Crowdfunding your film can be fraught with many potential dangers, but one of the most common issues overlooked by first-time crowdfunders is the cost of running a crowdfunding campaign. These costs are varied but can include: the production of promotional assets like campaign videos; the cost of your time for marketing the campaign and supporting your backers; the cost of fulfilling your campaign rewards; and finally the costs of using your crowdfunding platform of choice, Kickstarter, IndieGogo etc. The price of using crowdfunding platforms can be broken down into two key costs: credit card processing fees (normally something between 2-4% of […]

When I sit down with a filmmaker to discuss their latest project I almost always discover that in their rush to build an audience and leverage the power of social they have completely forgotten about search. This baffles me — you only have to look to your own browsing habits to know that the major search engines are the portal through which most of us experience the web. Google collects untold amounts of data about our search habits and viewing patterns as we use their sites. They then take this enormous sea of data and analyze it to try and establish links between […]

Tweets with an unusually high level of disgruntlement have begun to appear in my feed in the last few days. These tweets all have one thing in common: crowdfunded projects that have failed to deliver in one form or another. These projects range from film to gaming to industrial design, but they were all very successful campaigns that have since turned into projects that left a sour taste in the mouth. In observing these complaints and interacting with some of the frustrated individuals over Twitter I began to see a pattern in the projects that caused so much grief: they […]

This is a plea, of sorts, to the growing number of online platforms that wish to become a lasting link in the indie film value chain: please consider the interoperability of your systems. Increasingly, platforms do not require exclusivity, which is fantastic and frees filmmakers to release their films on multiple online/digital outlets at the same time. However, with the ever-increasing number of platforms comes more work for the filmmaker. Codecs, formats, resolutions, subtitles, audio specs, frame rates, aspect ratios — all of these are defined in platform requirements to ensure your video is compatible with their system. Then there […]

Since I co-founded the distribution platform OpenIndie in 2009, the direct-to-fan model has matured into an attractive alternative to traditional distribution deals. Theatrical options in particular have increased dramatically, and success stories have grown from the few to the many. Having moved on from OpenIndie earlier this year, I will be writing a series of articles for Filmmaker on the new ways in which technology can enable distribution for independent filmmakers. In this first post, I’ll reflect on the theatrical space, highlight a range of the available crowdsourced theatrical platforms, and discuss their differences and the opportunities they present for filmmakers. The […]