Nina and I were back at our old stomping ground (we graduated in
Fine Art back in 1991), Edinburgh College of Art
this weekend for the final session of
Interdoc, a training programme for independent producers of
creative documentary, run by the Scottish Documentary Institute, a
gem of an organisation. The weekend ikicked off with a bit of
'pitch' practice, which in normal people parlance is a kind of
Dragon's Den approach to presenting your film's potential
(visually and verbally) to some VIPs from planet-of-film. Who you
hope might give you a supportive smile, then a meeting and
eventually some finance. In such supportive company as the SDI,
this procedure isn't that stressful, but the idea is to get so good
at it (without, of course, losing one's sponteneity, wit and/or
hair) that you could confidently pitch to a full Wembley Stadium.
Or its documentary film equivalent, probably the IDFA Amsterdam
Forum. So our small band took to the pitch spot as we had in
Spring's first session, and caught up with if and how each one of
our projects had come on. Some of us had filmed (much) more, others
had reframed their films, but - not surprisingly - we all still
needed money so top marks for coming back to school to learn how.
There's a powerful sense of collective support in these practice
pitches, one really wills the team that's talking onwards and
upwards, but not having pitched publicly often, I wonder if this is
the case in the cut throat forum of a 'real' pitch - or do the
other project teams secretly cheer when you bump the mike, your
taster stalls or you go a bit, or very, blank?!
Once we made it through our pitch rehearsals - the new 4 minute
taster for our current project was brilliantly received - we then
studied budgets in close detail (cries of "You'll need a third hard
drive, so budget it in!" and "You haven't got the rights yet?! That
could be expensive...... and even, "You have to budget for
bribes ?!....Oh, I see, we call them 'tips' on
paper....".
We also got two Skype sessions with major European players
Stefan Kloos
and Peter Jager. The former Skyped us from a theme park in Germany
where his daughter was swimming (this being a Sunday afternoon), a
location offering a lively panorama of half naked swimmers behind
his talking head, though this somehow rarely distracted from his
insights into European Media funding, a holy grail for some though
it did all sound fairly stressy to apply for, let alone get.
Perhaps a test of a charismatic-enough speaker could be 'Can you
hold an audience on Skype talking about European funding, even with
nude Germans all around you?'. If the answer is yes, you're
probably powerful enough to start your own church.
Peter Jager (of the wondrous Autlook Films) Skyped from the
safety of his home office, with only an enigmatic old map on his
wall to try and distract us (where did it depict?). A sales agent
with wide experience of releasing and distributing 'the best films'
(only 10% of all those made, he claims), we were all slightly
awestruck by his forensic approach to planning worldwide
distribution. To summarise, he advises talking to him shortly after
you have had the idea for your doc. No - joking aside - it seems
that the best approach is to show a sales agent a rough cut and ask
their advice on which festivals to target with it - do not rush the
release, he emphasised, though Noe of SDI gently pointed our that
by that stage in a film project most film-makers are starving and
possibly bankrupt as they limp towards the finish of the film. So
it might seem like they're rushing that release, a bit. But with
the consensus that piracy and the Web mean there's not that much
legitimate 'business' left out there for film, it seems that we
film-makers need to help distributors do the best for us by really
planning the film release from festival to theatrical to VoD, and
not just go straight to our favourite festivals, wait a bit and
then plonk the film on our own website and Distrify. And make about
$27 across five years. I know this approach because I have done it.
It works as long as you expected just the $27 and are cheered by a
monthly splatter of emails from fans in Sri Lanka ('How on earth
did they get hold of it?' you wonder) and Hackney.
Peter is very probably right - the issue is, as he described in
an example that had every film-maker in the room's toes curling,
sometimes 4 out of 5 of your top festivals say 'No thanks' so you,
the disappointed but pragmatic film-maker say 'Ok let's drop our
hopes and go for our second choices'. In this instance Peter says
'That last top festival WILL say yes - hold fire". Give that man a
medal for bravery, but it's a tough position to hold when it's your
film and your tired, emotional and skint....
Posted Monday 1st October, 2012 at 10:13 am by Karen
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