Self Distribution advice?

Josh Bass said:
Not to get arty farty, but I would like to think that one of the things people like about TV/movies, animation aside obviously, is the fact that you're watching PEOPLE do things (except for the thriving donkey porn genre), and if it's all mo-cap/CGI, I think something gets lost. I think, no matter how good, you're gonna lose something when it's computer graphics instead of actual humans. Maybe for your "Transformers" type movie that works, I don't really see people flocking to see the CGI version of [insert name of indie film about old man dying of cancer and reflecting on his life] or "Parks and Rec"/Breaking Bad/etc. (TV shows).
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I'm talking when it gets to a level of photorealism where you can't tell the difference between CG and live action. When we get there it can used for more than just big budget action films. The reason why I personally would want to make movies this way is because it would be more like directly a play than filming a movie. When you have the performance you want you automatically have any/all camera angles and movements you want in any location under any lighting conditions.

This would be the ultimate way to make a film for me because now we have complete freedom to explore the story and performances and have the time to let things happen organically. How many times do great ideas on set get passed by simply because you don't have time to explore them. No matter how much planning you do on a film there are just some things that are only discovered in the moment of the performance. Yet so much time is wasted by repetition, all for the sole for the sole purpose of just getting a different angle. What if you didn't have to prioritize what you want vs what you need. You're not looking at a monitor, or standing next to the lens. You're watching the performance. If you feel you have it then you have it. For all angles, all locations, all lighting conditions, all wardrobes, all makeup, all hair, etc...

Just think about how much exploration you could do with your actors if you weren't waiting for camera or lights. Now, I'm not advocating you don't do any planning or think about shots/movement/lighting. I'm just saying when you're "filming" those things don't matter anymore. You are capturing a performance and now you're free to only worry about that and have the time to actually play in the moment.

My personal vision for the future of film making is being able to easily scan any room, object, or person and map motion capture data to it. So now I can "film" on a sound stage (or anywhere) with a minimalist set and only worry about if I (as the director) feel the story is being told. EVERYTHING can be tweaked in post. Now, of course this could be perverted and you could see a Kubrick like director taking things to extremes and manipulating things to a level where you might as well just key frame the entire animation from scratch instead of capturing somebody else. However, I think the advantages of making films this way outweigh those risks.

We already can make films like this. Avatar, Adventures of Tintin, Polar Express show us it's possible. Now we just need to improve it to the point where it's faster and cheaper. I realize not everybody wants to make movies like this but to me I see film making as just telling a story. It doesn't matter how you do it as long as your able to tell your story. I personally see this technology as a vehicle to allow anybody willing to put in the effort tell any story and not have to worry about budget. Because big action flicks will not really cost much exponentially more to produce than say a film like Tape, or Dinner with Andre.

I predict Hollywood will get there in 10-20 years and it will be another 10 or so before it's cheap and easy enough that anybody can do it.
 
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wescotte said:
This is exactly what I was looking for. We've submitted for reviews to quite a few sites.. Most are either to big to care or too small to really influence anybody. I'm starting to think the mid size ones that charge a small few might be the way to go. I haven't actually done any just yet because of money reasons but I'm going to give them a shot. Know any others off the top of your head?
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I've gotten reviews from these sites
Here's the links - film threat is probably one of the mid-size sites you were mentioning
http://www.roguecinema.com/article3142.html
http://www.filmthreat.com/reviews/49690/
http://www.threemoviebuffs.com/review/assisted-fishing
http://www.joeholmanonline.com/2013/02/independent-film-review-assisted.html

You really have to have thick skin to submit for reviews.

-Joe
 
Let me try this again from a different angle: I think actor performances are going to suffer if it's just a guy in a skintight suit with pingpong balls in a greenscreen studio. Why spend money on Brad Pitt (or whatever actor you admire) if you don't even see their real face? Why not just hire Steve Fartpants, anime voice actor? So now we have bad actors, in phony environments, and we're making it impossible to take advantage of all that actor-y stuff like listening to your partner, being in the moment etc., because, again, it's a guy covered with ping pong balls in a green screen studio, probably alone 'cause why go through the trouble of getting the actors in the same room at the same time, and you're telling him "pretend it's a hospital and your daughter's in a coma in front of you, you're totes sad, and. . .GO MOVIE!"

To sum up, I think the more you remove real people and real environments, the more you are asking for bad movies.
 
Josh Bass said:
Let me try this again from a different angle: I think actor performances are going to suffer if it's just a guy in a skintight suit with pingpong balls in a greenscreen studio. Why spend money on Brad Pitt (or whatever actor you admire) if you don't even see their real face? Why not just hire Steve Fartpants, anime voice actor? So now we have bad actors, in phony environments, and we're making it impossible to take advantage of all that actor-y stuff like listening to your partner, being in the moment etc., because, again, it's a guy covered with ping pong balls in a green screen studio, probably alone 'cause why go through the trouble of getting the actors in the same room at the same time, and you're telling him "pretend it's a hospital and your daughter's in a coma in front of you, you're totes sad, and. . .GO MOVIE!"

To sum up, I think the more you remove real people and real environments, the more you are asking for bad movies.
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Okay, I think you're missing some aspects... Motion capture does not require skintight suit w/ ping pong balls. That's just how they do it now. There are tools that exist even today and that are evolving to do it in a manor that is not intrusive. Using multiple Microsoft Kinects for example can do pretty good motion capture of the body without the ping pong balls. Yes, it has it's limitations now but it will be resolved in time. It's also a dirt cheap solution that was never designed for high "resolution" motion capture. Facial tracking is slightly more complicated but there are methods being developed that will not require you to mount a camera in front of your face.

You could film in your living room.. A real place that actors can interact with real environment. Then you are free to dress your virtual set in anyway you want. Your living room might not work for what you want. It just might not be the right layout. So you find a place that is... Or it might be easiest to go to a sound stage and build a minimalist set. Just enough to have the actors understand the space they are in and have their positions translate into the virtual set. My point is it doesn't have to be a set build to fool the camera. It only has to be good enough to allow the actors to do their job. Theater people have been using minimalist/no set for ages... While I agree it's probably not the easiest way to act in front of nothing but a green screen it can be done.

Personally I envision you being able to finding a location that is a close enough match to what you need so there would be as little post set design as possible. You scan in where you film and you're good to put your virtual actors in it and light it. But say you want a different couch or table. Just replace them with a different 3D model of similar proportions to what was really there and any actions with it should match up.

I see being able to do more gorilla style filming where you could film in a restaurant while it's open to the public. You don't need tons of equipment so you don't need a huge crew so you don't have to have to closed down to film in. It could literally be a director and his actors in this restaurant with minimal disturbance to the real environment. You can put lavs on your actors and because you don't have to hide the mic you can get good sound even under less than ideal conditions.

My point is... Think about what you could do if only had to focus on performance of your actors. You are not waiting on camera, lights, makeup, wardrobe, art dept. Yes, you're usually only waiting for lights/camera because everybody else works in parallel but I think you get my point. After you have your performance you can do everything you want/need to do in order to get the image you want. You can spend as much time as you want because you don't have an actor you're paying 20 million dollars to waiting around for the scene to be lit or the camera to rehearse a complex movement. Maybe you know exactly how you want it light and it's only a digital gaffer doing grunt work. Maybe, you have no idea and now you have complete freedom to discover it by just playing with your scenes without risk of sending 100 people into overtime pay. The same applies to camera.

Does this make more sense?
 
wescotte said:
I think it's this level of organization and trust that will help pave the way for distribution models that other art forms just were't capable of making happen.
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I think it's the lack of advertising/marketing that leaves so many finished projects in the land of obscurity rather than the lack of distribution options (vimeo just gave us another paid option today). I'm not every talking about making money necessarily but just getting seen. Looking for Lenny (the doc in my sig) for example, got distribution but without a budget to trumpet to the world that our movie was out there our numbers are much lower than they could be. We (we being the 5 primary people behind the doc) all have full time jobs so that severely limits the amount of time we can spend trying to create a grass roots movement around the movie (which would be a full time job in itself). Looking for Lenny has received mainly good reviews and even got a write up Rolling Stone and 10-15 years ago I think we would've been in a better position but now there is such a glut of content that getting something made isn't that big a deal. It's like the old joke about everyone in Hollywood has a script. Well, now everyone in LA has a movie. The big challenge is no longer making a movie but making your movie get noticed in an ever broadening sea of content.

Sure, cat videos on YouTube aren't the same thing as movies but you are competing for people's free time which means cat videos, Facebook, mobile games etc., are the competition. How do you get someone interested enough in your movie to watch it instead of doing something else? That's the challenge.


Trent Reznor famously split with his label years ago and released music independently but now he is partnering with a label again. Link
"No one else can write the songs I can write," Reznor told the audience, "But there's other people that can do some of that (marketing) stuff. The great part of self-releasing has been control of your own destiny. Nobody has approval. Finishing a song at midnight and putting it out the next day. Getting fans excited with no leak because you have the only copy and you uploaded and you didn’t publish. That’s fun. It felt great, particularly after a long career in the weirdness of the labels. But we wanted a team of people that are better at that than I am worldwide. That felt like it was worth slicing the pie up monetarily."
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-Andrew
 
adkimery said:
Sure, cat videos on YouTube aren't the same thing as movies but you are competing for people's free time which means cat videos, Facebook, mobile games etc., are the competition. How do you get someone interested enough in your movie to watch it instead of doing something else? That's the challenge.

Trent Reznor famously split with his label years ago and released music independently but now he is partnering with a label again. Link
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That is a very interesting article. I admit I don't know Trent personally but I'm going to make some speculations anyway. He needs a label in order to continue to earn the level of income to maintain his standard of living. He decided that out weighed the negatives he had associated with working for a label. I believe he is a big enough an artist to survive without getting a day job in order to continue to making music. He however decided that wasn't enough. I also don't think there is necessarily anything wrong with this.

I'm not sure I agree with experiments like In Rainbows hurts the value of music anymore than iTunes forcing artists to have a universal price point. Personally, I would rather live in a "pay what you want" world but I do understand it's limitations. You are correct that we do compete with cat videos. This is because we don't yet have a real distribution network for independent films. Hollywood has the big screen and you won't see cat videos there. We can argue about how some cat videos are better than some of the crap they release but we can't deny they paid for the infrastructure to do it. I think interdependent film makers also need to work together to invest (both time and money) for the proper infrastructure for independent cinema.

YouTube is an amazing thing if you want to just get your content out there and great things do float to the top but only a tiny fraction of people are successful in using it to go from doing something they love to doing something they love for profit. I don't think YouTube really wants to be that stepping stone and it's more just a byproduct. Vimeo might be closer but in the end I still think it comes down to not everybody can/will get to do what they love and doing it for a living simply because sometimes we love to do things we're not as good at as somebody else.

The real difference comes down to doing something for no return and expecting to do it for a living. Technology has made it so much easier for people to have a day job and do what they love on much larger scales. It's closing the gap from hobbyist and professional very quickly. I just think with music it was a faster to happen. I think Film will eventually get there as well. I believe this will happen via the process I describe in some of my previous comments in this thread about motion capture + CG. I believe it holds the key for the hobbyist film maker to produce any content with the same production values as that of Hollywood for a fraction of the budget.

We've already seen this in music.. Anybody can produce a record now if they have the will to do it but the big labels still exist. They are still manufacturing music and finding talent. It's just now if you want to make music you can on your own terms. You might not get rich in the process but at least you can still do it. This same thing is happening in film right now as well.

It's fun to speculate what really is sustainable when art and commerce collide but in the end I think there is just too much being made to watch it all. There will always be people/companies that exist who help filter out what we might not like and we will pay them a premium for that service. I think we're simply living in a time where these entities are just out of touch with audience and believe their roles are something else.
 
I very rarely post on forums but I read a lot of them. I started a horror streaming channel a few months back. Haven't really advertised it yet because we've been shooting a lot of content for an official launch. Right now we're in about 70 thousand homes. We get a lot more views but we only count return viewers. Blah...Blah.... Anyway, we would be happy to help in anyway possible. I started the channel because I was running into the same problems as many of you. It's been expensive but I have access to viewers in US, CA, and the UK. Plus it's on their televisions in HD and not just over the web.

We deal mostly in horror and sci fi but would be happy to review films and give a quote or two. I'm not interested in bashing someones film so if it sucked then we would not review it. Actually, you can usually find something nice to say about any film if there is some heart behind it.

Our big launch will be in May and we will be rolling out a lot of original content. We'll also be looking for films but I can tell you that it won't pay all that much. It's very difficult to turn a profit with a free channel but that's not why I started it. I want to make films and I want people to have access to them. Plus, make enough money to pay for the next one. You know how it goes........ The channel is Zom-Bee. We're a bunch of filmmakers and are happy to help others where we can.
 
Okay so say everyone is shooting Hollywood-looking movies at home, same tech, same skills. 100% the same. Everything. The same amount of talent and people involved. You still need marketing. Becoming viral (= free marketing) is very, very difficult and will be even more so in the future as the world gets online and the content AND quality of it constantly going up. There was a time when people watched flowers in HD on youtube and it was fascinating, now we're having so much quality content that only very little of it actually float to the surface. So why are flowers in HD still getting attention and many views? Well, there's only room for /content in the first place.

The bus doesn't get more seats because more passengers enter it...

When discussing movies and money with people who aren't filmmakers they usually talk about "how much other useful stuff one could have spent that enormous amount of money on...", but they don't consider the fact that they would never have heard about the movie in the first place... if those millions wasn't spent on marketing.
 
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There is so many misconceptions voiced here...

500 years ago Columbus spent years trying to convince heads of state to give him a few ships and swim across the ocean to as we all know discover America. He did all the convincing for 2 reasons a.) because he couldn't afford those ships; b.) because getting access to those lands without political and military support of those powerful heads would mean nothing - like literally, "great here is the new land and so what?" 500 years have passed and people make the mistake the Columbus had a foresight not to make. We assume that because we can afford the ships (the cheap digital gear) then we are golden to swim across the ocean (make our films). Well, we get to some land and - so what? You still need "powers" that have vested interest in your success because otherwise you would see Columbus walking from house to house proclaiming "check it out, i discovered new lands!" It's not that too many ships are build or too many lands are discovered but rather that few of those newly discovered lands have powers behind it to make the discovery relevant.
 
The fact that we can shoot so cheaply is a disservice to young filmmakers as they start producing content without fully understanding why or even understand that basics of politics involved in the system.

Everyone is trying to game the system by trying to calculate what works but with that an important element is lost - believe in own ideas. That believe can't simply come from some delusional stance but rather a thorough examination of oneself - what is it that make you you? Only then one should start making films - or any other art. And only then that art start having any relevance. Before that happens, it's nothing but copying formulas used to express other people's "selfs." That's why i find the easy access to technology so damaging to our population - so much is being produced and so little is being said. And the reasons for it are easy to discern, when one doesn't know himself/herself then one can't help but repeat overheard banalities from the past.

I watch soooooo many indie films and they ALL fall victims to the very same patterns. Freshness of thinking is so rare - it truly is like a rare gem. I mean here is community made up of thousands - many of who had their films release on netflix and what not and, honestly, how many of those are even watchable - not great, just watchable??? Now this community started as anti-Hollywood indie spirit ete, etc, "here is DVX100 for $3000 go make your film" and how many brilliant films came out from that????
 
Patryk_Rebisz said:
I watch soooooo many indie films and they ALL fall victims to the very same patterns. Freshness of thinking is so rare - it truly is like a rare gem. I mean here is community made up of thousands - many of who had their films release on netflix and what not and, honestly, how many of those are even watchable - not great, just watchable??? Now this community started as anti-Hollywood indie spirit ete, etc, "here is DVX100 for $3000 go make your film" and how many brilliant films came out from that????
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I half agree with this.

Thing is though, originality for the sake of it, doesn't automatically sell either.

Take the Horror genre, for instance, which has a very faithfull audience. Horror fans will watch almost anything from any country in any language if it's horror.

But you're much more likely to be successful among the fans by adhering to their expectations while also being entertaining, than you do by thinking fresh.
You're also much more likely to land a deal with a distributor and get into festivals, since they know what horror fans want.

I would say especially if it's your first film, it's not a bad idea to just do something that's entertaining and maybe not too fresh. But something that has a definite "voice" of your own.
 
Jawa Ex Machina said:
I half agree with this.

Thing is though, originality for the sake of it, doesn't automatically sell either.

Take the Horror genre, for instance, which has a very faithfull audience. Horror fans will watch almost anything from any country in any language if it's horror.

But you're much more likely to be successful among the fans by adhering to their expectations while also being entertaining, than you do by thinking fresh.
You're also much more likely to land a deal with a distributor and get into festivals, since they know what horror fans want.

I would say especially if it's your first film, it's not a bad idea to just do something that's entertaining and maybe not too fresh. But something that has a definite "voice" of your own.
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Well, then you end up in the catch22... Why should one bother watching the OP's film if whole Troma library is available????? And of course the answer is, one shouldn't. And the film dies its natural cause.
 
"I watch soooooo many indie films and they ALL fall victims to the very same patterns. Freshness of thinking is so rare - it truly is like a rare gem. I mean here is community made up of thousands - many of who had their films release on netflix and what not and, honestly, how many of those are even watchable - not great, just watchable??? Now this community started as anti-Hollywood indie spirit ete, etc, "here is DVX100 for $3000 go make your film" and how many brilliant films came out from that????"


I wouldn't know. I can barely stand most of the "real" movies. Most of these kids have absolutely nothing to say, whatsoever. I think they've been misled by the culture of disposable corporate garbage they spring from. They are taught that there is something called "entertainment" and that is what they are supposed to be making.

There is no such thing as "entertainment." It's a lie.

There is art, the communication of ideas through various media. The ideas are what is important, as well as the execution. This execution can be entertainING, but to trade away ideas in pursuit of mindless "entertainment" is why most of these so-called filmmakers are clones of one another. As disposable as the 14 billionth bag of Cheetos.

(I don't win popularity contests, btw.)
 
For these smaller movies some of us make, the most valuable marketing card to play is your idea. If you aren't making something anybody wants, you already have a problem. Marketing starts at the beginning not the end. Before one line of dialog goes down, you need to know who the story is for, whether or not there's a retail pipeline to get it to them, what the marketing platforms are, etc. Too many assume you just make the best movie possible then figure all that stuff out later. Unfortunately, they find themselves caught with their pants down most of the time.
 
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