“Seed&Spark announced Thursday (March 4, 2021) that it is ending its proprietary subscription streaming service later this month as it shifts its distribution focus to new impact-driven initiatives. Seed&Spark’s library will next be heading to IndieFlix….”
IndieFlix looks like a good home for those films:
“IndieFlix CEO Scilla Andreen said the additions to her service’s library are part of a mandate to grow the service’s library with meaningful content that can create conversations using the power of film. And with open submissions and a transparent royalty model, Andreen said IndieFlix will continue to help fill a need for filmmakers increasingly shut out of platforms like Amazon Prime Video Direct, which last month stopped accepting shorts and non-fiction submissions, cutting out a major digital revenue stream for filmmakers and distributors.”
We pioneered a revenue sharing system called RPM or Revenue Per Minute which pays filmmakers for every minute their movie is watched.
My take: streaming is a crowded market so I’m happy Seed&Spark is concentrating on crowdfunding and classes. IndieFlix’s revenue sharing system sounds promising. Anyone care to share what your quarterly cut amounts to?
Jess Jacklin, Charles Beale and Jake Bowen of the excellent vlog/podcast Demystified recently interviewed Evan Glodell whose first feature Bellflower debuted at Sundance in 2011 and went on to earn two Indie Sprit Award nominations.
He relayed his seven-year story chasing funding for his second film:
“I’m having meetings with literally A-list actors who were like, ‘I want to work with you’ and every big studio in town, and I was like, ‘We’ve made it.’ Nothing had ever worked in my life until one day I said, I’m gonna do this thing and take what was available to me, like in my real-world resources I actually had, which is what we used to make Bellflower. And instead of being like, ‘Hey, that was a big life lesson, that worked!’ we were like, okay, now let’s go back to holding our hands out… What the hell was I doing?”
And he revealed his epithany:
“If I care at all about telling stories in these movies that I say I care so much about that I’m willing to endlessly work and go to meetings for seven years with no outcome, I should just go back in with the resources I have now. The second that I made that decision, all of a sudden everything turned around, and it was like the stars aligned.“
His micro-budget mantra: Just start with what you have.
“You literally have like zero in your way. It’s only you. You can tell your story, but you’re scared of having your story be there bare naked on the screen without the polish of millions of Hollywood dollars and skill, you know? Like 99% of people who reach out to me to say the same thing. I’m like, dude, you just need to get over your fear and just go. Do you have a rich family? Do you have rich friends? No? Okay, you’re in with most of the rest of us. Just go. Nothing’s gonna happen if you don’t go.”
F = Fungible. “Fungible” assets are exchangeable for similar items. We can swap the dollars in each other’s pockets or change a $10 bill into two $5 bills without breaking a sweat.
T = Token. Specifically, a cryptographic token validated by the blockchain decentralized database.
N = Non. Duh.
So NFT is a Non-Fungible Token, or in other words, a unique asset that is validated by the blockchain. This solves the real-world problem of vouching for the provenance of that Van Gogh in your attic; in the digital world, the blockchain records changes in the price and ownership, etc. of an asset in a distributed ledger that can’t be hacked. (Just don’t lose your crypto-wallet.)
Early 2021 has seen an explosion in marketplaces for the creation and trading of NFTs. Like most asset bubbles, it’s all tulips until you need to sell and buyers are suddenly scarce.
But I believe NFTs hold the key to unleashing the power of the blockchain for film distribution.
“Non-fungible tokens are blockchain assets that are designed to not be equal. A movie ticket is an example of a non-fungible token. A movie ticket isn’t a ticket to any movie, anytime. It is for a very specific movie and a very specific time. Ownership NFTs provide blockchain security and convenience, but for a specific asset with a specific value.”
What if there was an NFT marketplace dedicated to streaming films? Filmmakers would mint a series of NFTs and each viewer would redeem one NFT to stream the movie. This would allow for frictionless media dissemination and direct economic compensation to filmmakers.
My take: while I think NFTs hold promise in film distribution, the key will be to lower the gas price; the fee paid when creating NFTs in the first place.
Tune into Youtube on Tuesday, March 9, 2021, at 8 p.m. ET.
“The TFCA Awards celebrate Canada’s own film community. We are extremely grateful to founding sponsor Rogers Communications for the $100,000 Rogers Best Canadian Film Award, one of the largest arts prizes in Canada. Under the TFCA’s rules, eligible contenders for the awards include films released in theatres or streaming in Toronto in 2020 as well as films that qualify for the 2020 Academy Awards and have a Toronto release scheduled by the end of March 2021.”
My take: my goal is to win the Rogers Best Canadian Film Award with ‘1 Lie.’ All I have to do is make it and get it screened in Toronto. How hard can that be? (Hmm, the screening will be tough.)
He starts by lamenting the loss of the way things were:
“I miss the community that accompanies sitting in a dark room for an hour or two surrounded by complete strangers. Strangers who embark on the uniquely shared but silent conversation that is watching storytelling unfold in the cinema. Every filmmaker wants to see their work on the big screen with an engaged audience. It doesn’t matter if it’s a crowd of five or five hundred. Putting your work (yourself) out there and having a dialogue about the message behind the medium makes the trials and tribulations of this industry melt away.”
With his second feature, Panda Bear It, a new marketing strategy was required, as:
“…film festivals, screenings and promotion typically involved many other people and a lot of marketing: shaking hands (RIP), traveling with your project to festival screenings big and small and being an ambassador for your own film. That slow burn approach allows you to meet your audience.”
But as the pandemic picked up steam, suddenly only social media and online distribution were viable.
Rather than invest in too many festivals with online screenings, Evan decided to build up his online presence:
He created a podcast called Convincing Creatives. “Talking to a different member of our cast and crew of every episode. The types of conversations we would have with an audience at a film festival Q&A just put into podcast form. People connected with that. They missed it.”
He also fleshed out his Youtube Channel. “I filmed a series of videos shot in my home office during lockdown talking about every aspect of production on Panda Bear It for a few hundred dollars in North Carolina. It grew into a series about indie filmmaking now spanning over 35 videos and counting. They’re essentially the DVD bonus features no one asked for.”
All this was to build up hype for their release on Amazon Prime. He concludes:
“The twists of this year molded me more as a filmmaker. I was truly and fully involved in every aspect of production and promotion like it or not. Perhaps this is a roadmap for future works? Filmmaking is a celebration of the human condition that I didn’t know was as resilient as my fellow filmmakers and film goers proved to me this past year.”
My take: I love the way Evan pivoted. Not able to tour with his movie at film festivals, he doubled down on his podcast and Youtube channel. All indie filmmakers need to be all-in on every possible marketing outlet to attract their audience.
“The new Bandcamp Vinyl Pressing Service streamlines the financing, production, and fulfillment of vinyl records. With no up-front investment, you can create a vinyl campaign and start taking orders almost immediately. Reach your goal, and we press your records and ship them to your fans.”
Records are perhaps the only analogue media format that persists in the digital age. This could be because audiophiles believe the sound is “warmer” and hipsters have embraced the ritual of taking a record out, putting it on a turntable, dropping the needle on a physical piece of PVC and studying the record jacket as sound emanates from a hi-fi.
My take: I think the resurgence of vinyl is important to indie filmmakers for two reasons. One, how about releasing your soundtrack on vinyl? You get that beautiful album cover for your poster. Two, folks like to collect things and hold them in their hands. For filmmakers this might mean selling your movie as DVDs or Blu-rays. I think we can all agree VHS is truly obsolete though, right?
Two vastly different distribution strategies went head-to-head recently.
Following the status quo, Christopher Nolan‘s Tenet was released theatrically.
Disney+’s Mulan forwent cinemas and was streamed as PVOD (premium video-on-demand) exclusively to its subscribers.
Both are $200-million-plus movies that normally would have been summer blockbusters. How did they do?
Forbes‘ Scott Mendelson reports that “opening in 2,810 American theaters, including some in California, Tenet grossed $20.2 million over its Thurs-Mon Labor Day weekend.” Ten days into its domestic release, The Numbers reports the worldwide gross as $207,500,000.
Daniel Roberts of Yahoo Finance reports “downloads of Disney+ spiked 68% from Friday, Sept. 4 through Sunday, Sept. 6, compared to one weekend prior. Consumer spending in the app also spiked 193%, which can obviously be attributed to customers paying the $30 ‘Mulan’ fee.” Ten days into its international release, The Numbers reports the worldwide gross as $39,601,014 — but this does not include ANY of the streaming revenue.
Because Disney has not released its streaming revenue attributable to Mulan, comparing the two distribution strategies is kind of like comparing apples with kumquats. Stabs have been made to guesstimate the number but it remains a mystery.
“Mulan is outright bombing in China, having earned $8.27 million on Saturday, just 5% from its mediocre $7.9 million Friday gross. Credit the Chinese media blackout, online piracy from last week’s PVOD debut via Disney Plus or that the film isn’t clicking with Chinese moviegoers and Disney made a mistake to presume they would automatically show up.”
It seems neither distribution strategy is doing particularly well.
My take: CV-19 is upending the standard distribution model. While I applaud experiments in new ways to get movies to the masses, I can’t help but wonder if the summer blockbuster is dead. $200-million-plus movies require too large a box office to break even. I suggest immediately making more modest-budget movies. (Hey, throw me $10 million and I’ll deliver a moneymaker.) Check out this primer from Gray Kotze for comparisons between movies at three cost-points:
Ajay Kishore, Founder and CEO, explains to Julia Sun and David Grasso that: “Stareable provides tools that help creators build an engaged audience of fans who will pay for bonus or premium features.”
Beyond building the Stack Exchange of web serious, Stareable seems to be having a lot of fun.
They put on a three-day conference and festival each year:
My take: I’m currently developing a web series, so I’m a potential customer. I realize Stareable is concentrating on web series producers right now but as a content consumer too, I find the website lacking. I wonder if an A or B model would work better: one side for consumers and the other side for producers. Heck, why not just put the producer side behind a log in screen: dangle some success metrics in front of producers and they’ll all sign up. How big is this community of web series creators, and how large is the viewership?
“We should rethink why we are making independent films in the first place, especially indie sci-fi and speculative films. I don’t think we should even be trying to compete with Hollywood. We should be striving to make films that are strikingly different from big-budget films.”
Aleem faced five challenges making After We Leave and solved them creatively. Although he answers them from a sci-fi point of view, they can be extrapolated to indie filmmaking in general.
#1. The Brainstorming Phase: What Are Sci-Fi and Indie Film’s Core Strengths?
“Hollywood is very good at making its kind of movies. Why should we try to compete with them with a lot less money? In my mind, the only reason to make an independent feature film is to create a movie that only you would make. A kind of film that wouldn’t exist if you didn’t exist. I think what independent films can offer are new directions in style, tone, theme, topic, representation, and viewing experiences. They can challenge the mainstream artistically, politically, and narratively.”
#2. World building does not have to be expensive.
Rather than with a VFX-laden long shot, sometimes a world can be built with a carefully composed close up:
“The future version of Los Angeles that I imagine in my film is undergoing severe water shortages. This glass is the only clean water we see in the entire film. Every other time characters drink, they drink dirty water or something other than water. I don’t have a shot of a huge empty reservoir. I don’t have a shot of drones “mining” water from clouds. I have one clear glass of water, provided by the most powerful and richest character in the film… and my main character chugs it down. It cost me nothing. But it’s definitely world building.”
#3. The standard model of film production discourages artistic risk-taking.
Aleem laments, “The system is always telling us to play it safe.”
To counter the “stay on schedule” mantra, he bought their camera gear:
“We could choose to just try one crazy complicated shot, exactly at sunrise, and then we’d all go off to our day jobs. If it didn’t work we could try again the next morning. There was no downside other than our time… and because we were fitting it in around our existing work and lives. This way of working was, in fact, the thing that convinced collaborators (some long time friends, some new) to work on the film. They all had day jobs that paid way better than I could. The reason they gave up their nights and lunch hours and weekends to work on After We Leave was that I was offering them a chance to try things they normally didn’t get to try. To reach for things in a way they normally didn’t get to.”
This also freed up his actors to ask for extra takes and for his DOP to extend magic hour by shooting at the same time over a number of days.
As to locations:
“I ‘scouted’ for hours on Google Street view looking for rundown and beautifully gritty locations… and then I placed small scenes in each of them. We shot all over Los Angeles. We didn’t get a single permit. We didn’t need to because we didn’t care if we got kicked out of somewhere… it wouldn’t throw off our schedule or make us cut the scene or waste a ton of money. We’d just film it next weekend at a different location. And the truth is, most days we were a crew of three people with a DSLR, a Zoom recorder and a mic, plus one or two actors. We shot in 25 different exterior Los Angeles locations and were approached only once by the police and twice by private security. And in two of three of those times, they weren’t telling us to stop filming… they were making sure we were safe in what they perceived to be a dangerous location.”
#4. VFX don’t have to cost a lot of money, they (just) cost time.
Rotoscoping and motion tracking in Adobe After Effects have improved so much in the last ten years that green screens and locked off cameras are no longer necessary.
#5. There is actually a huge advantage to being micro-budget when you reach the distribution phase.
Aleem realized his advantage was, “I needed to make back less money than other films.”
After being rejected by top film festivals, he found success at niche ones:
“After being rejected by 22 festivals in a row, I got an email from Sci-Fi London raving about my movie. I gave them the world premiere and After We Leave won Best Feature Film there and everything started to change. We went on to Berlin Sci-Fi, Other Worlds, Boston Sci-Fi and won a number of awards and got great reviews.”
Aleem concludes:
“The big lesson I learned is to only do what I felt we could do well and to pick a story that makes use of that. And that’s the irony… by avoiding mimicking the films that try to appeal to huge audiences, I actually created a film that resonated with audiences.”
My take: Lots to take away here. Embrace your limitations. Less money can mean more time. Raise enough to get it in the can. Then raise more to finish it. Use the right festivals to connect with your true audience. Never compromise your vision.
Naomi is the writer and one of the producers of Bite Me, a $500,000 subversive romantic comedy about a real-life vampire and the IRS agent who audits her.
They wanted to do distribution differently:
“Our distribution plan was based on two core hypotheses. The first was that, although Hollywood is constantly complaining that people don’t want to see movies in theaters anymore — thanks to Netflix, streaming, having to put on pants to do so, etc — those complaints didn’t jive with our observations about the people around us. In an age where technology is isolating us all ever-more-aggressively, drawing us further into our phones and farther away from each other, we felt that people are actually desperate for excuses to get out of their homes and into community. It isn’t that people don’t want to leave their homes, we figured. It’s simply that you need to give them a better proposition than “pay upwards of $50 for two people to go to a movie theater, interact with no one you didn’t come with, and have no added positive experience above what you would have gotten for the cost of your monthly Netflix subscription at home without having to put on pants.” Our second hypothesis was that, if we did some crazy marketing stunt like, say, travel around the country with the film in an RV for three months, and also put substantial marketing dollars into social media and YouTube ads, that all of that buzz, news, fun and marketing would translate into a larger number of people renting and/or buying the film online.”
The filmmakers are brutally honest with the number of tickets and merchandise they sold in the real world and the digital revenue online.
They thought they’d rake it in online and their real world tour would not amount to much more than a cute publicity stunt.
Good surprise! They grossed $38,000 in ticket sales across 51 screenings, meaning an average of $745 per screen. They also made an additional $9,000 in merchandise sales, for a total of approximately $47,000.
Now, if their online revenue was ten times as much, they’d recoup their film cost.
Bad surprise! Less than 600 people rented or purchased the film online, generating these numbers: $1,821.45 from iTunes, Amazon, and GooglePlay/YouTube combined and an additional $5,522 from Seed&Spark, for a grand total of $7,343.45 in digital revenue.
That’s actually less than their merch.
Along the way, they heard that TVOD is dead: “TVOD sales for everyone have declined 50% year-over-year for the last two years.” Yikes!
Wait, there’s more!
They also made a fascinating 12-part documentary series that follows them across the States as they promote their film and show it to paying audiences. See Prologue, Part1:
My take: Kudos to the Bite Me Team for this unparalleled access. The glimpse into their truth is humbling. Finding your audience is harder than ever; there’s just so much competition for eyeballs. I would actually like to see the documentary series cut into a feature, something that chronicles the wide-eyed optimism of the filmmakers, their journey around the country and the realizations they stumble on. Of course, then they have to take that on a second tour across the continent.
