Find Your Audience Part III: 5 Keys to Distribution
By Jon Fitzgerald, co-founder of the Slamdance Film Festival
The ultimate goal for any film is to find an audience, and all roads lead to distribution. Regardless of your release strategy, you need a distribution pipeline to get your movie onto a screen — in a living room or in a theater. The ideas below will help inform this next stage of your adventure.
Start at the End
Reverse engineer. Your festival strategy begins with knowing where you want to be in the end. You do need a plan B and C, but start with your primary goal. Are you hoping for theatrical release? Or aiming for iTunes and Netflix? Looking for one of the top distributors to handle distribution for you? If so, it’s helpful to develop a spreadsheet with the companies that could be a fit. If you play any Festivals in LA, NY or other towns where any of these companies have reps, you can email them an invite. If you play an online fest, you can send them a link, and track who watches your movie, and where the interest lies. For those of you looking to play in theaters, hold off on sending screener links to sales agents, unless you have been advised by an experienced Producers Rep. Given the opportunity, it’s always best to let buyers see the film with an audience, on a big screen, even if that formula looks a little different in 2020. Times are changing, and more filmmakers are considering the streaming universe, rather than waiting for a theatrical release, but you still want to be careful with your choice of distributors and properly weigh your TVOD, SVOD and AVOD options.
Push your Brand
The festival circuit is a great arena to generate buzz for your movie, and amplify your brand. See this as a chance to refine your key art and your poster, which drives postcard design. Of course, this leads to your thumbnail, which is one of the most important sales tools. And your trailer is even more critical. While many films begin their festival run without a trailer, hopefully, it’s in the works. All of these elements can be integrated into your evolving website design and social media outreach. The more buzz you can generate, the more festivals will want you, and emails from sales agents and distributors will start appearing in your inbox. As you begin to secure fest invitations, those laurels and screening times are added to your website, and fed into your social media campaign. You’re essentially building your case to secure the right distribution deal.
Play the Right Festivals
By last count, there were over 9,000 film festivals, and they come in all shapes and sizes, genres and categories. If you have a non-fiction film, there are plenty of great fests with doc sections, and specialty fests that cater to this genre. Looking to target genre fests? Horror. SciFi. LGBTQ. Comedy. Some focus exclusively on Shorts, or Features and most have a combo. Fest categories? There are Industry fests, Community fests and Destination fests. And, of course, plenty that overlap. The festival menu is quite expansive. The key is to play fests that can help you achieve your goals. The average consumer may not know the difference, but A24 will. It’s important to always track the trends and understand the current landscape. Obviously, challenging times call for innovation and we’re seeing many fests pivot to virtual cinema options. But take the time to do the homework, and ask the right questions. Make sure their model aligns with your goals. Some fests without geoblocking, that offer free streaming to online audiences, can hinder future distribution deals.
Do the Work
As we’ve all seen these past few months, this business is always changing. You can help your own cause by staying on top of current events, related to the indie film landscape and specific film festivals. Or you can hire a Producer’s Rep. IndieWire, Filmmaker Magazine, FilmFestivalToday, MovieMaker Magazine, and Film Festival.com all publish stories related to fests, the latest acquisitions and company executives that turn over like baseball managers. Know who is where, and what they are buying. Any new information, links and acquisitions of note can be added to your master Distribution spreadsheet for future reference.
Marketing
Most filmmakers make the assumption that if they upload onto Amazon or are delivered to iTunes that audiences will simply find them. Open the floodgates. Sadly, it doesn’t work that way. Amazon has over 10,000 movies and iTunes more than 100,000, but who’s counting. Yes, their audiences are huge, with Amazon having over 100 million Prime Members. And sales volume is high, with iTunes generating $1.8 billion in VOD and $3.5 billion in movie purchases. But there has to be a marketing strategy to drive eyeballs to your movie. This is a very exciting time for indie filmmakers, with so many streaming platforms seeking content to fill their pipelines. On the flipside, the majority of market share is controlled by platforms you can count on two hands. The next tier of players, whether we’re talking SVOD, TVOD or AVOD, also require a marketing push. The smaller the audience, the less advertising revenue, which translates to less net revenues to the filmmaker. Once you have landed with your distribution partners, be creative with your marketing, social media and partnerships to drive audiences to your movie. That’s why you made this movie, right? To entertain, engage or inspire audiences. Once you lock in those deals, you need to get them there to press play.
Hopefully, the ideas presented in this series will help you achieve your goals, and ultimately, find your audience.
The co-founder of the Slamdance Film Festival, Fitzgerald has directed a number of festivals (AFI, Santa Barbara, Naples and more). He has consulted to many other festivals, while providing festival strategies to indie filmmakers and will continue with Film Festival Mastery. A published author (Filmmaking for Change: Make Films that Transform the World), Fitzgerald recently launched iGEMS.tv as an internet guide for audiences to discover quality movies and series, and iGEMSpro as a resource for independent filmmakers.
