Good Communication

"You can't be focused without good communication. Even if you have only four or five people at a company, a small communication breakdown is enough for people to be working on slightly different things. And then you lose focus and the company just scrambles." — Sam Altman

From Lecture 2 of How to Start a Start-up. Lecture 1 here.

Sam Altman is the president of start-up accelerator Y Combinator.

Why do I post about tech start-ups? Because they have a lot in common with getting a new film off the ground, building a strong and focused team, and impressing investors that you're dealing in reality not just fantasy.

Show investors that you're passionate, not crazy.

Is Your Film "Remarketable"?

"Regular" readers of this blog (I'm sure there would be some if I posted regularly) will know that I'm essentially convinced that marketing is now an intrinsic part of the craft of creating a feature film, and in all cases — whether you're a haughty auteur or a consummate hack — marketing shouldn't even be thought of as separate from the process of storytelling.

To those who might accuse me of trying to dumb down, or cause projects to appeal to the lowest common denominator, I'm not. What I'm saying actually runs totally counter to that; because in fact giving people the same homogenised mush they can get elsewhere is completely the opposite of being remarkable.

What I'm talking about is treating "finding an audience" as simply another creative parameter; an essential requirement of using someone else's money to practise your craft.

Lots of filmmakers want this to be someone else's problem, and try to shirk the responsibility of even thinking about it, hoping that a producer, sales agent, financier or distributor's marketing department will let them do as they please, and take care of the pesky audience question.

Others, I know of many, actively want to reach bigger audiences, but simply lack the knowledge of how they can do so. There are no guaranteed results, but there are lots of things you can do.

So I'm a huge fan of Seth Godin's stuff, and I've posted about him here in the past, but I still don't think enough people are getting it. Maybe people are still confusing marketing with advertising, in which case they should stop, because this stuff is too important to not know and, as Seth says:

"Marketing is too important to leave to the marketing department."

This is truer now than it has ever been. With an ever-growing glut of content out there to distract us (and dilute our potential audience base) we have no choice but to somehow make our work remarkable, in the sense that people feel compelled to remark upon it.

This is just one concept among many that Seth talks about. Hopefully at some point I'll blog about Tribes and Getting Permission (and any conversation with me about marketing will inevitably feature me paraphrasing Seth with "Marketing isn't what you're saying, it's what other people are saying about you...* " ) but it'll be much faster if you just look them up yourself.

Those are all really important concepts for filmmakers too, but today I just want to talk about how to ensure (and communicate that) your projects are remarketable.

I've also posted about the concept of "similar but different" in the past, but my thoughts on it have evolved over the years, specifically with regard to finding a sizeable worldwide audience for a feature film. The short version goes something like this: Imagine seeing a TV commercial for a film and feeling genuinely excited to see it. That took maybe 20 or 30 seconds to get you energised to go see it, rent it, download it or whatever you do these days.

Why so fast? Was it because it was radically different from anything you've ever seen before? Unlikely. It's far more likely to be because it is a genre you're comfortable with, updated with a clever tweak.

Genre provides the "similar",  

the original tweak provides the "different".

Can your project do that at every scale of its existence, from Title to Logline to Outline etc?

Can you get the concept in a sentence that you reckon is worth a text message to someone who loves the genre? How about firing off an email link to someone you don't know well, but who likes the genre? What about bringing it up in passing to a vague acquaintance who you're not even sure likes films? How about a complete stranger? The removal man? The barista?

Now can you get it so everyone else would be texting each other too? What tools are at your disposal to achieve more of this? Playing with genre, combining genres, combining mundane ideas from your life with an unexpected genre twist. Even playing with bizarre casting ideas (because that could subvert our expectations) could be just the thing you need.

Being like everything else is now banned.

(And so is not being like anything else... but that can wait for another post.)

Now I'm not saying that it's easy to build the marketing into the project at every step from the concept to final cut and beyond, but I firmly believe these questions will help get you there.

And you know what? The people who ultimately have to sell your film will thank you, because they will say "I know how to sell this!" and the sales agents who have to sell to those distributors in every country around the world will thank you, because they will say "I know how to sell this!" and once you're giving people something they know they can sell to their guy... you'll have everyone on board, pulling in the same direction, and the money will flow.

As a producer myself, I've just launched a new project into the marketplace to test all these theories. I will update you with how I get on. See you in Cannes.



* That sentence was getting too long so I'll finish it here: The full quote is something like "Marketing isn't what you're saying, it's what other people are saying about you... so never send spam or try to manipulate anyone."

Legwork 10 Step Checklist

On the back of the BFI's shocking stats last week, many investors and producers must be wondering what the point is of even trying to make money in the film industry at all. Granted; for some investors it is just a bit of fun, a way to be involved in the glamour of the film industry, but as one commentator shrewdly observed "there must be cheaper ways to meet Scarlett Johansson".

It is worth pointing out that the figures released in David Steele's speech include those for certain Film Council supported films which were never actually intended to make a profit. They exist for cultural purposes, or box-ticking purposes, and so really I'd like to see another set of stats for just the films that did actually intend to return their investors money.

Nevertheless it is no secret that film investment is inherently risky. What can producers do to maximise the chances of being among the top-performing film releases that do see profit?

One of the best ways is to make a film that appeals to audiences in multiple territories. More sales equals more income. Get a good home video and / or TV deal in multiple countries as well, and you're well on your way to recouping a lower budgeted film. (It's partly for this reason that high-concept horror is widely seen as a safer bet than most, but I digress).

When an investor asks (my consulting company) Legwork to appraise a project we're essentially being asked to perform due diligence in advance of a very pricey business transaction. When a producer hires Legwork it's because they're cognisant of the importance of adding value to their investment offering, and making the investors pick them instead of all the other tasty investment opportunities out there.

For both cases we've developed the proprietary checklist below in order to formalise the process of building marketing into the project from concept to logline to script to trailer and beyond.

This is a series of questions intended to ensure the producer is making the best film possible, as measured against every important metric, and is not leaving any value on the table unnecessarily. All these conditions must be satisfied before we will sign off on a project.

1/ Are story, characters & dialogue at a stage where the script will attract a high enough calibre of film star to ensure international sales?

2/ Are the above-the-line talent (stars, director, etc) sufficiently attractive to international sales agents and distributors that they can envisage the film doubling its investors money?  

3/ Does everyone creatively involved in the making of this film have the same vision? Is everyone trying to make the same film? Are the huskies all pulling the sled in the same direction? 

4/ Is the budget right for the genre, the film’s elements and its likely income? Do sales estimates from reputable sales agents or pre-sales agreements confirm that this budget level is justified?  

5/ Is the genre one which is sought after by a large enough global market to garner sales capable of doubling the investors’ money? 

6/ Within an established set of genre expectations, is this story remarkable in its individuality in some way that will get significant numbers of people talking about it? Does the story or its elements innovate in a way that will differentiate it in a crowded marketplace and increase the number of territories sold, prices per sale and ancillaries within each of those territories? 

7/ Given the nature of modern, fragmented audiences, have we done all that we can to identify and allow for the engagement of possible “tribes” in the Seth Godin marketing use of the word; niches of communal interest, sizeable groups of people who can get behind the film and spread word-of-mouth? 

8/ Have we done all we can to explore additional revenue streams, such as sequels, spin-offs and merchandising (books, games, art, fan sites, fan art, apps) — within reasonable and tasteful bounds and with respect to the story and the filmmakers? Are there ways these might contribute to the depth of the central dramatic work to a consumer, rather than just as added revenue or mind-share? 

9/ Have we done all we can to identify all possible PR angles, in as many territories as possible, that will garner this film media attention in print, television and online, thus offering significant added value, and revenue, to that distributor? 

10/ How could we collect emails or social media follows for permission-based marketing or otherwise maximise our customers’ awareness of this and similar future films?

Robin TJ Kershaw & Laia Enrich, 2013

Check out the Legwork 10 Step Checklist and download a pdf to share with colleagues at www.legworkfilms.com/10steps.html

There is no more room in the middle

Most producers don’t submit their scripts to rigorous analysis... but then most producers don’t make successful films either. Every year thousands of naive newcomers think they can beat the system with nothing but their own intuition, and every year thousands of films worldwide end up unsold, undistributed and unprofitable. [Here's Stephen Follows with some UK stats].

The serious, well-balanced, producer knows that betting on a hunch will simply result in misery, and that the only real way to carve a lasting career and run a long-lasting production company is to exercise due diligence on behalf of the investor — and to give buyers something they actually want.

There are many tactics to maximise the value of a film investment and mitigate against a possible downside, but let’s be clear: the only serious ways for a producer to influence a film’s income are marketplace-aware script development and talent packaging. 

Quite simply the added value that your film derives from focusing on development and packaging is at least an order of magnitude greater than its cost to production, and very likely far more. The path to success is littered with the corpses of producers who thought they couldn’t afford development — whereas real producers know you can’t afford to skip it.

The distribution paradigm has changed radically and continues to do so as the competition for eyeball-hours heats up. Every minute of the day, 100 hours of new video is uploaded to YouTube*. This, and virtually the entire filmic output of the past 100 years of cinema coming online, is now your competition. There is no more room in the middle. High quality storytelling with high-calibre, internationally known actors is now the only market still available.

Not coincidentally, those are precisely the two areas where my consultancy firm Legwork has been actively developing its expertise — and continues to do so in an Executive Producer capacity on three very different upcoming projects. Also, since both our producer and investor clients need to keep costs down, our deferment model finally makes that expertise affordable to all. Just in time for the coming democratisation of content creation.

Will this change the way producers approach the marketplace? It already has for some. The people with the best end-to-end understanding of the value chain of the independent film industry really get this stuff. Those who know that the best way to sell to a sales agent is to give them something they can sell onwards to their guys. It’s astonishing how many producers still don’t think this way, but I honestly don’t think they’ll be able to get a foothold in the film industry of the future. They will flounder from failure to failure losing their investors’ money on unsold product no one wants to watch. They will not last long.

Sales agents that I speak to tell me that everything is about quality now. Without a world-class script you’re unlikely to attract the director and cast needed to sell your film, and you’ll be relegated to competing with skateboarding dogs on YouTube for audience share. If you’re serious about producing in the coming decade, you’ll be forced sooner or later to get serious about development, it really is as simple as that.

* Source http://www.youtube.com/yt/press/