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What is Your Filmmaking Niche?

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In movie marketing, there is this phrase I really like: “Marketing to everybody is marketing to nobody and niches will make you riches.” And while not every movie is guaranteed success, it is much easier to find your audience when you choose a filmmaking niche.

What is a filmmaking niche? It’s making a movie for a small slice of a larger audience. For example, let’s say you were making a horror movie. Horror is a very broad genre. But a subset of the horror genre is zombie movies. So in this example, making a zombie movie for a zombie loving audience would be your filmmaking niche.

So this is where you start. Will you make a horror movie, romantic comedy, action movie or a girl with a horse movie? (By the way, a girl with a horse movie really does well internationally.)

filmmaking niche

What is Your Filmmaking Niche?

Knowing your filmmaking niche is important because in order to make non-discriminatory distribution channels, such as iTunes and Amazon profitable – It is required that YOU market your movie on the internet. This means that you must work on sourcing your target audience and then drive those folks to your point of sale.

Having spent the last few years working in distribution, I can tell you that most filmmakers screw this up. They make a movie for everybody. And it is frankly too expensive to market to everybody! So before you even think about making your movie, answer these filmmaking questions:

  1. Who Is Your Target Audience?
  2. How Large Is Your Target Audience?
  3. How Will You Reach Your Audience?
  4. What Is Your Marketing Strategy?
  5. How Many VOD Sales To Break Even?

Since both iTunes and Amazon are internet, transactional marketplaces, it makes sense that most of your sales will come via the internet. And as a result, you must create a web presence that speaks to your audience. In other words, you need to make sure the right people know your movie exists.

Who are the right people? People who love your type of movie.

Your Movie Website

When it comes to designing a movie website, most filmmakers never think about their filmmaking niche. They know they need a website for their movies. The problem is, most filmmakers put way too much crap on their site. And none of it speaks to their audience.

Goals

It’s essential to have goals for your movie website. When people come to your website, what action do you want your visitors to take? Do you want them to Tweet about the site? Join you on Facebook? Get into your audience list? Or buy your movie?

Distractions

Once you know your website goals, you need to determine if your website architecture and design is inline with your goals. To do this, install Google Analytics and monitor your traffic. If you find people are getting lost in a bunch of silly pages, remove those pages. Keep what matters.

If you like these tips, you’ll love the Independent Producer’s Guide To Digitial Distribution

How To Sell Your Movie Idea

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If you want to sell your movie idea and actually get your movie made, stop procrastinating and take action. Start the process by breaking your BIG filmmaking project into small, manageable chunks. How do YOU plan on taking your movie project from script to screen?

Do you plan on finding prospective investors outside of Hollywood to fund your movie? Or do you plan on moving to Hollywood and then networking your way through the studio system?

sell your movie idea

How To Sell Your Movie Idea

1. What Are You Selling?

Everybody has an idea. Trust me. The other day, while waiting to get my oil changed, I sat within earshot of two idiots pitching movie ideas to each other.

Both thought the other was gonna jump at the chance to “produce” each other’s epic story. The problem was, both of these yahoos wanted the same thing – to get THEIR movie made.

(And both bragged about knowing some movie star.)

In this example, even if these guys were real, there was no buyer in the conversation, just sellers.

Before you make your pitch, make sure you’re actually pitching to a buyer. And secondly, make sure the buyer actually cares about what you’re selling.

2. Make Sure Your Movie Is More Than An Idea

Everybody in Hollywood has an idea for a movie. Everybody thinks they can write screenplays. Everybody thinks they are special.

Everybody is crossing their fingers, waiting and praying that SOMEONE ELSE will recognize their talent and sprinkle them with Hollywood famous fairy dust.

Ideas are everywhere and ideas are worth less than something tangible.

If you want to be taken seriously, make sure you have more than an idea. I suggest having the rights to an outstanding story, or some money in the bank, or the interest of a NAME actor. At least this is something.

3. Speak The Language Of Your Buyer

Everybody asks: What’s in it for me? If you don’t get this, you will pitch water to fish – with no success. (Fish do not need additional water!)

While I enjoy all movies, my own interests involve skateboarding, time travel and science fiction that explores theories of physics. I also like knowing if there is an easily accessible market.

Is there a niche target audience for your story?

Story aside, some people are interested in helping you because they think it will help them get laid, make more money or simply feel good on the golf course, bragging that that they are now a film producer.

What does your buyer want? If you do not know, you have no business pitching.

If this aspect of film producing seems totally cray, cray and you never sold a thing, I highly recommend you get some sort of sales job. This will teach you cold calling skills, how to face rejection and if you’re good, you might just make few bucks in the process.

Or you could just grab a copy of my buddy Scott’s book – Writing For The Greenlight. In it, you will find out what Hollywood script readers, producers, and studio executives want in a screenplay (and why) from someone who’s been there. Grab your copy now.

How To Generate Movie Ideas That Sell

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A few weeks back I was at my dentist. We got to talking about movie ideas. And she immediately started telling me about some story she’s been writing for close to a decade.

That wouldn’t be too bad, except I’m paying her to drill my teeth.

And her story sucks.

Well, let me clarify…

I didn’t actually read her screenplay. For all I know the execution could be fabulous. But in terms of finding a remarkable hook that would lead her (or a distributor) to fulfilling my seven si·ne qua non distribution tactics, there was nothing there.

Nothing memorable. Nothing remarkable. And nothing exciting…

I recommended that she hire an A-List movie star and call it a day.

(That is what I call generic advice for generic movie ideas.)

As a filmmaker your success depends on your ability to produce and pitch movie ideas that sell. A good movie idea is memorable. It makes people raise an eyebrow and respond, “that’s interesting!” And it’s the sort of thing people remember long after you left the conversation.

From a business perspective, great movie ideas have a clearly defined target audience. If you can’t define your audience, you’ve either never thought about creating movie ideas that sell… Or you’re pretending that everybody on earth is your audience.

If that’s your situation, allow me to share a saying that applies to your movie business:

“Everybody is nobody. It’s niches will make you riches.”

movie ideas

Movie Ideas That Sell

The first step to planning your movie and finding your niche begins with brainstorming a few movie ideas. Write down a list of at least a dozen movie concepts that seem interesting to you. From there, pick the most appealing idea.

Keep in mind that getting your movie made, seen and selling is not a fast process. So in addition to creating marketable concept, you have to love your material. If you cannot have fun with your story, then why make the movie?

Once you focus on a concept, distill your movie into one concise sentence known as a log-line.

For example, let’s say your movie is described as “Zombies attack people.” Obviously this is a very succinct log-line, but it lacks the necessary detail to make your movie memorable. So your next job is to incorporate some flavorful elements back into your log-line.

Here is the same example with added detail: “Zombies attack a camp for the mentally challenged.”

While socially inappropriate, the extra detail adds sizzle to the description.

This will help you in two ways. Firstly, a unique description makes it easy for your audience to immediately understand how your movie differs from all the other movies in the genre. And secondly, from a marketing perspective, the words “zombies,” “zombies attack,” and “zombie movies” will help you to refine target your core audience.

Later, these targeted keywords will help you jump-start your internet search engine optimization campaign.

If you like these filmmaking tips, you’ll love my Sell Your Movie System.

 

Sell Your Movie For Maximum Profit

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If you’re already a seasoned feature filmmaker, take a moment and think back: Do you remember when the idea of making movies seemed like a far away dream?

Do you remember when you first got the idea for your movie? Do you remember Your first day of production? Do you remember your first screening and how well everyone loved your work?

That happened to me with my first feature. Like you, I thought our movie would get into Sundance, play well, build buzz and if we were really lucky, we had hoped the movie would garner us a 3 picture deal. But that didn’t happen.

Sure, we got some offers, but they were not “deals.” (A deal actually pays money!)

So instead of exchanging our movie for an empty promise, we decided to try selling our movie on the internet. Little did I know, this one decision has changed the course of my movie making life. That was five years ago…

And since that time, the internet as evolved. If you’re a filmmaker with a movie, you need to get it selling in all the popular internet marketplaces, including Amazon and iTunes.

You don’t need a middle-man to make this profitable. I am going to show you my internet marketing secrets…

You can check out my “How To Sell Your Movie” system by visiting the website here.

Modern Moviemaking Manifesto Explained

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Filmmakers need to establish a new business model to survive changes in VOD distritbution. Business Model Canvas: Nine business model bui...
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Last week I published a new filmmaking podcast called the Modern Moviemaking Manifesto. I published these ideas in response to all my veteran independent filmmaking friends who are currently having difficulty raising movie financing, and later, getting a return on that money.

Since posting, I have gotten a lot of feedback. Most of it has been positive. But there have been some questions. The most glaring involves how to create a production team for the long term. And the other feedback has something to do with my pragmatic approach to the movie business. I’m told that the modern movie making model, relying heavily on VOD distribution, is not as sexy as what most filmmakers expect (because I don’t talk about Hollywood fame and fortune and going to cool parties, et al.) One woman screamed at me, telling me that she doesn’t care about business and just wants to make movies. Other folks have simply told me my modern moviemaker ideas suck. And others have quit our filmmaking community.

This was to be expected. Not everybody is willing to explore or embrace new filmmaking ideas. And when I listen to my own recording, I can see how my enthusiasm for the modern moviemaking model could potentially sound pompous. This was not my intention. So I promise to get back to Toastmasters and refine my speech. But all of this aside, I believe the demise of traditional movie distribution creates a serious problem as filmmakers – and also a great opportunity. As a result, we have two options as filmmakers. We can choose to ignore this, or we can choose to be part of the modern moviemaking solution.

If you read Ted Hope’s blog – Truly Free Film, you may have seen my conversational responses to Sheri Candler’s well written guest post: How To Make Money With The New Independent Film Distributors’ Business Model. If not, it’s worth a read. And I have added one of my responses, on how to make Independent Filmmaking a viable business, here.

Just like you, I’m looking for a way that us fillmmakers can actually make a living making movies in this brave new world of VOD distribution. So in terms of empirical data, so far in my own business, I can tell you that at least one of our titles generates a nice stream of passive income without the middle-man, and without much marketing. As a result, many of the acquisition folks who formerally rejected our title have circled back with offers. While the new deals are OK (cash advances for foreign territories, complete with performance bumps), after crunching some numbers, the headache of locking up rights prompted us to respond in way familiar to most gate keepers: “Unfortunately we have to pass at this time.”

In this new era of filmmaking, our growing ability to make our movies, find our audience and make money without the middle-man has forever changed my life. And as a result, I firmly believe this process can be repeated for all subsequent titles. I mean, sure, we can still entertain traditional theatrical and retail DVD distribution both in North America and abroad (while these channels still exist, and if we are so fortunate) – but from now on, it is my intention to base my business plans on projected returns from our direct DVD rights as well as our VOD rights – because these are the two sales channels that filmmakers can access and control without asking some middle-man for permission.

For those of you who are adding your own thoughts to the Modern Moviemaking Manifesto, what I’m proposing is easier said than done. It is easy for me to talk about the success of our first feature. It is much more difficult to admit that our second feature bombed miserably. With that project, we did the complete opposite of everything that made our first title successful. The movie was a character driven drama, without any name talent. And while the production value was great, and the acting was good, we had no definable hook. Nothing about the movie separated it from the sea of other, similar character driven movies. Had it been 1995, we may have had a chance.

So my team and I learned some valuable lessons. Most modern moviemakers agree that it behooves us independents to create movies with a strong marketing hook, peppered with a bit of controversy, aimed at a very specific target audience. But when you crunch the numbers, to make this work, our niche audience must have mass enough to justify our movie budget.

While I have spent considerable effort to jam-pack these ideas into the Modern Moviemaking Manifesto, anybody who has studied Rodger Corman and read his book, “How I Made A Hundred Movies In Hollywood And Never Lost A Dime” will quickly realize that the Modern Moviemaking Manifesto is not so “modern.” Corman has been utilizing it for years. Known for his type of down and dirty movie making, complete with fans who got to know him and know his work, Corman created a model where movies were made fast, cheaply, and each movie had a controversial hook.  The result of which allowed Roger Corman to create multiple streams of movie income.

But the one thing Roger did not have was a non-discriminatory sales channel. And thanks to VOD and companies like Distribber, we really have nothing holding us back from creating a similar empire. This is why I’m so full of enthusiasm for modern moviemaking. Nothing is holding us back from raising money, making movies and reaching our audience. And instead of simply blowing investor money on up-front compensation, we just have to adjust the model ever-so-slightly.

The Modern Moviemaking Manifesto is about creating movies fast, cheap and repeating the process, while at the same time creating awesome profit sharing deals on the back end. Over time, you will add more and more titles to your library. And this will create diversification, with the thought that dividends from dozens of titles can really add up.