5 Things Filmmakers Should Know About Self-Distribution by Josh Folan
I’m Josh Folan and I’ve been making independent film for over a decade now (mostly in New York). And as of seven months ago in LA. And we just recently (on Thanksgiving) released ninth-produced, fourth-written, third-directed, second-edited feature LOVE IS DEAD starring Alice Kremelberg, Al Thompson, and Lita Foster.
We did that in self-distribution fashion and self-distribution is a somewhat fluid term with a lot of definitions and meanings at least right now and these are the five things that Film Courage thinks I should share with you about the initial stages of that self-distribution experience…and this is my fire place.
The first thing I would like to touch on about self-distribution is the decision to do it. It’s not the easiest way to get your film out into the world and it’s a great deal of work, so it’s not for everyone. In our case the reason we chose to do it was a range of things but 1) It was hard to attract interest in it from the companies that you really want to be working with or many of the companies that you really want to be working with in the distribution realm. We had an extremely difficult to sell subject matter.
Most sales companies are not looking to blaze new trails with the material they acquire. They want something that’s just like a thing they know can sell but maybe just a little bit different to differentiate it in the marketplace and that’s definitely not what we made.
And on top of the subject matter, the actual aesthetic of the film is weird. We shot the film to look like this 1970’s or 80’s television sitcom. So it’s shot in a four by three aspect ratio. We degraded the 4K image to make it look standard definition and make it look like it’s playing off this sh**ty VHS tape. There’s commercial breaks and opening title sequence, there’s just a range of things that make it not look like anything that is really out there in my opinion which I consider that to be an asset but sales companies are a little more hesitant with something like that.
It was difficult to get a partner that we really liked. We did get interest from smaller companies that…some not so bad…some bad. And a smaller company like (that in my experience having done this for a decade) isn’t going to do anything. They’re not going to bring any added value to the project. They’re going to throw it out on platforms which a chimpanzee could do in this day and age and they’re not going to put any marketing money behind it. They are not going to do anything special so why give them in most cases you’re going to have to give away in most case 30% of your revenue off the gross minus expenses that they are going to deduct from going to film markets where they may or may not really be doing anything for your film?
So we didn’t want to give away that much or that little so I decided maybe initially and got Seanie my co-producer agree to it to just do it ourselves. I have self-distributed before so I thought I could perhaps do it with or our little-to-no money which is what we had left over after our $32,000 budget. There were so sacrifices we had to make and I would direct you to the article I wrote for Film Courage that led to me having to make this video.
Reading that you can decide whether all this work and all the potential payoff of it is for you, but for us it made the most sense.
The second thing about self-distribution for zero dollars is the assets acquired and I think the skills I think you need to have (or have cheap access to) in order to accomplish this. One of the things you’re going to need in a platform where everyone is just blowing through a million titles on whatever they watch their content on is really good key art that captures what the film is about and is compelling in one way or another and sets you apart from one of the other things that they could be picking.
And in our case with the key art for LOVE IS DEAD, first of all for producing 101 you need to have an on-set photographer that is taking pictures whether you are paying them or begging for favors or however you get it, you need to have the actual imagery to create the key art with. In this case this picture was captured by our key and only PA and associate producer / art department assistant / a million other things Josh Goldsmith.
That’s where we got the image from and I tinkered around with. You’ll also need a captures (a captions file) for almost all platforms these days that require that (closed-captions)…(Watch the video on Youtube here).
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