Power to the People: the Democratization of Film
A solid overview by Jeff Steele in TheWrap about the impact of digital technologies on music, print, and now the movie businesses. The basic premise is that nowadays anyone can make a movie. He zeroes in on the two remaining areas in transition we’ve discussed many times on this blog: financing and distribution.
Re financing, Steele talks about crowdfunding (as an example I will be posting something this week from a young filmmaker who is using Kickstarter to raise funds for a short movie she’s written and wants to direct).
But really it all boils down to distribution. And the issue there isn’t really the actual distributing of a movie, it’s the marketing. Some excerpts from Steele’s article on this subject:
Generally speaking, if want to market your film to a national audience, but you’re not planning to spend at least $25 million, then you probably shouldn’t spend anything at all. But for smaller independent films, social networks like Facebook and Twitter are giving filmmakers unparalleled access to millions of followers who can hopefully be converted to viewers and fans. With Obama’s call to make high-speed Internet accessible to 98 percent of the population, social media is sure to evolve the P&A requirements of film more than ever.
Just as in the music industry and the rapidly changing print industry, distribution changes everything. Distribution is the last piece of the democratizing puzzle. Although a film can get made without them, distributors still remain the final “judgment” by which even a finished film must acquire approval in order to reach viewers.
But this, too, will change. It’s only a matter of time until legitimate alternative forms of crowd-distribution rise and perhaps coincide with alternative forms of crowd-financing, thus ironing out the bumps to reveal the new, fully and irreversibly democratized film industry, whose entire life cycle will be comprised of ones and zeroes.
In other words, how to generate any sort of buzz to attract eyeballs to your film? Sure, if you’re Ed Burns, the actor-writer-director whose recent movie Nice Guy Johnny was into profit on Day 1 of its release, your name will enable you to get on “Good Morning America” to promote your film. But if you’re not a name, how to cut through all the marketing and advertising noise that gets directed at consumers to make them aware of and interested in your movie?
For more of the Jeff Steele article, go here.