With BURDEN I toured for 6 months then entered Distribution talks, with a new film SWERVE that I produced we signed with a Buyer and Distributor before it’s World Premiere.

Similar to a band, we should be touring with our film, selling it to multiple territories at the same time. We shouldn’t do the waiting game anymore. Hollywood isn’t, if a film flops they quickly put it on DVD to save Marketing money. Way pay twice the marketing for a failure.

We as indi-filmmakers don’t have giant Marketing budgets so we need to do it all at once.

BURDEN and SWERVE will be playing on Italian TV starting Sept 1st 2010, and we are looking forward to continuing to lockdown other territories.

We are living in a crazy new era where the rules just don’t apply like they used to.

If we think of it as a company biz mindset than there are ways to cut cost long term. First, don’t rent but buy. Make it part of your biz plan that if you, as a filmmaker, can make back the money from the film after a certain period of time (after completion) than you (original company) gets a “bonus” in the form of the equipment. This gives you an incentive to sell, sell, sell and also when you’re done you have something tangible. Now the next film should cost you less because you have equipment that won’t be part of the equation. Now you might be able to have the original company make a cut of the backend as part of the trade for making the equpment available on film #2. And so on and on so on. My point is longevity. The first film made make considerably less but the second, third, fourth should start to cost less. Plus you need to study some of Rodriguez’s shooting technique like zooming between characters lines so that you are getting more than one shot per take, cutting down on production time. There are many cost cutting ways to trim the budget. Each film you should be learning your own tricks of the trade to make each one easier.

On marketing one of the things I’ve learned is to find a way to get my audience to fall in love with some of my characters prior to seeing the film. One of the things that made people watch episode after episode of LOST was that people fell in love with certain characters. Since we’re not shooting TV we have to find a way to make our audience fall in love with them prior to watching.

Raising awareness about a project has never been easier, the online tools are far less expensive (if not free), if you’ve got quality content and some imagination (which we’d expect, being a film maker and all) then there’s no excuse, engaging your target audience via the likes of Facebook, YouTube and Twitter is not rocket science.

However, as @Diana says, the internet is a tough platform to generate a clear revenue model, advertising doesn’t always cut it but is a good start, this is where we need our greatest minds working together, trying to develop a clear business model that considers web 2.0, peer to peer sharing, social media etc.

The web has changed things forever, and for everyone. Now we need to figure out how to best harness its power and apply it so that those who work hard and produce great visual projects can make some money to fund future ideas.