Hey Where's My Sales Report? Indie Filmmakers Getting Screwed in the Distribution World

In the world of indie film distribution there is an old scam that still is very prevalent today, it's pretty easy to avoid it for the most-part, but many filmmakers never get paid on their distribution deals. It's a very simple scam, here's how it goes down. A filmmaker finishes their film and send it to a small distribution label, we'll call them Celebrity Flicks International (fictional), CFI agrees to distribute the film and the filmmakers sign and exclusive contract. CFI gets the film setup and is very cooperative with the filmmakers and the film gets released on DVD, VOD and other Digital Outlets. The first reporting period goes by and no sales reports show up.

So the filmmaker follows up with CFI, who's probably far away in a different state, and just gets CFI's voice mail. CFI doesn't return any phone calls or e-mails for weeks. If the filmmaker is really persistent, they'll get a reply and it will usually be one of two responses: "What, you didn't get the report and check, I'll have to talk to my accountant and see what happened. I'll get back to you." or "We're behind on reporting, it will be on your next statement". Well the truth is there is no report or money coming and now your film is out there making money for someone else. Plus, even though your distributor is in breach of contract, you'll have a very hard time getting another distributor to pick it up because your film is already saturated in the marketplace.

How do companies like CFI get away with this? Because for the most part they probably only owe the filmmaker a small amount of money $10k or less. They know most indie filmmakers don't have the money to sue and that they won't travel to another state to go to court. So CFI pockets the money and is there waiting to sign the next naive filmmaker who sends them their movie.

How do filmmakers avoid this? Do some very simple research on your potential distributor. It's so easy today with Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin etc. Look at the distributors catalog and then look up the filmmakers that they distribute. Contact the filmmakers and tell them what you're doing and ask them if the distributor in question worked out for them. Did they get paid? Filmmakers will be more than willing to speak up about their experience with a distributor.

Even with good references this can still happen. We've entered into over ten separate distribution agreements with different wholesalers, retailers and distribution labels. We've only been screwed on one deal and it was this same old scam, and we had checked references. It's not fool proof but has worked for us over 90% of the time.

The Official Apprehensive Films Store:
www.TheGrindHouse.Net

Everything Apprehensive:
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Blu-Ray & Indie Film Distribution, 4K Coming Soon

A conversation I had today with a filmmaker made me write this blog and it's a question I get asked a lot. Should we go to Blu-Ray & DVD or just DVD with our movie? Blu-Ray is a great format with awesome possibilities, but is a very tough market especially for the indie filmmaker. The manufacturing process to replicate Blu-Ray's in a factory is much more costly than DVD, because of the licensing fees and unlock codes you have to pay to the BDA (Blu-Ray Disc Association). Who's the BDA you ask? Mostly Sony I'm pretty sure...

So you've got much higher startup costs, currently around $2,500.00 per title, then you have the actual manufacturing costs. But it gets worse from there, because the bigger studios have been trying to push Blu-Ray on the consumers, they keep lowering the price of the discs to try and get people to splurge on the expensive HDTV setups. It's tough for an indie movie to enter the marketplace at $24.95, with virtually no advertising supporting them, and compete with a large studio release for $5.99 and national advertising. I was in Fry's a couple of weeks ago and saw a kiosk on Blu-Ray discs for $5.99 each. They weren't brand new releases, but studio catalog titles from about five years ago.

The Blu-Ray market is also much smaller than DVDs. Last I read Blu-Ray was doing about 18% of the business DVDs are doing as a whole.

There was an indie retro-label that launched and was planning to do nothing but Blu-Ray's with fully restored transfers of old cult horror films. They folded after their initial release.

So I say enter the Blu-Ray market with trepidation. I always suggest selling direct to customers with BD-R's if you want to offer Blu-Ray's of a small indie movie.

Interestingly enough as slow as Blu-Ray has been growing, but it is growing, Sony & LG announced the arrival of 4K resolution Blu-Ray Discs.

"Sony and LG are gearing up for new Blu-Ray discs that offer 'Ultra HD' definitions far higher than normal Full HD, such as 4K - four times higher than normal HD, and near the resolutions offered in Imax theatres.

'We're expecting the arrival of 4K Blu-rays in 2013,' said John Taylor, LG's Vice President of Communications told website Pocket-Lint."

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2084665/New-Blu-Ray-discs-offering-times-hi-def-2013.html#ixzz2F63TrlGh

The Official Apprehensive Films Store: www.TheGrindHouse.Net


Everything Apprehensive: www.afcinema.net

Retail is Dead? Indie Film Distribution in 2012

My name is Jonathan Morken, for those of you who don't often read my blog, and I run Apprehensive Films an indie distribution label/production company. My blog generally consists of posts about what Apprehensive Films is up to, our new releases, fundraisers, merchandise, new projects etc. But I've decided that on Fridays I'm going to be writing a post about the different distribution questions I get and the current state of indie film distribution as I see it.

I got into distribution six years ago after making many short films, music videos and a feature length documentary. My reason for starting the distribution label was to control my films and be able to work backwards. If I knew what a release could actually make, what it would take to get a release onto cable and into major retailers, then I could plan the films we produce in-house around that and we would have a really good shot at turning a profit and making another film. Six years later the plan is working. Apprehensive Films now has full blown North American distribution. We get our projects out to major retail, cable, all the major digital outlets, all the major online retailers and we have international representation. As of last week we just wrapped principal photography on our first in-house produced project that is based on our current level of distribution.

Now that we're through with the introductions I want to talk about an issue I hear coming up all the time. Distributors and Filmmakers complaining about how retail is dead and there is no money to be made through traditional home video distribution. I'll be the first to admit that retail has taken a big hit, but it's definitely not dead. Sure Hollywood Video is gone, Blockbuster lost some stores, Best Buy shrunk their DVD selection, but there is still a lot of open market out there.

There are 33,000 redboxes in the US, there are 4,700 Walmart Stores, 600+ Barnes & Nobles stores, tons of small indie record store chains across the country, thousands of comic book stores. The list goes on and on.

We just had a Halloween themed release that sold over 4,000 copies last month. But only 180 of those went through Amazon.com, the largest internet retailer, 3,000 of those sold units went to a major retailer in Canada. Our release was an indie release with no major talent and no major marketing campaign. But it still was able to catch the eye of major retailers, how? It was timed with a major holiday, had great cover artwork and quality content.

The market is flooded with too many indie films, but you can set yourself apart by making a quality project and coming up with a way to market the project so you don't have to have major stars or marketing campaigns. One of our most successful releases, that continues to sell is Hardware Wars, simply because it was the first parody of the most popular film ever made. Hardware Wars has never had a multi-million dollar ad campaign, but it is arguably the most successful short film of all time.

We're going to be pitching our Halloween release from this year to Spirit Halloween Stores (700 nation-wide) and Halloween City (400 nation-wide) for next year.

We also have been handling a documentary on fly fishing for a number of years and we sold a ton of DVDs to fly fishing shops.

I don't think retail is dead, it's sure not what it was in the hey day of VHS sales, but it is still a very large market I think a lot of filmmakers and labels alike are tending to count out prematurely.

- Jonathan Morken

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Everything Apprehensive