I’m Patrick and this is my first time posting on Shooting People. Two weeks ago I was approached by James Mullighan to blog about a self-distribution project I’m running at Met Film. Some of you might know the Met Film School, it turns out we’re actually a group of three companies, Met Film Post, Met Film Production and the Met Film School and we develop, produce and post-produce a variety of feature films and television programs… Bet you didn’t know that!

Well, it just so happens that Met Film Production made a film called Heavy Load - a great documentary about a punk band of the same name. It was funded by the IFC and ITVS in the US and the BBC here in the UK. With TV rights out (UK and US resting with the BBC and IFC respectively) and our international sales with the girls at TVF we found ourselves still sitting on UK and US DVD and theatrical rights. Around the same time a couple of people at Met had also become very interested in self-distribution, especially after hearing about all the neat ways to find niche audiences and aggregate them for effective DVD and theatrical distribution.

Well, it didn’t take us long to figure out what we were going to do with those rights we had laying around the office – we’ll try this self-distribution-thing ourselves! That was back in June. In August we hired Dnyan to help me put everything together and together with Al, who produced Heavy Load, we started our journey in to self-distribution

The idea behind all this is that we believe self-distribution is coming of age and there are some unique films with identifiable core audiences which can be reached much cheaper and more efficiently through social networks, direct online marketing and PR than the traditional posters-on-the-tube approach and with Heavy Load we’re looking to prove this assumption right.

To date we feel we’ve been doing pretty well. We’ve engaged a PR agency and a cinema booker and we’re in talks with DVD wholesalers about stocking our titles on high street shelves. Our website has been updated and will include an online shop to buy directly from us. We’re date mining left right and center and are updating our groups and blogs on Facebook, Myspace and Bebo daily.

Early on we decided that Heavy Load should play in cinemas – even though we’d most likely loose money overall, the press won’t review a straight to DVD film like they do a theatrical one and running the numbers our losses would be minimal considering we’d screen through the digital cinema network at £78 a cinema as opposed to £4,000 per print. As of writing we have a pretty good theatrical run: 2 weeks at the ICA, 1 week at the Empire Leicester Square and another 2 weeks dotted across the country – the full list plus more info and goodies can be found at: www.heavyloadthemovie.com

This theatrical run has resulted in some great PR, two-page spreads in the Guardian, reviews in Total Film, Empire, Little White Lies, a section on BBC Radio 4 and the promise of MTV at our Premiere at the ICA this week.

So for this week its all hands on deck to make sure we maximise the PR from our premiere – luckily it sold out straight away and the gigs we’ve organised for afterwards are also at capacity. Now we’ve just got to entice the press down… free beer anyone?

I’ll be back in a few days and let you know how the premiere went – at the moment we’re looking for volunteers to help out on the day and photographers and filmamkers to take as many pictures and videos as they can and post them online – if you’ve got your own photo or film blog, let me know!

Best,

P

Along with the expenses incurred if you go it alone there are other caveats to bear in mind:

“You‘ve got to have the phone numbers,” said Tom Bernard, the longtime co-president of Sony Pictures Classics. “Self-distribution is good, it can work, but filmmakers who are so innovative in making movies have to channel some of that into learning how the marketplace works.” He said major pitfalls were “carpetbaggers” and “middlemen” who may agree to represent a movie at a place like Sundance, but gravitate to the easy sale and leave their less fortunate filmmakers high and dry.

” Creative distribution strategies are enabling [filmmakers] to get their films out more widely, earn more money and have greater political impact than would be possible through traditional distribution deals.”