While it’s safe to provide projections – any investor with any business experience will understand that each project carries it’s own risk to reward ratio. Your goal as a filmmaker is to help mitigate these risks as best you can.
By now you’ve heard of crowdfunding. But the little secret that nobody is talking about is this – Not all movie projects will get fully funded by the crowd. BUT. . .
Without a defined market or an established sales channel, it is difficult to justify financing, which makes it very difficult to pay cast and crew – which, by the way, makes it difficult to produce a movie.
As a result of lower priced production equipment, coupled with non-discriminatory distribution, YOU can make, market and sell your movie this year and you don’t need to ask permission.
As a filmmaker, getting movies made, seen and sold sometimes seems impossible. And if you haven’t yet made your first feature, sometimes it’s easy to get caught up in all the reason’s why it can’t be done.
A lot of filmmakers (who do not have website traffic) are being fed the idea that “content enablers” will magically source an audience. When I wrote the post about website streaming, I did so more in response to the never-ending slew of emails I get from various PR firms trying to push the next streaming gizmo for indie filmmakers – none of which solves the blatant problem of actually getting enough people to watch the movie…
We’ve all heard many horror stories from filmmakers who were thrilled to find a distributor for their film only to find the film was mishandled, shelved or the company went under with no recourse for the filmmaker to claim their rights back. There are also distributors so coveted for their professionalism and skill at finding the right audiences for their titles that everyone wants to work with them.
I believe video on demand distribution represents freedom for filmmakers. While there are many great sales agents and distributors, I am totally bothered by the sales agents and middle-men who have taken a bottom-feeding approach to VOD. These jerks make a living trying to sucker unsuspecting filmmakers into long term video on demand deals that suck. I put together the following video to express my disgust and also provide a new hope. As a modern moviemaker, there has never been a better time to make, market and sell your movies without the middle-man.
I started Filmmaking Stuff because I wanted to help filmmakers make movies and also, create a self sustaining movie business. In other words, if you have the passion to make movies, then you owe it to yourself to get moving! The following filmmaking video provides you with a brief overview of the Modern MovieMaking Method. I also show you how to grab over $100 dollars in filmmaking tools, free.
One of the most important filmmaking strategies you must adopt in this era of modern moviemaking is a long term perspective. In years past, filmmakers focused on making one movie, selling it and then moving on to the next movie.