I started an online course from Future Learn called: Film Distribution: Connecting Films with Audiences. Will leave some notes and resources in this post.
Distributors who are member companies of Film Distributors’ Association, the trade body that represents film distributors’ generic interests in the UK – https://www.launchingfilms.com/fda-members/
If you work for a film distributor and have responsibility for acquisitions, a film festival market is like being in a big bazaar.
There are dozens of busy film festivals in towns and cities worldwide, but the main annual events attended by thousands of international film buyers and sellers, and almost as many journalists, are at Sundance (January), Berlin (February), Cannes (May), Venice (August) and Toronto (September). The annual American Film Market is another large gathering that takes place in November.
Most distributors need to have a ‘slate’ – a line-up of various films – to release in any year. Normally this would be a mix of different genres of films and the mix would depend on the distributor.
In his book, Adventures in the Screen Trade, William Goldman wrote of the film industry the now famous adage: “In the film industry nobody knows anything”.
Two distinct factors are assessed for every film: their overall marketability and playability:
Marketability refers to the film’s potential to be marketed effectively, e.g. having clear selling points such as stars, genre or director that can be turned into a strong advertising campaign and a feeling of ‘want to see’ among the target audience.
Playability refers to audience reaction to the film. If an audience has enjoyed it, they will encourage friends and contacts to go and see it too. This allows the film to grow and sustain itself in the marketplace.
Second highest cost involved is the media. Right audience, right media (target media). What are the main selling points or hooks. How to position the film in the current market place.
I guess I am not the only one that feels overwhelmed by everything that is going on in the world and the uncertainty of what is going to happen. Global economies are collapsing. I feel the system needed to slow down and rethink itself a long time ago, and so do we.
I flew back to Spain before I was lockdown in London. The day before my flight, I went to the library and filled my suitcase up with books knowing I was voluntarily flying into a country in quarantine (at that point UK was not in one). I have spent the last few days going through the pages of “The filmmaker’s eye” by Gustavo Mercado, “Photography and cinema” by Philippe Dubois, “Directing film” by David Mamet and “Film directing shot by shot” by Steven D. Katz.
Everyone took life in cities for granted and now I look forward to taking the bins out because I have a reason to be able to be in the streets. Funny. I was really busy before this happened, so it’s been like going from 100 to 0 activity and I am still getting used to it. I have been thinking a lot about how life in the countryside hasn’t been that affected by this crisis, and how disconnected cities are from nature and natural ecosystems. My grandparents live in a tiny 30-people-town and have their own orchard, so even if the industrial food production collapses with this crisis they do have a back-up plan and will still get fresh vegetables. What is our back-up plan?
My project proposal was based on my trip to Japan in July, but at this point, who knows when we will be able to go on holidays abroad again. What is my back-up plan?
What is Fashion back-up plan too? Who needs to buy clothes to be lockdown at home? Who will be able to buy clothes when, after this quarantine, everyone hasn’t had an income for months? Why do we need to produce fashion media now? I had a bit of a breakdown thinking that our job is no longer essential, but then I thought, what would we do without art, music, literature and films in a quarantine? We DO need to keep creating media content.
I was already exploring theories about ecofeminism that sees environmentalism, and the relationship between women and the earth, as foundational to its analysis and practice. The film I was working on, that was planned for the 25th of March, explored the connection between a group of women and nature. I think I would like to produce a series of 3 short films, the first one the one planned for Margate (hopefully we can film it when this is over), and the other two exploring the same concepts in two other locations. One in Spain, as I was talking before about life in the countryside and the sustainability of it. And the third one for Japan, I am still hopefull that I can change the dates of my flights, so I would like to work on the preproduction of the idea and be able to film it at some point.
Ps. Still from the new Xavier Dolan film: Matthias et Maxime. (Virtual realised last Saturday)
The main questions a director must answer are: “where do I put the camera?”, !what do I tell the actors?”, “what’s the scene about?”.
Eisenstein method to make a movie: a succession of images juxtaposed so that the contrast between these images moves the story forward in the mind of the audience. First the shot: it’s the juxtaposition of the shots that moves the film forward. The shots make up the scene.
The mechanical working of the film is just like the mechanism of a dream; because that’s what the film is really going to end up being, isn’t it?
Does anybody know what a MacGuffin is? It’s Hitchcock’s phrase for a little invented device that will carry the action. In a melodrama, a MacGuffin is that thing which the hero is chasing. The secret documents, the delivery of the secret message.. We, the audience, never really know what it is. You are never told more specifically that “it’s the secret documents”. Why should you be? We’ll fill in for ourselves, unconsciously, those secret documents which are important to us.
That’s all it’s good for. People have tried for centuries to use drama to change people’s lives, to influence, to comment, to express themselves. It doesn’t work. It might be nice if it worked for those things, but it doesn’t. The only thing the dramatic form is good for is telling a story.
Why do directors, then, shoot this many takes? Because they don’t know what they want to take a picture of. And they’re frightened. If you don’t know what you want, how do you know when you’re done? If you know what you want, shoot it and sit down. Suppose you are directing the “get a retraction” movie.
You don’t have to narrate with the dialogue any more than you have to narrate with the pictures or the acting. The less you narrate, the more the audience is going to say, “wow. What the heck is happening here? What the heck is going to happen next…?” Now, if you’re telling the story with the pictures, then the dialogue is the sprinkles on top of the ice cream cone. It’s a gloss on what’s happening. The story is being carried by the shots. Basically, the perfect movie doesn’t have any dialogue. So you should always be striving to make a silent movie. If you can learn to tell a story, to break down a movie according to the shots and tell the story according to the theory of montage, then the dialogue, if it’s good, will make the movie somewhat better; and if it’s bad, will make the movie somewhat worse; but you’ll still be telling the story with the shots, and they can take the brilliant dialogue out.
There are some directors who are visual masters – who bring to moviemaking a great visual acuity, a brilliant visual sense.
(TFE) If you want to become an effective storyteller, one of the most important things you can do is to have a clear vision of your story, so that it reflects your unique take on it, not somebody else’s.
(TFE) Anything and everything that is included in the composition of a shot will be interpreted by an audience as being there for a specific purpose that is directly related and necessary to understand the story they are watching.
(TFE) Hitchcock’s rule. An amazingly simple yet extremely effective principle that Alfred Hitchcock shared with François Truffaut during the writing of Truffaut’s “Hitchock/Truffaut”, states that the size of an object in the frame should be directly related to its importance in the story at that moment.
Yesterday I helped Jasmine out on creating the treatment for an idea she will be pitching to get founding. It was interesting to try to visualize someone else’s idea and look for visual references for it. It also helped me to understand a bit more what a good treatment is and how important it is for the preproduction phases of a film/short video.
I am working now on expanding the initial moodboard I shared on my previous post for the video I will be directing in the next couple of weeks.
Since I will be looking for collaborators in Japan to whom I will need to pitch my ideas, I decided to start working on how to present them from now.
I got quite sick a few months ago and I used to have a recurrent dream every night when I was getting really high fevers. I wanted to use those visuals from my dreams and turn them into a short film but I needed to find the team and collaborators to make a proper project out of it.
The main source of inspiration is the idea of empowerment in loneliness and feminine energy, and how women and nature are interconnected using theories of ecofeminism.
The recurrent visual in my dreams was this frozen white rose sealed into an ice cube, defrosting upside down; followed by a female figure isolated in an unknown landscape. I kept having these two images repeated in my fever dreams night after night.
For the video, I want to use both of them and complete a sequence. The girl, that is completely alone in nature starts running. We can just see her at the beginning but then a group of women appear in screen, running alongside the main character. For the final shot, the group of women will appear static in a composition (female energy). The next presentation gathers some of the initial ideas and references:
