course explicitly telling them. You know, without a tagline even. It was such an abstract concept and relied so much on a feeling, that we felt it to be an exciting challenge. That said, we also of course didn’t want to oversell it. When very little happens, you can easily make a website or poster that promises too much. That too was a no no.

So the design work began and I sat huddled over my computer for several days in that nervous funk I always get into when I know I can do it and will do it, but it’s just not happening yet. Then, soon, like trying to pee when you’re really drunk, really full of booze, and have been holding it in for too long, things began to trickle out. Then moments later they all just came out together. Pretty soon I had a list of ideas spilled out on the page and sent them to Giles (best friend and Version Industries co-founder) for his thoughts.

He was into it.

For the website we agreed that animated GIFs, living movie stills, or what people are now calling cinemagraphs, were the right direction. There aren’t many truly captivating, art-for-the-sake-of-art websites on the internet, but of the few my favourite is easily if we don’t, remember me. Take a look. If you don’t know the site already (and already love it), you soon will. The only difficulty with Pavilion is that a lot of it is shot with a moving / handheld camera, and IWDRM has the luxury of picking out the movies with all the beautiful static shots in them. Nevertheless, the laid back, audio-less, ethereal quality of these was absolutely spot on for this project and so all we had to do was convince Tim.

Tim was down.

For the posters there were a bunch of things I’d scribbled on paper scraps lying half on and half off my couch in my living room the night before. These I’d typed up and emailed myself and then hated the next morning. However one or two of them triggered new ideas and we realized that effectively taking an idea from the most unlikely of sources – Robert Zemeckis’s 1985 film Back to the Future - was very possibly the solution to this film’s supporting printwork. So we quickly started putting together some demos using a low-quality quicktime of the film Tim had linked us to.

The extent of Tim’s enthusiasm for our ideas in the coming days was enough to get me through the coldest of winters, let alone the balmy week in July that it was. He wrote us back a long email analyzing each concept and explaining why each one worked for him in different ways. We then encouraged him to choose his top 2-3 concepts so that we could start working on the final editions. As I touched on in last month’s article – there’s being paid for doing some work and then there’s meeting the approval of someone who you respect. These two things are completely different, and the energy you get from one far exceeds the other. There was a fantastic feeling in the Version Industries studio the weeks that followed, hard at work as we were hard on the site and a final set of posters.

Some days into the production Tim wrote another excited email stating that he was so in love with the type treatment on the posters that he wanted us to do all the type for the actual film’s credit sequences. The hot pink, italic, capital letters had hit a chord with him (as we’d hoped it might), and had now dethroned the more restrained, plain, black, capitalized Futura he’d been using up until that point.

The only part that still concerns me slightly as we prepare to reveal the work we’ve been doing here is that it all still somehow doesn’t feel involved enough on some cursory level. I think this is because as a company we’re used to coming at a concept from several angles and layering up the visuals where possible. However, in being true to this very unusual film we knew that in every way less was more, and that meaning and impact were to be obtained from the most subtle and imperceptible touches. Furthermore when watching the film you realize the footage is almost untouched out of the camera, and this too informed the very raw and simple feel of all the work we produced in support of it.

So, without further ado, here is the Pavilion website -

And here are two of my favourites from the selection of posters we produced for the film -

We won’t spoil the details of the film by explaining our exact reasoning for the various elements of each design. We do hope however that each speaks for itself and that everything I’ve said gives you some insight into the process from start to finish, as well as leaving you with some unanswered questions of course …

For those who were not at the two talks I did for the IFP, my name is Caspar Newbolt and …]]> First of all, thank you IFP for the invitation to write monthly articles for your blog. It’s a very flattering and exciting opportunity, and I mean to give it my all.

For those who were not at the two talks I did for the IFP, my name is Caspar Newbolt and I co-founded Version Industries. To give you some context in terms of any comments I make towards films throughout this post and any future posts, I am currently in the process of developing four low to medium-budget film-related projects, alongside my more regular design duties at Version Industries. Three of these are music videos and one is a short film. I have shot, directed and edited three music videos and one documentary to date and have provided my company’s design services to three IFP film directors. I am also currently working on a record cover for a film soundtrack – the re-scoring of the 1970s science-fiction film Silent Running by 65daysofstatic.

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I’d like to start my IFP blog series by talking about the underrated commodity that is trust. It is perhaps the most valuable psychological element within the collaborative creative process, and so I believe very much worth talking about within the context of this blog. What’s most interesting about it is how it pervades the various parts of what we all do in different ways. Whether it be trust in the way you can emotionally captivate people with your work, trust in the collaborations you form as part of your work process, or trust in the way your projects aren’t given a chance to perform on their own terms. There are other ways of course, but these I believe are key at least to the way I work and the experiences I’ve had thus far. The following examples, anecdotes and rants I hope will illustrate these points clearly.

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In terms of the work I do for Version Industries, I have a healthy obsession with narrative and pathos, and feel that one should inherently lead to the other if you’re going to win the trust of your audience, whatever the medium. For this very reason I try wherever possible to tell a story with each project, be it a website, a record cover, a poster or a music video. I don’t mean a ‘story’ in the ‘fashion magazine’ sense, I mean a story with characters, scenes, events and climaxes. Now of course it doesn’t have to be a sad story to be a good story, but without a sense of pathos somewhere along the line, you won’t glean any real loyalty for your work. Take the funniest film you’ve ever seen and there’ll be a moment of sadness sitting right at the heart of it, and whether you like it or not it’s that moment that grounds everything else. Why? Because sadness feels more true than happiness. We might only recollect the happy memories and we certainly don’t have much memory of pain, but it’s a fact that it’s the sad moments that help us lower our defenses, bring us together and help us trust each other. Trust being fundamental if you are an artist trying to earn the respect of your peers and garner support from your audience. It’s trust that leads them to follow your progress and consequently support for your next piece of work, be that financially or other.

Two projects of this kind that we’ve just completed are record covers, one for the Nashville, Tennessee electronic musician Makeup and Vanity Set and the other for the Manchester, England electronic musician Polinski. Each project involved setting up a narrative behind the music and then illustrating that as best we could in the artwork. Makeup and Vanity Set only had one image produced by us, Polinski consisted of a series of panels much like a triptych. Both stories contained the element of loss and the drive to search, find and get back that which was gone – pathos and narrative. I’d recently lost someone very dear to me and these on-going projects provided me, to a certain extent, with a cathartic outlet for this. You can see both covers below.

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In terms of collaborations, as mentioned above I do a lot of pro-bono work for projects of my own choosing. These projects are generally for bands, but the bands I’m into are typically of a cinematic or conceptual nature. The projects are more of a collaboration and each have turned into good friendships. If you want to produce the best work you can, you must work with people you can call friends and, furthermore, who are on the same wavelength as you artistically. This way you are always expressing yourself creatively in the most honest and open-hearted way, and they are giving you the platform to do this on. You then get to the point where you’re talking to them every day online or offline and the process is no longer about deadlines. It’s more about a stream of ideas, references and concepts that never ends, and a body of work that evolves as each of you grow, live life and tackle each new obstacle together. Again, it’s all about trust.

All the film makers I look up to and respect have a very singular vision that’s come to be in part as a the result of a very trusting, long-lasting friendship. Whether it be Darren Aronofsky and Clint Mansell, David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti or John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands, we all smile when we think of the powerful pieces they’ve put together.

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Finally, in an ideal world we’d hope the people financing, promoting and pushing our work would believe in us enough to let the work speak for itself. A lack of trust is the reason product placement in film has become more and more aggressive. If the consumers believed anything the advertisers said, they might spend less time avoiding what they had to say. If the film studios believed in the film makers and their script, they might not be so insistent on re-writing the film as a commercial.  Instead ads breed like bacteria, form like a mould on every surface and continue to find new ways to invade our waking moments. David Lynch put it better than any of us really.

The moment you lose trust in someone or something is a very precarious and dangerous occasion and it is sadly not something people fear enough. As the old saying goes – if you haven’t got anything good to say, then don’t say anything – lest you lose their trust and sacrifice your integrity in the process. The author and screenwriter William Goldman took what seemed a very defeatist stance when he stated his great rule of (studio and independent) film making: nobody knows anything. By this he of course meant that despite having a great script, great actors, a great director and every other good thing you can have going for a film – how it turns out and how it’s received can still not be guaranteed. Now he’s a great writer and has a vast amount of experience to back this statement up, but we all know there are more examples than you can count on two hands of cases of directors and writers who’ve put out a pretty consistent body of work throughout their careers. Stanley Kubrick being the first that comes to mind – a case which makes me think that Goldman was perhaps a little to financially minded in his statement. After all no one accurately remembers how well a film did in history, they just remember how much they enjoyed it.

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So a level of trust certainly pervades everything we do artistically and there are touchstones certainly to ensuring a trustworthy relationship or set of particularly creative circumstances.

Managing expectations well is one of these. You need to govern well the scale and cost of the project, but never the ambition or scope. This way no one is paying a lot for a project that is taking a risk, but everyone is making sure that project happens because it’s an exciting risk and therefore a highly motivating endeavor. As we all know, expensive does not equal good. It never has and it never will.

Taste is the other major factor here. Some people have good taste and some don’t. Taste is fundamental to making great art and is what should be the focus of producers, investors paving your way. By this I mean you should be finding producers and investors that have good taste, and they in turn should be looking for good musicians, writers and directors who have the same. Only together will you be able to trust each other to make great art, and only together will everyone be satisfied.

Trust makes good art, earning trust takes management and good taste.