Martay
Veteran
Okay back to the beginning.
1. It is important to note that STEP OFF isn't my first film. Therefore it does benefit from the hindsight of the good, bad and ugly of many projects that I've been associated with in the past.
2. We set out to make STEP OFF with full confidence that we would find a distribution home for it. The only question would be how wide a release would it get.
a) We knew we could self-distribute through non-exclusive partnerships we'd forged with the release of our documentary BEAT MAKERS (go see it on HULU for me please). So, at the very least we'd have outlets at Amazon, Indipix, Hulu, etc. when we completed the film.
b) We had offers that we had turned down with Beat Makers because self-distributing offered actual money directly to us and NOT being caught up in distribution fees, etc. like in the case of my first feature film Behind The Nine. I made a deal with Echelon Entertainment for Behind the Nine and it has sold in at least 9 territories but I've yet to collect a dime because of distribution fees not being covered from the sales. All that being said, if the right distributor who wasn't directly tied into the majors (Warners, Lionsgate, etc.) showed enough real interest to work with us, we figured we'd have this route available as well.
c) We were making a narrative feature that hadn't been made as yet. Sure there have been Hip-Hop films (many) but none had focused on Music Producer/Beatmaking culture as yet. It is a niche that is very active online and we felt fairly easy to reach (that's now debatable since we've had less support from Hip-Hop sites than we expected in terms of spreading the word) directly. AUDIENCE MUST BE TANGIBLE! We knew there was an active Beatmaking community from our experience with the Documentary as well as with our general knowledge of Hip-Hop culture going in.
d) We committed more resources than we had done on any of our previous films so we knew Production Value would be much higher than ones we'd done before. We knew it would LOOK LIKE a REAL MOVIE. Sounds silly but again, PERCEPTION is reality. You tell someone you make movies and they expect what is playing at their local theaters, not what they won't catch at their local film festival. We had MORE locations, more 2nd Unit focus, more of the kinds of things that you usually (or at least I) don't worry as much about on making a low budget film. Ordinarily, as a writer, I focus on story. So my concern is shooting the material in the script. For example, we produced a really good short called "B.A.M." that did well on the festival circuit. It's essentially a twist on courtroom drama. So we shot the court, and the flashbacks from the court. It looks good, it's well done...but what if that was a feature film? It would be too claustraphobic, too contained. Believe me, if you ever watch Behind the Nine (available at Netflix), you'll see what I mean. So, we made a conscious effort to open STEP OFF up as much as we possibly could on a low budget. So, we knew we'd have the best movie we'd made on our hands (at least in terms of how it would be PERCEIVED by the average viewer) as evidenced by even our first trailer.
e) Which brings me to the plan. And this is something I've shared with some via pm and maybe it seemed like I was keeping something back because it seems so simple. However, I assure you, this is all stuff we knew going in which means it's something you ALL KNOW going in. Creating awareness for your film is the most important part of the puzzle at every stage of the game. So, we were about to shoot STEP OFF (yes, Battle at the time)...we TOLD EVERYONE we were about to shoot it. Press releases, blog posts, forum visits, every time I was out and about at a film event...(We're shooting, we're about to shoot, etc.)...at this stage. Have your logline as second nature. "What's it about? Well, it's...." Let EVERYONE KNOW you're creating a movie.
RINSE and REPEAT at every stage of production.
GET A POSTER before you're done shooting. Ours was unveiled just after we wrapped Principal Photography. We were behind the curve, it was supposed to be done BEFORE we started shooting...get the poster MADE ASAP. Ours got changed when they changed the title but you see they used our concept and modified it to be slicker...Again, try to make your poster look as much like a REAL MOVIE as possible. The poster is key to making the one sheet which is something you pass along to distributors officially...but if your poster isn't at least close to being a PRO Poster, then that hurts the overall appeal. I've seen a lot of festival posters in my day and most of them look like they belong at film festivals. Some are nice, but most do not look like a movie that is coming to theaters soon. And I know that some people do not like the slick posters at their local theater and prefer artsier ones, etc. Okay, fine. Just KNOW what that means for the perception of your movie. Now that's not to say our poster is great but we tested our poster with a lot of people to get to where it was when we released it. It made a site dedicated to movie posters and despite the critique given, that fact alone made me proud that we were being treated like any other movie (for the record our poster was next to Narnia's last movie poster at that site).
And then comes the TRAILER...that should be the first thing you cut. I see a lot of posts about we've got a rough cut about 3 or 4 weeks out of principal photography...that's nice...WHERE'S THE TRAILER?? We released our trailer on New Year's Eve 2009...tried to make it a big deal...slowly it did become a big deal. We ran the trailer for 8 months as we were in post and still promoting the crap out of the movie...gradually the trailer got OUT THERE...Fandango, iTunes, etc. We were running well with theatrical features from Screen Gems, etc. on some sites. All the while, we sent hundreds of queries and general notes about the movie. We sent about 9 or 10 official press releases about different aspects of the movie...I personally was frustrated that we were largely ignored by the indie film press for the most part. One of my favorite movie sites did 80 stories on RED STATE and couldn't even blog once about my indie project even while running on the most viewed on iTunes for a couple weeks. However, for the hundreds that ignored us, a few posted something about us.
Our movie was getting to be known...the distributors that had not paid attention to our emails previously were now pursuing us...wanting to know when we'd be done with post, when they'd get a screener, etc. That's when we KNEW we'd get a real distribution deal.
f) Meanwhile post-production was WAY longer than we expected. Largely due to the music. We were making a music movie and had 73 original pieces of music to put into the film. That's a lot of musicians to deal with. Dealing with that many moving parts is pretty time-consuming.
So, we wanted to capitalize on the awareness we'd created about the movie. I mean who knows how long they'd be interested...maybe some other decently made Hip-Hop movie would come along in the interim, etc. So we put temp score and music into the locked picture in order to send a reasonable rough cut of the movie to select distributors. We made a list of 5 to reach out to. Our wishlist. That would be it, none of the others would have a shot at it until we were actually done and perhaps after festivals.
Well, we got 2 offers, and we took 1 of them. Our movie would be a Lionsgate release some time in 2011...we didn't know when at the time we made the deal in Sept. 2010.
That's a quick re-cap, off the dome recollection. I can do certain pieces later more focused on specific questions but I figured this one would serve as a decent re-Opening.
-Martin
1. It is important to note that STEP OFF isn't my first film. Therefore it does benefit from the hindsight of the good, bad and ugly of many projects that I've been associated with in the past.
2. We set out to make STEP OFF with full confidence that we would find a distribution home for it. The only question would be how wide a release would it get.
a) We knew we could self-distribute through non-exclusive partnerships we'd forged with the release of our documentary BEAT MAKERS (go see it on HULU for me please). So, at the very least we'd have outlets at Amazon, Indipix, Hulu, etc. when we completed the film.
b) We had offers that we had turned down with Beat Makers because self-distributing offered actual money directly to us and NOT being caught up in distribution fees, etc. like in the case of my first feature film Behind The Nine. I made a deal with Echelon Entertainment for Behind the Nine and it has sold in at least 9 territories but I've yet to collect a dime because of distribution fees not being covered from the sales. All that being said, if the right distributor who wasn't directly tied into the majors (Warners, Lionsgate, etc.) showed enough real interest to work with us, we figured we'd have this route available as well.
c) We were making a narrative feature that hadn't been made as yet. Sure there have been Hip-Hop films (many) but none had focused on Music Producer/Beatmaking culture as yet. It is a niche that is very active online and we felt fairly easy to reach (that's now debatable since we've had less support from Hip-Hop sites than we expected in terms of spreading the word) directly. AUDIENCE MUST BE TANGIBLE! We knew there was an active Beatmaking community from our experience with the Documentary as well as with our general knowledge of Hip-Hop culture going in.
d) We committed more resources than we had done on any of our previous films so we knew Production Value would be much higher than ones we'd done before. We knew it would LOOK LIKE a REAL MOVIE. Sounds silly but again, PERCEPTION is reality. You tell someone you make movies and they expect what is playing at their local theaters, not what they won't catch at their local film festival. We had MORE locations, more 2nd Unit focus, more of the kinds of things that you usually (or at least I) don't worry as much about on making a low budget film. Ordinarily, as a writer, I focus on story. So my concern is shooting the material in the script. For example, we produced a really good short called "B.A.M." that did well on the festival circuit. It's essentially a twist on courtroom drama. So we shot the court, and the flashbacks from the court. It looks good, it's well done...but what if that was a feature film? It would be too claustraphobic, too contained. Believe me, if you ever watch Behind the Nine (available at Netflix), you'll see what I mean. So, we made a conscious effort to open STEP OFF up as much as we possibly could on a low budget. So, we knew we'd have the best movie we'd made on our hands (at least in terms of how it would be PERCEIVED by the average viewer) as evidenced by even our first trailer.
e) Which brings me to the plan. And this is something I've shared with some via pm and maybe it seemed like I was keeping something back because it seems so simple. However, I assure you, this is all stuff we knew going in which means it's something you ALL KNOW going in. Creating awareness for your film is the most important part of the puzzle at every stage of the game. So, we were about to shoot STEP OFF (yes, Battle at the time)...we TOLD EVERYONE we were about to shoot it. Press releases, blog posts, forum visits, every time I was out and about at a film event...(We're shooting, we're about to shoot, etc.)...at this stage. Have your logline as second nature. "What's it about? Well, it's...." Let EVERYONE KNOW you're creating a movie.
RINSE and REPEAT at every stage of production.
GET A POSTER before you're done shooting. Ours was unveiled just after we wrapped Principal Photography. We were behind the curve, it was supposed to be done BEFORE we started shooting...get the poster MADE ASAP. Ours got changed when they changed the title but you see they used our concept and modified it to be slicker...Again, try to make your poster look as much like a REAL MOVIE as possible. The poster is key to making the one sheet which is something you pass along to distributors officially...but if your poster isn't at least close to being a PRO Poster, then that hurts the overall appeal. I've seen a lot of festival posters in my day and most of them look like they belong at film festivals. Some are nice, but most do not look like a movie that is coming to theaters soon. And I know that some people do not like the slick posters at their local theater and prefer artsier ones, etc. Okay, fine. Just KNOW what that means for the perception of your movie. Now that's not to say our poster is great but we tested our poster with a lot of people to get to where it was when we released it. It made a site dedicated to movie posters and despite the critique given, that fact alone made me proud that we were being treated like any other movie (for the record our poster was next to Narnia's last movie poster at that site).
And then comes the TRAILER...that should be the first thing you cut. I see a lot of posts about we've got a rough cut about 3 or 4 weeks out of principal photography...that's nice...WHERE'S THE TRAILER?? We released our trailer on New Year's Eve 2009...tried to make it a big deal...slowly it did become a big deal. We ran the trailer for 8 months as we were in post and still promoting the crap out of the movie...gradually the trailer got OUT THERE...Fandango, iTunes, etc. We were running well with theatrical features from Screen Gems, etc. on some sites. All the while, we sent hundreds of queries and general notes about the movie. We sent about 9 or 10 official press releases about different aspects of the movie...I personally was frustrated that we were largely ignored by the indie film press for the most part. One of my favorite movie sites did 80 stories on RED STATE and couldn't even blog once about my indie project even while running on the most viewed on iTunes for a couple weeks. However, for the hundreds that ignored us, a few posted something about us.
Our movie was getting to be known...the distributors that had not paid attention to our emails previously were now pursuing us...wanting to know when we'd be done with post, when they'd get a screener, etc. That's when we KNEW we'd get a real distribution deal.
f) Meanwhile post-production was WAY longer than we expected. Largely due to the music. We were making a music movie and had 73 original pieces of music to put into the film. That's a lot of musicians to deal with. Dealing with that many moving parts is pretty time-consuming.
So, we wanted to capitalize on the awareness we'd created about the movie. I mean who knows how long they'd be interested...maybe some other decently made Hip-Hop movie would come along in the interim, etc. So we put temp score and music into the locked picture in order to send a reasonable rough cut of the movie to select distributors. We made a list of 5 to reach out to. Our wishlist. That would be it, none of the others would have a shot at it until we were actually done and perhaps after festivals.
Well, we got 2 offers, and we took 1 of them. Our movie would be a Lionsgate release some time in 2011...we didn't know when at the time we made the deal in Sept. 2010.
That's a quick re-cap, off the dome recollection. I can do certain pieces later more focused on specific questions but I figured this one would serve as a decent re-Opening.
-Martin
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