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 make the long, hard road of getting a film made and seen feel just a little bit less like venturing forth into complete Terra Incognita. There are lots of great folk out there helping to clear a path through the wilderness, like Ted Hope with Truly Free Film for example, but we all need to share what we are learning as we re-invent the future. So read this book and pass it on!

We’re really proud of the growing Digital Bootcamp Wiki. It started off as a companion to the workshops we have been conducting but it has now become a standalone resource on funding, distribution, marketing and so much more in the digital age. Wiki comes from the Hawaiian word for “fast” – and if you all collaborate to this wiki by adding to it we can help it grow even faster!

We’re pretty excited to let you know that we’ve up to a strategic partnership with VODO (short for voluntary donations), an experiment in new distribution from Shooter Jamie King. What’s the idea? Well, Jamie is also one of the directors of Steal This Film, a film that he achieved over 5 million downloads for by working with Pirate Bay to promote and distribute the film for him. He also received more voluntary donations for the film than he would have earned from sharing advertising revenue on those views with Youtube or any of the other revenue sharing online distributors.

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

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 of the wiki!

The catch is you have to contribute some of this info! But check out the DocAgora Webplex website. There’s already a lot of great resources on there for documentary filmmakers and this is the sort of site that will only get stronger as more people use it and contribute to it (it’s early days yet so don’t expect a complete database at this stage). I was talking to a filmmaker at Hot Docs who said that he wished that there was one place to go for all these resources. Well now there is! Or at least there will be.

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.

Scottish Screen have provided a very handy downloadable guide to the world of short film distribution. It covers all the bases from festivals to sales agents to digital distribution. If you are even considering making a short film you should read this guide. One of the things I am learning is that thinking about distribution AFTER your film is made is usually way too late. You should be thinking about the goals you have for your film from day 1 of pre-production. It saves a lot of headaches in the long run and it actually makes the whole distribution process more empowering and creative for you, the filmmaker. So get reading!

The incredibly useful Workbook Project recently added another weapon to its creative arsenal. NEW BREED consists of first person accounts of the filmmaking process – you can read through all the posts or go straight to the filmmakers or projects that you’re particularly interested in. The site outlines some NEW BREED goals for 2009:

With the dawn of 2009 comes some new additions to the site. NEW BREED: CRITICAL FOCUS will introduce a new series of interviews, special topics addressed by site regulars and more articles from guest contributers. Look for upcoming conversations with filmmakers Hunter Weeks, Ondi Timoner, Barry Jenkins, Lynn Shelton and Joe Swanberg, as well as a new series of articles by site regulars sharing insight into lessons learned… the hard way. And in a few days we will introduce a prolific filmmaker of short films, Jack Daniel Stanley, who takes his southern gothic horror film, A Little Mouth To Feed, to Slamdance 09 and offers insight into his preparations, planning and experience at the festival.

If you’d prefer not to learn ALL your lessons the hard way, read NEW BREED and hear from filmmakers who learned them for you!

I have been spending the last few days catching up on presentations and panels from the Power to the Pixel conference that took place in London last month – they are now online and free to wach. There’s some great info and ideas here, from Christy Dena on cross-media production, to Arin Crumley on collaborative filmmaking to Jamie King on distribution. If you are feeling worried about how the credit crunch is going to affect independent filmmaking (and let’s face it, who of us isn’t!) then watch some of these videos and get inspired about all the possibilities out there (many of them low cost, using free tools that are already available).

Here’s Jamie King, creator of Steal This Film, which has been viewed millions of times after being given away for free via BitTorrent.

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 other technologies to reach audiences that will care about their project?

New Distribution Opportunities
How are filmmakers presenting their work on websites, cell phones, iPods and the new generation of Internet-connected TVs and set-top boxes? Do these distribution avenues create conflict with more traditional outlets? Are there substantial economic benefits or simply promotional positives?

You should check out the suggested strategies for connection-creating, marketing and promotion and distribution.

Case studies include:

Byron Hurt:HIP-HOP: Beyond Beats and Rhymes
Katy Chevigny: ELECTION DAY
Curt Ellis: KING CORN
David Iverson: STILL LIFE
Hunter Weeks and Josh Caldwell: 10 MPH
Tiffany Shlain: The Tribe

Hi everyone,

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