Hollywood, Unapologetic! - Season 9 (2020)

Like most independent filmmakers, we produce our film and find a distributor. The distributor tries to find exhibitors, which in turn attempt to find an audience. This has been the "traditional" way most independent films get released. For many independent productions, it becomes an uphill battle to find the right audience, if the battle itself hasn't already been lost. For me, and my more successful filmmaking colleagues, we define our target audience first. This determines everything else.

It is so important to consider a marketing strategy, geared to a very narrow and targeted audience at the very beginning of the development stage of your film. The process should be a collaborative effort between your audience and you from day one. What that really means, you can gauge how the public reacts to what you post online. You can interact and get feedback to see what your audience responds to, both positively and negatively. That feedback can help you work out the details towards a positive marketing strategy. And if you are able to build a solid base of ...

"Do you approach filmmaking as a business opportunity?" I ask this because the most common obstacle I've seen is aspiring filmmaker's unwillingness to look at their film projects as a business opportunity. Many don't look at what they are passionate about as being a product. There's resistance to this line of thinking by us creative types. But here's the reality of it all, to make a good film, short or feature, requires money. The bigger the film, the more it's going to cost. For most of us, the money to produce our films comes from the distribution end.

Your cast's name recognition is a huge part of the marketing process. A distributor can capitalize on the cast's notoriety, building up the "value" of your film. And this helps with the distributor's Return on Investment. This return, or ROI is the distributor's ONLY goal, the bigger the return, and the better. This goes directly hand-in-hand with your casting. Your cast members will have a fan base already built in. The more well-known the cast member, the larger the fan base, the more likely some of those fans will want to see your film. Think of it as having a core...

From my experience writing screenplays, and working on hundreds of productions for film and television, often brought in during development, I've seen a screenplay's title change several times of many of the films during the production process. The reasons can be from the story itself has changed so much from the original text, the moods progressions have changed, to considering the marketability of the film. Having a non-complicated and short film title helps it to be remembered. There are exceptions to this, usually from a more established director, or a film with a...

The first stage in the filmmaking production process you need to do and be mindful of, during the Coronavirus Pandemic is the development stage. This is the stage when ideas for a film are put together. Sometimes that means acquiring the rights to a book, stage play, magazine article, video game, comic book, graphic novel, or directly from the source of a true story. Other times the screenplay has already been written or a pitch for an idea is available.