I know I said in my last blog I was going to explain what ideas lay behind the creation of Oodle, but I’m going to divert this week to discusss something that is exercising me more and more each day, the market!

Since I was a lad of about fourteen, I have known that what I wanted to do with my life was make films, films that are shown in a large dark room filled (hopefully) with people eager to see said film.  This desire came with a belief that I also had the goods to achieve said dream.  But it isn’t so easy.  I used to think that the best way to succeed was make the best work you can, that is your stall; people will come along, gaze upon it, appreciate the skill on display and choose to partake in some way.  Like I said, it isn’t so easy.  One of the best things I ever made, a children’s comedy series that I put my heart and soul into, won a Best Drama Bafta in 2006.  I haven’t even had so much as an interview for any TV directing gig since and am unrepresented as my agent finally threw in the towel.  So much for quality being your calling card.

I love the process, but I am rather less impressed with the business.  I attend scriptwriter’s conferences where senior representatives of TV broadcasters proclaim they are desperate to find the next Dennis Potter, while refusing to contemplate a commission for anything beyond the most mundane and risk free programme.  I don’t believe them anymore, in fact as a culture that celebrates soap above most other drama forms has held sway in TV for some fifteen years now and these senior executives have come up in that time, would they even recognise the next Dennis Potter?  Or might they think, this writer’s barking mad?

To be fair though, drama is extremely subjective.  One person’s masterpiece is another’s fish wrapper, but to allow the great works to come into being, there needs to be a market with sufficient breadth for all to develop, where producers can take chances on work and succeed or fail and earn a living in the process and though there might be pockets of that in television, in film in this country that doesn’t exist.   Every few months in one paper or another, someone is agonising about the UK film industry, that it’s a cottage industry, that producers can’t find investors because investors never make their money back, so can’t get their projects made, so can’t earn a living, so are giving up, yadda yadda yadda.

You think it’s complicated?  The solution is not complicated, the solution is allowing the producers to sell their product to their own market and earn money from it.  Everything else flows from that and in the UK the Americans own our market and they will not let us in.  It’s our market.  Let me say that again.  It’s our market!  If it was supermarkets and like Asda is owned by Walmart, they were all owned by Americans and they refused to sell anything but American food and UK food producers were all going to the wall and local food types disappearing, would we still sit idly by?  Ok film is not a staple of life, the analogy is not perfect, but it does illustrate the placid acceptance of another dominant culture over our own and I have to wonder why?  Why is a product that we have enormous skill at making, with such immense global value so completely neglected. I should probably state here that I have nothing against American film, I love an awful lot of them and admire their incredible breadth, but I want to make films in my country and it is nigh on impossible because the control of the distribution system by foreign owners denies me the economics that makes it possible.  I really would like to see that change.

It may be a dirty word to some, Thatcherite economists mostly I suspect, but quotas seem to me to be the only real solution, yes, it’s an artificial intervention, but the playing field is not level, we are not allowed to compete on anything like fair terms and a quota would go some way towards levelling the field.  We had an industry when we had quotas and it’s disappeared since they were abolished.  France has always had quotas, 15% of films in cinemas must be of French origin and they have a flourishing industry.  Not all of their films are brilliant by any means and you wouldn’t expect them to be, but they regularly release over 100 indigenous films; we are having a great year if we manage 10 and I’m not including films like Harry Potter, films made here with American money are not British films.  Though I appreciate there is a desire to exert some ownership over the skills involved in making those films, that is a double edged sword, it can lead us into the notion that we have a film business and in the respect of delivering the resources to make those films we do (and in some respects thank God as it maintains our skills base), but the money those films make goes back to America, they are still just American films made over here.  In Germany the quota is also 15%, in Spain it’s 30%.  German film is a resurgent success story with money to spend; Spain’s industry has exploded into life almost over night.  Market economics dictate that whatever the market chooses must be the best for all, but surely that is a very blunt instrument?  It is simply survival of the fittest, but in a developed society we also apply morality and intelligence, we protect and support everyone, recognising that all have something to contribute and brute strength is not the only value.  A quota is not a dirty word; it is just a government exercising its very considerable strength to provide a breathing space so that a less powerful, but valued contributor to the market may survive.  The Americans will continue to make billions from our market, but some of the money generated from people sitting in large dark rooms will stay in the UK to generate more films and if the coalition government are serious about supporting entrepreneurs, so that they will build business and help dig the UK out of it’s debt mountain, then they should seriously think about this.

I would really love to know what other people think about this and see a dialogue develop, there is a real argument to be put here and something really needs to change somehow, so please share your thoughts.

DS

If making a film is akin to having a baby, then making the DVD is like packing the growing teenager off to college and making him face the world on his own two feet.  My (business) partner Maya Hammarsal and I are wondering how our off-spring will fare.  We’re as proud as parents generally are.  We think he’s a well turned out and carefully nurtured individual.  However, the anxiety is still there.  Will he make an impression, be ignored, be ridiculed even or exploited or will he find his own path and make some friends along the way?

He’s not a sexy or hip individual, he’s not brash or edgy.  On the surface he isn’t the obvious candidate for success.  Our off-spring is a 40 minute arts documentary (BOSDET: The man behind the glass window), our first film of significant length, about a little known (undiscovered even) Jersey artist who, made his name on the international stage as a particularly gifted stained glass artist at the end of the 19^th century.   The film seeks to shed light on the man and also on that distinct Jersey culture that’s not quite English and not quite French.

This is our first DVD – I’ve overseen the whole process and as a result I’m feel particularly anxious – fearful that I’ve made some major mistake along the way.  Help hasn’t been difficult to find though, if you’re prepared to do the searching on-line and in the real world.  I attended the very good talk back in July (Making and Raising Money On-line) given by Peter Broderick and Sandi Du Bowski.  Peter finished with a stirring thought that ‘now is a golden age for being an independent  filmmaker’.  Even 5 years ago there weren’t the opportunities to self-distribute, build on-line communities, crowd-source and crowd fund he said.  As I wasn’t making films (certainly not with the intention of making money) 5 years ago I can’t tell if he was right, but it was inspirational stuff.  Then there was the podcast [26/08/2010] by Chris Jones (of Guerilla Filmmaker fame) where he interviewed James Collie about his film ‘Beyond Biba’. On the surface this film about a 60s fashion icon seemed as niche as ours and yet they had had extraordinary success with cinema releases, festivals that paid them to exhibit (how cool is that?), DVD sales and international TV deals.

We decided early on that our film wasn’t going to get a TV commission or wide festival coverage partly as we weren’t know to TV execs and partly because of our subject matter and length (not quite a short and not a feature).  We’re happy with the 2 festival screenings we got: the first in the US at the Jersey Shore Film Festival – (note the Jersey connection; we made sure we flagged that up with personal letters to the organizers) and the latest this weekend at the Branchage International Film Festival in Jersey, UK).  However, as we all know festival screenings don’t make you money.

Our approach to making back the cash we invested has been through specialist screenings, targeted mail-outs and carefully developed partnerships.  The film has already made us money at 2 screenings last October at the local Jersey history society, who generously gave a venue for free and allowed us to keep the box office takings.  We had over 200 at the events.  With hindsight we should have had the DVD ready to sell then, but a combination of lack of time and a fear this would prohibit any festival exposure at all stopped us.  We resorted to taking names and addresses, trying to build our first level of ‘fans’ and hoping that 12 months down the line these people would still be willing to buy a copy of the film, especially if it now offers extra shorts and interviews that provide greater textual context to the times, the unique language on Jersey and the more ‘technical’ aspects of Victorian stained glass window making.

A breakthrough was getting access to other people’s mailing lists.  The local history society has 2,500 names.  A direct approach through a flyer and ‘members only’ discount for a limited period is good for the society presenting the offer and good for us (we hope).  These people fit our ‘ideal viewer’ profile: people who are interested in Jersey, interested in history and interested in art.

We’ve also got another partnership with the local museum to show the film daily for the next year and where the film will be on sale in the Museum shop.  The world of retail is not kind to the small independent filmmaker.  Their mark up will give them a profit far greater than the one either of us will get.  It’s certainly not as lucrative as selling direct through our website (www.bosdetfilm.com) but it’s a shop front where the public would expect to find it and having a few sales up front (even if they are at a whole sale price) does bring in much needed money without the wait.

Finally, the education/specialist talk circuit beckons.  Church groups, schools and the W.I. might not be as sexy as the festival Q & A circuit, but you need to go where your audience is and if they pay you to screen and you can shift a few dozen DVDs then that’s success in my book.  At the end of the day I want this film to get seen and make money: not be a worthy artistic success but a financial failure.

So at the moment the future for this slightly un-trendy teenager doesn’t seem too bad.  We’ve accepted that we won’t be too prominent at festivals, on TV or in high street retail outlets.  But this doesn’t mean to say that we won’t be a success.  Accessing, developing and targeting ‘meaningful’ mailing lists, setting up ‘deals’ where both parties feel they are getting something beneficial (though not always monetary) and doing much of the DVD authoring ourselves has kept costs down, allowing us to feel confidant that this first foray into the big wide world of distribution and commerce won’t be the last.

‘BOSDET: The man behind the glass window’ by Maya Hammarsal & Mark X Jones screens at St. Helier Town Church, Jersey at 7pm on Saturday 25^th September as part of the Branchage International Film Festival 2010.  It’s also available later this month from www.bosdetfilm.com

Since then he has created a distribution union of many leading p2p sites ( The Pirate Bay, Mininova, Miro, TorrentFreak, Isohunt, Plube, OneDDL, Vuze, Frostwire and others) whose accumulative daily users top 40 million. They have agreed to promote one VODO film a month on their front pages. This means that free complete copies of the films will be released to all these site and VODO, which is short for voluntary donation, will collect all and any donations which are given as a result.

The project went live with Ivo Gormley’s documentary “Us Now” as the first test. The film achieved 100,000 downloads in the first four days and a bunch of attention, which ain’t bad at all. VODO is backed by the Arts Council, The Channel 4 BRITDOC Foundation, Emerald Fund and Goldsmith’s College. Shooting People is coming on board as a strategic partner, offering engagement and support for a number of reasons:

We applaud these kinds of distribution experiments which are driven by a love of independent content and a desire to make the work of independent filmmakers (rather than mega bucks for corporate entertainment conglomerates) sustainable in the digital era. We wanted to give Jamie our public support.
VODO needs quirky, smart and adventurous filmmakers to consider using this approach. Shooting People has loads of those.
We wanted to stay close to the results, lessons and new ideas that will come out of this experiment and be able to share that with the community. Can P2P sites drive large audiences to new work, not just famous titles? Can a donation culture be developed amongst those who are no longer paying for content up front? How many downloads are needed to trigger one donation? Is it possible to build a fan base for filmmakers this way? Can you sell content to TV stations after they have been a pirate hit? There are many important questions here that can only be answered by sucking and seeing.

So please go to VODO.net to find out more: www.vodo.net

So create an account and get stuck in. I’m very excited to see this build and I’ll be reporting back further as I try it out and encourage filmmakers to do the same.