Sometimes you have to go old-school to promote your film. Benny Safdie takes to the streets with a sandwich board to promote Daddy Longlegs which opens at the IFC Center in New York tomorrow. Read Eric Kohn’s indieWIRE piece on the Safdie brothers and Red Bucket Films.
If you haven’t picked up a copy of Jon Reiss’ Think Outside the Box Office do yourself a favor and grab one now. Whatever kind of distribution and marketing strategy you are pursuing for your film (and if you haven’t got a strategy yet this book will help you develop one!), there are loads of good tips and ideas in here for you. This is a time when we all need to be sharing as many resources as possible to…
I created a wiki – digitalbootcamp.wikispaces.com – for the Shooting People Digital Bootcamp workshop conducted on July 4th 2009 at the Frontline Club – taught by James Mullighan, Harriet Fleuriot and myself. Like the workshop itself, most of these resources are aimed at documentary filmmakers but narrative filmmakers can find lots of good ideas here too. Please add to the wiki if you have additional links, tips and tricks to share – we want plenty of collaboration in the spirit…
The very smart and savvy Sakia Wilson-Brown has written a series of posts for IndieGoGo on viral marketing. You can read the 3rd post here and then follow the links at the bottom for parts 1 and 2 (the IndieGoGo blog is doing funny things to my browser which is why I’m linking to Saskia’s blog).
Scott Kirsner of CinemaTech was commissioned by ITVS to investigate how indepedent filmmakers are working with new technologies and to answer the following questions: Opening Up Production to Participation During pre-production and production, how are filmmakers communicating with audiences, widely dispersed teams, funders and prospective subjects in new ways? What new opportunities for involvement and participation are they exploring? Finding New Audiences Once a project is completed and ready for release/broadcast, how are filmmakers using blogs, social networks, games and…
I’ve been meaning to blog about Anita Elberse’s Should You Invest in the Long Tail article for a while now because it highlights some key misunderstandings about what the long tail actually means for producers and aggregators/retailers of niche content ie. it absolutely does not mean that niche content is suddenly turning into blockbuster material and neither does it mean that niche content producers/aggregators no longer need to worry about big, mainstream successes. In fact the hits are vitally important…
John Tozzi’s Business Week article Indie Filmmakers Hit Their Target shows the abundance of new methods of distribution available to independent filmmakers. He details success stories of films and their creators who, rather than following traditional routes, are opting to take distribution on with the same entrepreneurial spirit they channel into their films. By maintaining their distribution rights, these filmmakers are carving new roads into advertising and distribution, while managing to draw a greater interest in their films (as opposed…
Jeremy Walker is taking the Summer, and possibly the rest of his life, off from film publicity. He has written a piece for indieWIRE reflecting on the nature of publicity (and the importance of good film stills!) Read it to find out more about what publicists should and should not do. For example: Filmmakers should not think about what goodies a publicist can “get” for them; rather they should think about how a publicist can integrate their film into both…
