Online Film Distribution

V

vnguyen

New member
I'm doing some research for online film distribution. I know, I know. It doesn't work well or even at all yet, but I wanted to find out your thoughts and get a discussion going on what works, why it doesn't work, the market and where it's going.

I've started making indie films a few years ago I have some products that I enjoy sharing with friends, family, the occasional film festival. I'd like to get the movie in front of more users, but I find putting it on Vimeo or YouTube such a undesired effect of consuming quality video.

I'm looking for your thoughts of online distribution such as youtube, vimeo, why it works, why it doesn't work, and what would make it work for film makers to provide content online and create a viewing experience that could potentially monetize films for indie film makers.
 
If you're going to distribute, I would say host torrents. Most of the major sites (aside from Google Video) have caps on length or file size which makes viewing kind of tough. Watching a few minutes is not a big deal, but 1.5-2 hours, I want to kind of sit back. This is not to say you shouldn't split it up and put it out there though.

I think if you want to monetize the net, you need to look at something like Dr. Horrible by Joss Whedon. He didn't take TV and cram it into the internet. He looked at internet and came up with something that fit the medium. If TV barely fits online, film will be even harder.

In terms of monetizing, you have to look at what can't be copied. The film itself is nearly free to copy and distribute w/ the internet. But merchandise or events are expensive to copy. One example is Head Trauma.

He took his film and built events around them. He had the film scored live during the showing. He had the actors engage the audience. And a whole bunch of other crazy game type stuff.

Does it take a lot of work? Was it a huge gamble? Heck yeah. But he took the existing technologies and leveraged them to make some good money. Not great money, but good money.

If you just want to get your stuff watched, put on every video site out there. Seed torrents for it. Make RARs and host them on those filesharing sites.

If you want to make money, I would suggest doing what Adam did w/ Corrado.
 
I want to clarify. I don't plan to distribute my movie. I'm considering and contemplating models to help other film makers distribute in an easy, free, streamlined web environment that will monetize their movies and get people to consume them.

With that goal in mind, I understand it's constantly being tackled every day with minimal success.

NinjaVsPenguin - thanks for the input, the pitfall of consuming a video from your computer chair is never as pleasent as a couch.

Audience interaction and the activity around the movie creates buzz and involvement from the audience. It's something I'm aware of, but I haven't done much research to see how people have been executing it in the real world.

If you guys can provide more examples that would be great. I plan to try to translate these ideas into reusable models and build a site that will take a movie, post it online, and require investment from a user to consume this quality content. User investment could be created from buzz from the small indie film reviews, audience participation during the online viewing, real viewing, upselling from film fesitivals, a ticket required to watch the movie online, widgets to spread buzz on third party sites, real time viewing with other video consumers.
 
hmm

hmm

Speaking of the Internet and distribution and whatnot, is there a reason why so many people decide not to put their shorts online at all, or at least they choose to submit to every film festival they want before maybe a year or two later putting it up online? I'm aware that some film festivals have clauses that ask that the product has no distribution yet, even online, but I find that actually very rare. At least with my music video, all 26 festivals to which I sent had no mention of anything like that, only one had any restrictions on other showings, i.e. it may not play in the L.A. area within one month of the festival.

Also I had this idea, it's been done before I know, and I'm not sure if it's even possible to make an idea like this successful, I don't really think it's worth it probably, but I thought of these four shorts I want to make and how the themes are somewhat tied together, and how I guess I could film them each to be 20 minutes long, film another short later that was like 10-15 minutes that tied them all together, by using the same casts, etc., and interwove the stories through editing, but the shorts themselves would only be like 10-12 minutes long when sent to festivals. There just would happen to be extra scenes and footage that would make more sense in a feature, so you'd be giving out essentially 40-50 minutes of a 90 minute or so feature through festivals. If you didn't post that footage online, I wonder whether you could still edit the feature and have success with it in the sales department, especially if you sent those shorts to 50 film festivals each and found success, like say each one was accepted to 15 festivals and you racked up 10 wins or so total between them, maybe 12, etc., if that would be something that would help in the distribution area. Then again, just because a short is good doesn't mean shorts strung together make sense unless it does really work, etc.

One thing I thought, though, is if the shorts actually fit together, if the theme made sense, and you had it all planned from the start, you may be able to somehow collect e-mail addresses from festival patrons who saw one short, then get them interested in the feature later to see how it all ties together, etc. And you'd have essentially shot a feature for the price of five shorts by that point. I think this has been tried before, and I'm not sure to what level of success. I was just thinking because realistically I only want to spend the money to make two of these shorts, I can't justify all four now at least, but if there was some way to monetize them, which there really isn't for short films, then it might make some sense.
 
IFHY is a short. and it isn't posted for free because i have distribution through heretic films and i'm selling it. rather than giving it away.
 
Hey Zak

Hey Zak

Hey,

That's awesome, congratulations! I saw you on the WithoutABox forums too didn't I? I mean I have noticed your film being selected to a lot of festivals.

How can you make some money back on a short? Let's say I plow $10,000 into a short, which I will because I want the experience, I have a few cool ideas, I haven't yet had the chance to shoot a pro-level short, just pro music videos, corporate work, training videos, etc. If I did a short like that, it turns out good let's say, does well in festivals, what do you do with it? To me, even if I got like $700 back, I'd consider that better than nothing since I'm not at all doing it for the money. That would cover like 20 festival submissions anyway, lol. Any advice on that front?
 
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