Given this sobering reality, producers — members of the 99% — are embracing a post-distributor marketplace. But understanding how to navigate this alternate landscape is essential.

This means recognizing the sound of a reshuffling deck. In the old game, producers relied on key factors beyond their control: top-tier film festival invites, prestigious jury prizes, audience awards and, all too frequently, the particular tastes and needs of distribution executives.

From this new shuffle, producers will deal their own cards, managing risk and seeking out rewards that include some combination of maximum exposure, return on investment and recognition.

Of course, traditional distributors will continue to service independent films. However, I believe most producers will market and distribute their projects on their own by incorporating old and new media, within and outside the traditional marketplace. Benefits include greater control, reduced costs, increased financial rewards and transparent accounting. However, this also means assuming full responsibility from the onset and taking all measures required to achieve their objectives.

With that in mind, here’s seven key practices producers must embrace to succeed in the post-distributor marketplace.
Embrace the Role of Entrepreneur.
Understand the odds: Whether by design or default, you probably won’t have a conventional distributor. Research best practices; collaborate with other successful producers and industry professionals. Create and adhere to success plans grounded in hard numbers.

Mix Old and New Distribution.
Assume responsibility for building an integrated media platform; successful marketing and distribution plans are a mix of old and new media. While you may sidestep turnkey arrangements, you’ll still leverage traditional platforms where appropriate. Specialty theatrical releases, DVD, VOD, television broadcasts, digital streaming and downloads, whether for sale or subscription, all figure in. Like recording artists who release content through their own labels, producers can establish their own branded distribution companies. Thanks to an emerging class of service providers and content aggregators, there’s a number of distribution options that act as facilitators rather than gatekeepers and render essential delivery services (digital encoding, quality control) for relatively modest fees.

Create Key Marketing Elements, and Then Create Some More.
Constantly create content. Take an abundance of photographs and videos that capture each step of production, both in front of the camera and behind the scenes; they will be vital for marketing. Images are the connective tissue between the production and its fanbase.

Integrate Social Media.
Your project’s success depends on your ability to incorporate social media as an essential marketing platform. YouTube, Facebook and Twitter are indispensable for developing an audience and generating a robust and substantive dialogue with their fans.

Forge Partnerships with Friends, Family and Fans.
Musicians have understood this for years: Success depends on establishing a personal relationship with fans. Create a network of digital hubs (YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, your own websites) to share project-related content; partner with support groups that will mobilize for both fundraising and distribution. Over the past year, we’ve witnessed a slew of producers who cultivated and partnered with rabid fanbases to achieve their goals.
David Dinerstein, now president of LD Entertainment, helped manage Kevin Smith’s “Red State” marketing strategy. “Every project comes with its own brand of drama,” he says. “With entertaining and informative posts, empowered producers can create positive value even from production setbacks.” While following the production’s own dramatic narrative, audiences vest in the film’s outcome and can become a service for financial and marketing support.

Collaborate with Experts.
You will need a team of specialists to replace the people who manage publicity, marketing and distribution in the traditional model. Key is a digital marketer to design and manage unique strategies; author and industry consultant Jonathan Reiss says these individuals are important enough to deserve producer status — Producers of Marketing and Distribution, aka PMDs.

Incorporate Crowdfunding.
It’s not just production money; crowdfunding is an invaluable tool for financing marketing and distribution. It also increases audience awareness and can motivate an army of loyal supporters. 

This list is by no means exhaustive, but it’s a powerful blueprint: Members of the 99 percent hold the power to change the course of independent film.

Indiewire.com – writing credit Steven C. Beer

Steven C. Beer is a shareholder in the international entertainment practice of Greenberg Traurig’s New York office. Steven has served as counsel to numerous award-winning writers, directors and producers, as well as industry-leading film production, film finance and film distribution companies.

The Google Inc.-owned video site announced Thursday Jan 19th that Your Film Festival will take submissions of short films up to 15 minutes in length between Feb. 2 and March 31. Fifty semi-finalists will be selected by Scott Free Productions, Ridley and Tony Scott’s production company.

Those 50 films will form a channel on YouTube: www.YouTube.com/yourfilmfestival. There, users will be able to view the films and vote for their favorites.

The 10 finalists will be flown to the 69th annual Venice Film Festival, where their films will be screened in August. Ridley Scott will lead a jury in selecting a winner, who will receive a $500,000 grant from YouTube to produce a work with Scott Free.

 See video below and more details at http://www.youtube.com/user/yourfilmfestival

“I think that modern technology is playing a very positive role for low-budget filmmaking,” notes Slamdance prexy and co-founder Peter Baxter. “Cameras are more affordable and filmmakers can spend a lot more time in the editing room. You’ll really see it in the strength of performances in the narrative section this year.”

Baxter said the new crop of narrative films has accelerated in quality this year. “We’ve had very strong documentaries in recent years but this year we are seeing very strong directing voices in the narrative entries,” he added.

The Slamdance competition lineup has 10 narrative films and eight docs — including 13 world premieres — culled from nearly 5,000 submissions and reserved for first time feature directors working with budgets under $1 million. Slamdance will run through Thursday at Park City’s Treasure Mountain Inn.

Narrative titles already generating buzz are “Bindlestiffs,” directed by Andrew Edison; “Heavy Girls,” directed by Axel Ranisch, and “OK, Good,” directed by Daniel Martinico. Documentaries that have gained pre-festival notice include “We Are Legion: The Story of Hacktivists,” directed and written by Brian Knappenberger;”Getting Up,” directed by Caskey Ebeling; and “Kelly,” directed by James Stenson;

Breakout hits from previous fests have included “Mad Hot Ballroom” in 2005, Seth Gordon’s “The King of Kong” in 2007 and Oren Peli’s “Paranormal Activity” in 2008. Some of the filmmakers first discovered at Slamdance include Chris Nolan (“Following,” 1998), Marc Forster (“Loungers,” 1996), Jared Hess via a short version of “Napoleon Dynamite,” and Lynne Shelton (“We Go Way Back,” 2006).

Peli, who’s on a promo tour of his upcoming ABC series “The River,” told Variety that his Slamdance experience — when “Paranormal Activity” screened in January 2008 — was unforgettable.

“It was kind of overwhelming for someone with no real connections to Hollywood,” Peli noted. “To get that kind of recognition from people who are really interested in films was just so exciting. What I’d like to do sometime is just go back to Slamdance and enjoy it as a fan, which is obviously not going to happen this year.

Writer Dave McNary

Director Jean-Marc Vallée’s Café de Flore received 13 nominations and David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method received 11 nominations—both films are nominated for Best Motion Picture and Achievement in Direction.

Rounding out the Best Motion Picture category are the awardwinning Monsieur Lazhar; the suspenseful The Whistleblower and the crowd-pleaser Starbuck.

BEST MOTION PICTURE
A DANGEROUS METHOD – Martin Katz, Marco Mehlitz, Jeremy Thomas
CAFÉ DE FLORE – Pierre Even, Marie-Claude Poulin, Jean-Marc Vallée
MONSIEUR LAZHAR – Luc Déry, Kim McCraw
STARBUCK – André Rouleau
THE WHISTLEBLOWER – Christina Piovesan, Celine Rattray

ACHIEVEMENT IN DIRECTION 
DAVID CRONENBERG – A Dangerous Method
STEVEN SILVER – The Bang Bang Club
JEAN-MARC VALLÉE – Café de Flore
PHILIPPE FALARDEAU – Monsieur Lazhar
LARYSA KONDRACKI – The Whistleblower

The full list of nominees are locate at Hye’s Musings Blog   http://hyemusings.blogspot.com/2012/01/32nd-genie-awards-nominees.html

Telefilm’s old system failed to account for international box office and DVD sales, to say nothing of factoring in the acclaim films receive. Such accolades have led to well-established careers and numerous jobs for actors and technicians, even though this wasn’t being officially measured, says Carolle Brabant, executive director of Telefilm.

For instance, according to older ratings systems, the 2009 Quebec comedy De père en flic – with a home box office of close to $11-million – was a clear hit. But the 2010 film Incendies might not be considered much of a winner with a box office of only about $5-million – despite the fact that it was nominated for an Oscar and won eight Genie awards, including best picture.

In fact, most Canadian films seemed to fall below expectations under the old system.

A decade ago, former Heritage Minister Sheila Copps set a goal for films to aim for 5 per cent of domestic box office – an attempt to rally Canada’s then-faltering film industry. But given the number of Hollywood films clogging multiplexes across Canada, English-Canadian films typically gross only 1 per cent of the market or worse. Quebec films do only marginally better at around 3 per cent.

And while Canadian films such as 2008’s Blindness often do very well overseas or in DVD and video-on-demand sales, these indexes haven’t been factored into whether they’ve been a “success.”

So, on Wednesday, Telefilm announced a new Success Index. Now 60 per cent of a film’s score will be based on sales figures, 30 per cent on awards and film-festival appearances and 10 per cent on how much of a film’s funding was private as opposed to public.

“The fact that we’re combining the cultural and commercial aspect into an index is quite unique,” says Brabant.

“A good example is [director] Guy Maddin,” she says. “He’s a true international star. His work has been recognized around the world. But his films are not necessarily reaching huge box office in Canada.”

And for films with strong overseas and DVD sales, Brabant argues that the new index better reflects the current reality of the film business, and helps to define what a 5 per cent box-office target might really look like. The industry is now multinational. Most large films have some foreign backing and therefore have some expectations of box-office and DVD sales overseas.

“We see it as an important tool to actually achieve that 5 per cent,” Brabant says. “Just having box office as the most important measurement was not sufficient.”

The new Success Index not only changes how individual films are measured, but how Telefilm itself is measured. Are they doing a good job of allocating public funds for films?

“It has always struck me, and maybe it’s from my background as a chartered accountant, that it was pretty unique in this industry to measure our success mainly from what we’re doing in Canada,” Brabant says. “When you look at companies in other industries – Bombardier or Cirque du Soleil, for example – these companies are not only successful in Canada, but they’re successful all over the world. I thought this was something that was missing [in Telefilm’s measurement].”

During the discussion, Coppola also took questions from audience members about working with A-list actors, his writing process, screenwriting and rumors about another Godfather movie.

Coppola and Cameron Bailey, co-director of the Toronto International Film Festival, chat about Coppola’s career during an event at this year’s festival.

When Francis Ford Coppola was a young filmmaker, he wanted to make what he calls “little art films.”

“I think many of my colleagues felt the same way, but [we were] involved in quite a dance,” he told Bailey. “You’re always doing something that will make a lot of money so that you can wake up and make the films you want to do.”

Coppola, who directed The Godfather and Apocalypse Now, revealed that his earliest films — like The Rain People and The Conversation — were more like what he’d hoped to do over the course of his career. But then money and life got in the way.

“I had to get a job, and of course, the job was The Godfather,” he says. “That made me be something I didn’t know I was going to be. I became a big-shot director. If you take a young Long Island Italian guy and give him endless possibilities, then you’ll see what kind of crazy things I did in the course of my career.”

Coppola’s most recent films — Tetro, Twixt and Youth Without Youth — are much like his earliest pre-Godfather movies. That’s partially because Coppola was able to finance his most recent films himself. It’s a financial arrangement familiar to the award-winning director. He also financed 1979′s Apocalypse Now — notorious for its troubled production period — after studios refused to get involved.

“It could have been because there hadn’t been a so-called war film about [the Vietnam War], and studios were very cautious,” he says. “The script for Apocalypse was considered interesting … but nobody wanted to do it, so I thought, ‘Of course, I should do it.’ ”

Coppola mortgaged his properties to finance the film, which took much longer to finish than he had anticipated.

“We were supposed to be [on set] less than a year, but we ended up being there two years,” he says. “I was pretty scared.”

And Marlon Brando, who played Kurtz in the film, was scheduled to be on set in the Philippines for just three weeks. When he showed up, his physique was not exactly what Coppola had in mind.

“He had promised me that he was going to be a little thinner,” he says. “The issue was, if he was a runaway Green Beret officer — it sounds silly, but [I was thinking] what kind of uniform should he wear? They don’t make size XXXXXL … uniforms. So … I had to dress him somehow.”

Coppola suggested cutting Brando’s hair off so that Brando would at least resemble the character Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s novel The Heart of Darkness. But Brando disagreed. For an entire week, the two men sat in a houseboat on set talking — but not filming — while Coppola struggled to figure out what to do.

“And on the Friday [of the first week Brando was on set], I walked in, and there was Brando sitting there with his head shaved, bald. And I said, ‘But Marlon, you said it wouldn’t work. You said you read Heart of Darkness and the idea for Kurtz that way wouldn’t work.’ And he said, ‘Well, I lied. I never read it. I read it last night.’ So he read it last night and came around to this image.”

Coppola decided to dress Brando in black pajamas, hoping to create the appearance of a gigantic person — instead of an overweight person — on-screen.

“That’s the way I got around the uniform issue,” he says.

Listen to a section of the In Conversation With Francis Ford Coppola provided by NPR www.npr.org

Director,Producer - STORM with Producer - Michelle Serieux

In recent years, Trinidad and Jamaica has produced notable Caribbean soap operas, but as you can imagine there is a greater need for artistry and dialogue through films and television to give voices to other stories.

New Caribbean Cinema (NCC) is a collaboration of 8 young Film Makers (two of which I met at an industry event during tiff) from throughout the Caribbean who, combine their talents, perspectives and artistry to help each other produce feature length films and other projects. The movement which touts a New Wave, New Style and New Directors is a much needed revolution for Caribbean film and media industry. NCC has gone beyond most collaborations by not depending and waiting on government funding but by pooling the resources and talents of its members to produce and direct shorts in an effort to create a final featured length film.

I met two of the Producers/Directors of NCC, Storm Saulter (Jamaica) and Michelle Serieux (St. Lucia) who spoke candidly about the film industry or lack there of in the Caribbean and advocated the need for support by the public. Both directors were enthusiastic about their venture and the crowd response at the reception to their trailers and shorts were equally encouraging.

Visit the site below, view the Trailers/Shorts and Support New Caribbean Cinema

http://www.newcaribbeancinema.com/

About Author: Khamal Murray is a major in Bioethics & Health Studies at the University of Toronto, a published journalist, as well as the Editor/Writer with TheJuxtapositionApe Blog and a contributor to online News Mag Alternavox  & Science Mag LifeofALabRat.

“People are realizing that Toronto is a great place to start selling new films,” said FilmNation Entertainment topper Glen Basner. “Equity is coming back after being on (the) sidelines, and that’s a double-edged sword, as while it allows more movies to get made, it doesn’t necessarily mean more good movies. For now, the financial crisis made buyers much more conservative, but the cycle will change.”

As the major studios have dramatically cut back on their production slates, distribution pipelines have opened to indies proffering low- to midrange-budgeted films. Sundance, Berlin and Cannes already saw better-than-expected markets, and after the stunning successes of “Black Swan” and “The King’s Speech,” the summer B.O. tallies for Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris” have bolstered the general sense that this is a good time to be an indie.

An eclectic mix of titles has emerged with elevated expectations for sales during Toronto: horror projects “You’re Next” and “The Awakening“; relationship dramas “360,” “Shame,” “Take This Waltz” and “Winnie“; police drama “Rampart“; enivronmental thriller “The Hunter“; and comedies “Peace, Love and Misunderstanding” and “Friends With Kids.”

Amber Entertainment and Haxan Films — the banner behind “The Blair Witch Project” — believe buyers can’t get enough horror, and rather than sell off foreign rights, they’ve fully financed “Lovely Molly,” formerly dubbed “The Possession.”

“It’s a calculated risk, but we think we’ll come out much better with an unencumbered film,” said Amber’s Jane Fleming. “We think that we can do far more on international sales than we saw in the estimates.”

To continue reading …http://bit.ly/qD5k15

Written by Dave McNary

Seth Worley director of Plot Device

This has been a busy week for Seth Worley. The Nashville-based filmmaker’s witty short film “Plot Device” has quickly gone viral, generating media buzz and putting him on Hollywood’s radar practically overnight.

It’s no surprise, either, because “Plot Device” makes for one helluva calling card: A visually scrumptious, ultra-high concept production, it follows a budding filmmaker (played by the director’s brother) who purchases a button online that sends him reeling from one Hollywood genre to the next. One minute, he’s surrounded by zombies; the next, he’s dodging gunfire and aliens (watch it below). 

Made for about $10,000, the short film has been played almost 15,000 times since it was uploaded to YouTube about 3 weeks ago.

Since then, the film has attracted the attention of movie studios and talent agencies in Hollywood who are interested in working with Worley. And he’s now reportedly heading west to meet with several agencies, from CAA to UTA and WME, and movie producers.  

So, is the short film really that impressive? Watch it and let me know your feedback.

Read a full Indiewire interview with Seth Worley – http://bit.ly/nezUav

This is more about what the New York Times wrote back in February.  New York Times asked a very important question – Has filmmakers somehow exhaust the subject “black experience”? Or has the cultural ground shifted and, with the economic crisis, made other kinds of stories (insert non-black experience here) feel more urgent?

So here we are five months in and only two black films released, one from Tyler Perry’s another from producer Tracey Edmonds. Many will remember Tracey Edmonds from films such as the indie “Hav Plenty”, or the American anthem “Soul Food” and “Light It Up” all very popular with a diverse audience. Her latest film “Jumping The Broom” is a broad African-American family comedy about two very different families that converge on Martha’s Vineyard one weekend for a wedding. As one entertainment critic pointed out – albeit a white wedding…

Lorretta Devine and Angela Bassett as mother of the loving couples in "Jumping The Broom"

After waking up from another one-night stand, up-and-coming corporate lawyer Sabrina Watson (Paula Patton) makes a promise to God: She’ll save her “cookies,” (which she’s apparently been distributing to the phine looking men of NYC), if the Almighty will simply find her Mr. Right. Sure enough, along comes Jason Taylor (Laz Alonso) — handsome well-fixed … the whole package. Six months later, they’re planning to exchange vows. This apparently came all too soon for the audience as it did for both respective families who haven’t met each other until two days prior to a wedding. The film stars some of Hollywood most recognizable actors which included Angela Bassett, Loretta Devine, Mike Epps, Meagan Good and Romeo.

The film has some real comical moments that put a few actors right where we are familiar with their talents and range. Like for example Loretta Devine is simple a darling on screen even when she is a manipulative overbearing mother. One of her most memorable line towards Mrs. Watson (Angela Bassett) was simply “You better get off your high horse, ’cause baby, you black!” To which Mrs. Watson replied in French “I’m about to have this women drag out of my house”

Personally, I have always enjoyed wedding films – “My Best Friend’s Wedding”, “Wedding Crashers” and the classic “Philadelphia Story”. However I simply felt that the Jumping The Broom failed slightly in the script and some of its actors’ performances. A friend that I went to watch the film with commented on Paula Patton performance who is a strong lead for the film – she felt that she was flat one dimensional to which I agreed. Having seen what Patton can deliver in “Precious” she fails in her attempt to be a wholesome fiancée.

But I have to give script credit on two things. Since this was also produced by T.D Jakes who is of the religious faith which meant that the film would carry a wholesome message of love, acceptance and chastity. I also loved the respect for traditions which was embedded in the cultural significance of jumping the broom. The idea of jumping the broom was part of the African American phrase used as a slang expression to describe the act of getting married, rather than a formal union which would not be recognized by church or state during the time period of slavery.

Measure against other black films of the past this may not be smash hit but it’s a clear sign that Hollywood has not given up on black culture. Perhaps all they need to do is to mixed it up a bit; add a bit of the past with new developments. African American culture is not so black and white it’s quite diverse and our many accomplishments are varied from Oprah to Colin Powel. But before we give up on Hollywood remember it was Hollywood that gave us the image of the first Black President.

- “Jumping The Broom” …Hit Theatres Mothers Day – May 8th