How Do I Sell My Film Part One - DEMOGRAPHICS

Netribution and film distributors WYSIWYG have joined forces to present on-line WYSIWYG's essential Guide to Film Distribution.

We're both interested in building a strong industry for independent filmmakers. This means creating films that people want to see and buy. It does not mean sacrificing creative integrity, but it means business. To do the business with independent film.... Read On

How Do I Sell My Film Part 2 - Delivery Format

Netribution and film distributors WYSIWYG have joined forces to present on-line WYSIWYG's Filmmaker's Toolkit....

Okay. So you now know who will watch your film. Well, that means you can also estimate how many people you have as potential audience. That gives you an idea of how much money you can spend. It also tells you... but wait, how many people will watch your film? That depends on how you offer it to them. Let's look a little closer at delivery format.

A rushed three hour write-up on the Pirate Bay en route to the Star and Shadow cinema in Newcastle on Friday, got me looking back to the first time the Pirate Bayern was in the news, when I wrote a piece here linking it to Hakim Bay's Pirate Utopias and the Temporary Autonomous Zone which was written back in spring 1990, long before the birth of the Web. If Cluetrain is the text that precursed social networks and user-generated media, the TAZ pre-empted the Web - both perhaps the first document to name it and is prophetic of many of its features.

It begins by talking of the 'pirate utopias' of the 18th century as islands and remote hidouts, scattered through an "information network" and goes onto define a Web evolving within that net. It's scarily ahead of its time:

"we'll use the term Web to refer to the alternate horizontal open structure of info- exchange, the non-hierarchic network, and reserve the term counter-Net to indicate clandestine illegal and rebellious use of the Web, including actual data-piracy and other forms of leeching off the Net itself."

He goes on, suggesting that re-use of what we find is part of our biological nature,  and that because the web removes production and distribution costs, free non-hierarchical access is assumed as standard:

"(Digression: Before you condemn the Web or counter-Net for its "parasitism," which can never be a truly revolutionary force, ask yourself what "production" consists of in the Age of Simulation. What is the "productive class"? Perhaps you'll be forced to admit that these terms seem to have lost their meaning. In any case the answers to such questions are so complex that the TAZ tends to ignore them altogether and simply picks up what it can use. "Culture is our Nature"-- and we are the thieving magpies, or the hunter/gatherers of the world of CommTech.)"

He doesn't have much hope for efforts to limit technical control of what he calls 'data piracy', citing chaos theory, which is not to assume there's no model to produce good content in the face of collapsing presales (watch this space!):

"Like Gibson and Sterling I am assuming that the official Net will never succeed in shutting down the Web or the counter-Net--that data-piracy, unauthorized transmissions and the free flow of information can never be frozen. (In fact, as I understand it, chaos theory predicts that any universal Control-system is impossible.)"

"Most of the independent films that we have seen or heard about suffered from one problem: finance. Some have come and gone because the young independent producers have failed, and are still failing to source the big budget required for production."

Sound familiar to you? It certainly will if you are a filmmaker in Bulawayo. It looked strangely familiar when it caught my eye in Zimbabwe's Sunday News, so I had to read on for some further analysis of what is clearly as big a problem for filmmakers in Zimbabwe as it is anywhere - but this is Mugabe's country, not known to be a benign regime.

   In Britain we like our television scriptwriters to be lovably eccentric - think the anarchic Paul Abbott, the flamboyant Russell T Davies or the wonderfully indiscreet Andrew Davies.

In the US, TV dramatists are a more serious breed altogether.

The new Tax Relief system for British films offers producers up to 20% of their budget in cash. The system replaces Section 42 and 48 which offered a tax break of up to 40% and also introduces a host of quite complex new clauses to limit and define which films are eligible for relief. Love it or hate it, it is a piece of legislation which will effect not just which films get made in the UK in the coming years, but exactly how those films are packaged and produced to ensure they can make the most of the possible benefits.

The new Finance Act runs to several hundred pages, which Adam P Davies, co-author of Netribution's Film Finance Handbook, has sifted through to write a comprehensive and detailed 5 page guide to the new tax relief and system in the UK - with glossary and worked examples. We can't promise we've interpreted it all correctly, but it has been looked over by the UK Treasury.