Traditional distribution

This used to be the only way to go, but now with alternative distribution you have choices to make.  Traditional distribution has both advantages and disadvantages and a lot of how you choose to proceed will depend on the kind of deal you’re offered.  Going with traditional distribution may not be the best way to get your movie seen and sold...

But it never hurts to try.  The advantage with traditional distribution is that established distribution companies have experience and will market your film and get it seen places that you might not have thought of.  The downside is they take a huge cut out of the profits to do this and many times the filmmaker hardly sees a dime.  Another downside is that there are many small distribution houses that will take your film and sometimes your money and do nothing with it.  You have to do your research and be really careful who you trust.  One good rule of thumb is don’t give them any money up front.  Look at their library of other work and see if your film is a good fit there.  And ask what their marketing strategy is for your film and how they plan to sell it and reach audiences.

You might be able to use multiple distributors for different markets.  There’s domestic (US) and foreign sales and you might strike one deal with one distributor and have a different deal for a different region with another. You can find distributors online through web searches.  The search method I've used is to find a film similar to mine, see who the distributor is and look up the contact info and just cold call.  You'll stand a better chance of getting through to someone if you have a sales agent.  They can be expensive though and your film will probably be one of many in their roster, but they have connections that you don't.

If you can't afford a sales agent and want to have a better chance of making a connection with a few, well researched distributors you might consider a trip to a film market.  The Cannes Film Market (Le Marché du film) is the largest market in the world and The American Film Market (AFM) is the largest in America.  You'll want to set up multiple meetings well in advance and do lots of prep work on who you want to meet, your pitch and your business card.  Attending a market is an expensive endeavor and you definitely want to do your homework ahead of time.

For My Toxic Backyard, I’ve been approached by a few acquisitions people.  These are the people that look for new films to add to their company’s inventory.  You’ll find them at film festivals and film markets and when you win awards, they’ll start to find you.  I’ve sent screeners to them, and I even followed up to see if they’d had a chance to see my film but it never went anywhere. 

Being a documentary with educational value, my next step will be to approach companies that distribute educational copies to college and university libraries.  Media copies are much more expensive than personal copies (like what you would buy or rent at home) because with media copies you get licensing to have screenings in classrooms full of kids and it can be checked out and seen over and over without additional fees.  Media copies can run anywhere from $100 to $500.  And since it’s a completely different kind of licensing and audience, it won’t interfere with distribution for home use.  Next I'll talk about self-distribution.

Scheduling Releases

With multiple ways for people to view your movie, you can make it available only one way at a time and maximize your revenue and announcement process.  I’m planning more than one release.  First, there were film festivals, then a limited theatrical release, then broadcast.  After that comes the opportunity for people to purchase the film on a DVD and finally it will be available as VOD (video on demand, both rental and download.)  

The reason I’m doing it that way is, I’ll be able to do more than one release announcement blasted on social media and I’ll make more through DVD sales than VOD so I’d rather most people that are interested purchase a DVD.  Making that the only option for a while, will get impatient people to do just that.  I don't want to miss out on sales though, so shortly after the DVD release will be VOD so that the documentary is widely available to as many potential audience members as possible.

Make sure you have a plan for how you want to release your movie, before you get to that point.  You don't want to miss out on a chance to have your movie in a film festival because you released it online too early.  And you don't want people buying a copy at home before you do a theatrical release, if you want to go that route.  Timing is important.  Make the most of it.

Broadcast

Because I had a documentary film, it made sense to broadcast it over the air for free on TV (I should say free for anyone to view, not free for me to play it.  Buying air time was actually pretty expensive.)  This might not make sense for most projects, but I’ll tell you why I did it.

First and foremost, I wanted to make sure that everyone in the area had an opportunity to see the documentary without having to purchase a copy.  I think it's important information for people to have no matter where they live, but most especially in Western North Carolina where the documentary was shot.  Having it broadcast also made it eligible for awards like the Emmys and I wanted to have a chance to enter it.  I should hear if it's nominated in May.  Keep your fingers crossed.

In order to have it broadcast, it had to be closed captioned.  There are multiple ways to close caption a film both in how you create the captioning and how you deliver the film with captioning.  I used Adobe Premiere to caption and I ended up needed 2 types of files for delivery.  For broadcast I had to embed the closed captioning in a quicktime file.  Later for selling on Amazon I had to create a separate file called a scenarist closed caption or .scc file.

After having done the work myself, I now know that I'll probably hire someone next time.  It's not that expensive to have a company do it for you and it's so worth the money.  Captioning was long and extremely tedious, but I'm glad for the experience and for gaining a better understanding of how it all works.

I had some difficulty finding a local station that would air my movie because it's a point of view documentary.  Here's a link to a previous post with more on that. 

Warning the follow is boring technical information.  Only Read this if you want more info on captioning in Adobe Premiere CC:

1. You can import a file into premiere or do it from scratch.  I made mine from scratch.  Right click in your project window and choose "new item - closed caption" (bottom right of the project window.) The default is CEA-608 and CC1.

2. You won't be able to see any captions until you go to the upper right corner menu in your program and source monitors and click on "closed caption display - enable."  But that alone isn't enough. You must make sure you are enabling CEA-608 (the default on the monitor was CEA-607 for me. You won't see the captions unless the type you are making matches what you've set to display!)

3. To edit your captions go to the "window" menu and click on "captions" to see the window you'll need to edit in.  Click on the add a new item in the bottom of the project window and choose "captions." (make sure you have selected the caption file in your timeline to see it in the captions window.)

4. Hit the plus button to add a caption and start typing.  You can see the in and out in the timeline, but to change the in and out you have to adjust the time code in the project window.  Text doesn't wrap, so you have to do a hard return at the end of each line.

Those are the basics.  If you have an specific questions leave a comment. Hope that saves you a little frustration in your captioning endeavors.

Limited Theatrical Release

Having a theatrical release seems really lofty, but it’s totally doable.  First, find a small art house movie theater and see if you can get them to give you a screening, maybe at an odd time, maybe for one time only, but see if they’ll split the ticket revenue with you.  Usually the theater keeps 60% of ticket sales and the distributor (in this case that’s you) gets 40%.  You might think, yea of course they’ll go for it, I’m the one giving them my movie, but keep in mind that you’re a risk to them from a business standpoint.  You are responsible for getting people to buy tickets, not them.  You have to advertise your own screening and fill up those seats.  They’ll post the time your screening is happening and maybe they’ll have a marquee or something, but you have to do everything else.  That’s what traditional distributors do, that’s why that system is still in place.  It works.  Distributors buy airtime and ad space.  They screen trailers and get posters out there and seen so people know there’s a movie at the theater that they need to go see.

If the theater doesn't want to take a chance on you, that’s totally understandable and you can still do a screening, just rent the theater.  You can rent a small movie theater at anywhere from $300-$500.  Now there’s no risk to the theater and let’s say you sell tickets at $10 a pop, if you rented the theater for $300 that’s only 30 tickets you have to sell to break even.  Anything over 30 is 100% profit going straight to you.  You might actually make money.

One thing you'll have to get together a head of time is a DCP of your film.  DCP, or Digital Cinema Package is the format you'll need to have your film in so it will play in a professional digital projector.  That can be an expensive endeavor if you have someone else do it ($1,500 to $3,000) but I made one with Open DCP.  It was a pain, but worth it.  I have more info on how I did it here.

 Another advantage to a theatrical release is a film critic might now review your film, since it’s available to the public.  You might be able to do this at the film festival stage with local critics in the area the festival is happening, but there are lots of films for them to write about and it’s harder to get a review.  In your home town, you stand a better chance.  Reviews give you free advertising, an unbiased opinion that people are more likely to trust and critical reviews show that your film is of interest to the public.

My Toxic Backyard screened at a fantastic local arts theater, the Fine Arts Theater, for a week, which was unprecedented and awesome.  There was never a sold out screening, and audience sizes varied greatly from day to day.  I was a little disappointed at my own inability to fill the theater.  Even with extensive community outreach weeks before the screening, a story on the local news, radio interviews and magazine articles it wasn't enough to generate as strong of a turn out as I would have liked.  I was able to split ticket sales and still made some money.  I also got two movie reviews in local papers.  Both were really positive!  It was definitely a worth while venture, just not something to take lightly.