Self-Distribution on a Micro-Budget: Releasing Your Film Worldwide Without Spending a Dime by Josh Folan
“I loved it. That being said I have no idea who would take it on.”
I’ve heard that, or something along those lines, a lot in the last twelve months or so. It’s come from festival programmers, sales reps, distributors, producer reps, filmmakers, friends with friends that do those aforementioned things, friends of friends and even just plain ole friends. It has been said in regards to my latest “directed by” credit, Love Is Dead! — a feature film adaption of a dark comedy stage play that a buddy of mine, Seanie Sugrue, wrote. If we had shot it in any sort of “traditional” manner, given the narrative deals in a gamut of offensive and hard-to-tackle subject matter, it would have likely still been quite difficult to market to any sort of widespread audience — which is often what the people with the job titles listed above are looking for when programming, acquiring and selling.
We did not, however, shoot the film in any sort of traditional manner.
When I first read the play, being immediately excited by Seanie’s hilariously morbid brand of comedy being on full display in the dialogue and themes, my mind turned to film adaption before my page count in the read made it out of single digits. And, partially because the form of stage and sitcom inherently have a lot of overlap, I saw that adaption as an envelope-pushing sitcom from way back — an All In the Family or a Married With Children — that goes much further than anything any television network would (or could) ever air. So we took that idea and ran with it — we shot the piece in a three-camera sitcom setup on a quasi-soundstage we built in a little black-box theatre in NYC, framed it in a 4×3 video aspect ratio, added a range of VHS tape playback effects and SD broadcast artifacts to both picture and sound, painted in a studio audience reacting inappropriately throughout via sound design, even threw in commercial breaks with off-putting PSA’s and ads that have slipped into public domain usage.
(Read more here on FilmCourage.com where Josh Folan shares his DIY film distribution tips).
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