indie Film Festival

I’ve started a new website called indie Film Festival at www.indieff.com

This is an Internet Film Festival for films that didn’t make it into the festival circuit.

Distributors don’t seem to be buying films with no stars now.

The original films the started the whole independent film scene would now be passed on by most distributors.

It also seems more films are being made than can be screened by film festivals.

I hear that festivals like Sundance and Cannes get about 5,000 films submitted and about 100 get accepted by the festival.

I’m still hoping our film gets into Sundance, but the chances are 50 to 1.

OK I’ve added Pub Crawl into IndieGoGo. No idea if it will raise any money. The money will go towards releasing Pub Crawl as a DVD, if we don’t get a distribution deal.

The word on the street is that film distribution deals seem to have dried up for indie films, so the way to go is to try and make money from self distribution.

So I will be offering Pub Crawl Tee Shirts.That’s the picture above on the Tee Shirts.

Crowd Funding

Need to raise money to make your movie?

Why not put a project on IndieGoGO or Kickstarter and use crowd funding to get the money.

I have checked out these sites and with Kickstarter, you pick an amount that you want to raise.

Then setup a project and offer people various things, such as Tee Shirts, DVD’s, TIckets, Credits with dollar pledges.

You don’t get the money until the full amount is raised and Kickstarter take 5%, it sounds a great idea, I don’t know if it is legal or not. I think it must be.

The other thing is you keep 100% of the rights to your project. The pledge gets you something, but not a percentage of the film. I know there used to be problems asking for small investors to invest in movies.

I don’t think are any limits, so in theory you could ask for $100,000,000 to make an action block buster, full of hollywood A-list actors. If you did that and it only raised $90,000,000 in the time, no money would change hands and the funders would not be billed on their credit cards.

IndieGoGo is a similar idea, but more focused on making indie films. the only problem I have is I looked at how it works and I still haven’t figured out how it works. I can see you can make a project, but is it the same as kickstarter, where the money is transferred if the project is full funded and does IndieGoGo take a percentage, I didn’t find this information.

More later when I find out how it works.

I’ve put Pub Crawl up on IndieGoGo

How not to Write a Book

I published my book Megachrist.com on Createspace. If you haven’t checked it out, Creatspace is a great place to publish books, Film DVD’s and Music.

Anyway I first started writing screenplays and I was inspired by Robert Rodreiguez ’s first film “El Mariachi”. I also read his book about making the movie Rebel without a Crew

So I wrote some film scripts. Some big budget and some low budget.

I also started looking into production, to see if I could produce one of my low budget scripts.

I don’t know why, but the other thing was at about the same time I read the Harry Potter first book. I liked how small it was and I got the idea, that maybe I should try writing a book.

One of the first scripts I wrote was based on Harry Potter, but the story moved to New York and it was a college for evil megalomanic Wizard who wanted to mostly take over the world. So this was bad wizards in an american college. Not really a low budget movie.

So I had some scripts and rather than converting books to scripts, I went the other way and converted one of my low budget scripts to a book. This is the megachrist.com book, but it was a bit short and as one of the characters was a sc-fi writer, I added the book he was writing into Megachrist.com. I also added a book, the main character Kate was writing.

So Megachrist.com is made from 2 film scripts and a couple of short stories. The one script wasn’t long enough for a whole book.

Publishing on Createspace was fairly easy. I used Microsoft Word to layout a manuscript and outputted it as a PDF file.

I have the proof copy, which I’m reading. It needs a little more editing, but I think it is OK to get most of the story. So I have approved the copy and it should come up on Amazon.

The other reason for writing the book, is now I can sell the movie rights to the book, it seems some people think films are better if they are adapted from books.

How not to write a book... don’t start with a screenplay

More from the BECTU Meeting

OK I was at the meeting and I am a low budget filmmaker and a a recent new member of BECTU.

I think there is nothing wrong with having low budget movies use a collaboration, like carving up a pie. Obviously the director, producer, heads of departments, DOP, camera operator, sound recordist and the runners will get different size slices of the pie.

This might be dealt with by having a maximum or minimum share anyone in the project can get. What about investors? They usually want at least 50%.

Then you need to work out is it a gross or producer net profits pie (eddie murphy quote "monkey points"), the problem being if you carve up a project into gross points no distribution or sales agent will touch it.

There is a good book that deals with collaborative film projects "Feature Film Making at Used-Car Prices: How to Write, Produce, Direct, Film, Edit, and Promote a Feature-Length Film for Less Than $10,000 by Rick Smitt".

I think the other thing you would need to do would be figure out what kind of budget this might be appropriate for say below £50,000.

Make it a code of practice, but not mandatory. There should be some reason that would make it easier for low budget filmmakers to use this such as standard simple contracts that everyone understands.

Then get Equity to accept it, Post production houses, and the music industry to accept it too.

The only problem is getting them to believe that there will be any profits.

Well if someone works out blueprints for how it might work, then someone else . ie a low budget filmmaker will have to try it out to see if it works, I hope they get a grant from somewhere.

I still think the problem is filmmakers, getting little or no money for films once they are finished.

For more information checkout Chris Jones blog http://www.chrisjonesblog.com/2010/03/bectu-debate-and-the-national-minimum-wage-lets-all-throw-stones-at-each-other/comments/page/2/#comments

An Internet Festival for the Rest of Us

In my other post I mentioned the idea of doing a Reject FIlm Festival, an Internet Film Festival for the Film that don’t make it into the major festivals.

What purpose would it serve?

1. It would help publicise Indie low budget movies
2. It might those films get into some smaller festivals
3. I’m curious to see what doesn’t get in.
4. If you’re like me, you probably think your movie is great and can’t understand why it didn’t get into Cannes and Sundance
5. Maybe your right...

OK I’ve been checking out Internet film festivals and so far I don’t think any of them have even got started.

The sites I’ve been finding from google are pretty much dead. They will be accepting films in the future, but they are stuck in the past.

It just did not happen. I don’t want to fall into the same trap.

Things I’ve figured out so far.

1. You need a cool name, most of the sites seem to have spent most of their time trying to think up cool names.
2. Then they mock up what the site might do with a simple website that does not actually work.
3. The they give up, go to sleep, run out of money or energy and the website sort of dies.

I’m not going to name any names...

The problem that I see is f you don’t have something that pretty much unctions as a film festival on day one, then I don’t think it will ever work.

So I think I need...

1. A cool name.
2. A way of taking features, Documentaries and shorts from filmmakers, we need their info, their film and a small fee.
3. Decide on a fee features $20, Docs $20 and shorts $10.
4. Have a non exclusive licence that allows filmmakers to shut down film downloads.
5. Have a time period films will be in the festival for, say 1 year.
6. Have a chart top 100 films based on downloads, shorts have their own chart.
7. Figure out how films get higher in the chart views, downloads or votes.
8. We can do2 and 3 by accepting films from Withoutabox.
9. Accept DVD or secure screeners from Withoutabox.
10. Have a preferred display format 16x9 is display as 160x90 or 320x180 or 430 x 270. Also accept 4:3 and 2.35:1.
11. By keeping films low rez it allows for sell thrus of DVD’s from Createspace.
12. Try and get sponsorship from Createspace.
13. By keeping rez low on films we also reduce the amount of webspace and bandwidth the film festival uses.
14. Figure out how to show festival entries.
15. have name of movie, date, budget, festival rejection list, movie website, facebook, myspace, twitter, trailer, movie stream or download and comments.
16. A search site facility.
17. Recommended new movies.
18. Genres top 10 charts features, documentary, action, thriller, comedy, drama, world, short.
19. Awards for top of charts film of the week, film of the month.
20. Festivals are monthly 04.2010 april 2010 RIFF.04.2010 for Reject Internet Film Festival 04/2010
21. Save old charts.
22. is there a way to import a movie to hard drive then save it as a movie in low rez or do I need filmmakers to send in .mov format?
23. Is Apple quicktime to much of a restriction
24. Do we need to use Apples Quicktime Streaming server (Darwin), WebBbject and java.
25. I think we need a database type website.
26. Or we could hand build the whole thing and drag in quicktime files.
27. The hand built thing will not give enough information on votes or views.

Cannes Film Festival

I’m going back to Cannes this year for the Film Festival.

I did go last year, but I didn’t have a pass, which was kind of boring as you need the pass to get into things.

Short Crawl is in the Short FIlm Corner it’s not to late to enter this http://www.shortfilmcorner.com/uk/home.html