DIY DAYS - from David Tames

DIY DAYS, who has revolutionized DIY filmmaking information, has a great piece on the world of independent distribution. The article not only solidifies the fact that for low budget films, festivals are the new theatrical (a theatrical release is basically a commercial for your DVD release for both majors and indies), and for less booking and promotion money (just the cost of submissions), you are looking at a huge, money-saving "theatrical release" to announce and promote your DVD and gain your audience - and with a lot less work. Joe Swanberg strategically used SXSW as a world premiere, then targeted the midwest by screening at a Chicago festival; he used a Northhampton film fest for his east coast push, a San Francisco fest for his west coast push, and a fest in Canada for his "international push." That was a near-full territorial push in only 5 screenings (similar to some friends of mine who have had 5 city limited releases with a distributor), that geared him up to release his DVD on his website and sell them himself (pretty successfully at that).


But the festival reasoning is detailed in another part of the site itself - see for yourself in the chart later in the article how fests are just one part of the whole picture, and how it all fits in together. This particular piece is about using the entire gamut of distribution avenues to your DIY advantage. Here is more from it:


Lance Weiler (filmmaker and DIY Days co-organizer) gave a presentation comparing traditional independent film distribution and a hybrid DIY model. Much has been written about the erosion of the independent film distribution business over the past year, including the widely circulated and discussed “Yes, The Sky Really Is Falling” message delivered by Mark Gill at the Los Angeles Film Festival’s Financing Conference.

Many distribution companies have closed, specialty films are experiencing lackluster box office results, and with the replacement of video stores with big-box retailers, shelf space for independent films is shrinking. And all of this is happening at the same time the supply of independent films is skyrocketing due to the democratization of production, post-production, and distribution. Here’s a juicy quote from Mark Gill’s piece in IndieWire:

Here’s how bad the odds are: of the 5000 films submitted to Sundance each year– generally with budgets under $10 million–maybe 100 of them got a US theatrical release three years ago. And it used to be that 20 of those would make money. Now maybe five do. That’s one-tenth of one percent.

Put another way, if you decide to make a movie budgeted under $10 million on your own tomorrow, you have a 99.9% chance of failure.


OK, so we have a problem, but where are the new business models? What models can independent filmmakers use to get their film in front of an audience?

Lance’s presentation slides are available as a PDF download: diydaysBoston.pdf (the two charts in this post are from the presentation).


Lance began his discussion with an explanation of current release windows, which is rapidly compressing due to changes in the marketplace. Right now, mainstream distributors think in terms of the following windows and in this order for the most part:

Festivals: indie filmmakers have traditionally seen this as a gateway to a distribution deal and did not have to worry about the other windows, I think a classic example of the old way is Darren Aronofsky’s Pi, the film premiered at Sundance where it picked up an award and the producers quickly sealed a distribution deal, however, this is rarely the case for independent filmmakers, these stories are exceptions to the rule, and it’s becoming more and more rare with the decline of speciality film distributors. Arin Crumley and Susan Buice’s Four Eyes Monsters, provides a classic example of the more realistic and difficult DIY model, none of the specialty distributors saw a way to make money with the film, however, the film did indeed find an audience, but the filmmakers had to take distribution into their own hands (which at this point has been written about widely, it has become an excellent case study).

Theatrical: classically this has been the window after festivals, but a lot of studios now start with a single festival and go right into wide release, classically the independent filmmaker’s goal was to get a distribution deal that included a theatrical release, and this “builds value in the ancillaries” and is an effective marketing campaign for for all the other forms of release of the film (home video, pay-per-view, etc), but this is becoming more and more expensive to do, and independent specialty films are being shut out as the number of screens for specialty films dwindles, distributors are taking less risks, and audiences for specialty films are increasingly watching them at home rather than in a theater.

Pay-Per-View: 90 to 100 days, only a few ways to get into cable and telcos, only a few players here, pay-per-view has been good for Lance, he’s managed to negotiate deals for this, his suggestion is to carve out each release window and negotiate rights separately, this can be very complicated, but worth it in the end, as you retain control of the destiny of your film.


Read the rest of this amazingly informative article here:


http://diydays.com/2008/10/diy-days-boston-notes-from-david-tames/