DIY Filmmaking Sucks

Secrets of successful IndieGoGo and Kickstarter crowdfunding

At Sundance this year, the DIY distribution guru Peter Broderick hosted a fast-paced overview of successful crowdfunded projects, sponsored by IndieGoGo. For anyone interested in trying to raise funds in small denominations (i.e. crowdfunding), it was a rapid-fire boot camp of best-practices.

Currently, the two most popular crowdfunding platforms for indie films are IndieGoGo and Kickstarter. IndieGoGo has the benefit of being originally focused on indie films, so it's got movies in their DNA. Regardless, these insights apply to whichever you choose to use.

Your video makes all the difference -- make it personal and high-quality.
Whether you use IndieGoGo, Kickstarter or your own website, you should produce a video to introduce people to your project and ask for donations. Even if you only appeal to friends and family, the immediacy and intimacy of a video make a huge difference in the success of a fundraising campaign.

• The key to your success is to make it personal. 
• Put yourself in the video and appeal for people to help you out.
• Don't just post a trailer -- do something special when asking for contributions even if it's just a personal introduction to the trailer!
• Treat the video like a compelling work of art in its own right -- make it clever, engaging, visually stunning and add a soundtrack to affect the viewers' emotions. Basically, make it kick ass so people WANT to watch it and show others.
• Bring on the cast and crew to talk about why they are involved and what the donors' help will mean to them.

Don't recreate the wheel: steal ideas that work
When you're building your crowdfunding campaign, don't do it in a bubble. Study the sites (both IndieGoGo and Kickstarter) and learn.

• Look through IndieGoGo and Kickstarter at the other projects listed -- particularly the successful ones with lots of donors. Learn their tricks (a quick visit to the site came up with this gem immediately: $5 for a Twitter shout-out. Donate $5 and we do a shout-out to you on Twitter. Thank you Pipeline Theater Company's production of the Caucasian Chalk Circle.).
• Set up a wide range of donor levels -- and have fun with the options.
• Study the various videos and see what affects you most as a viewer. Learn what works and what resonates with your personality and the tone of your work. The videos where the filmmakers themselves talk about their projects always seem the most compelling, but if that doesn't work for you, find something that does.
• Sign up for nonprofit fiscal sponsorship of your film, which allows your contributors (in the USA) to get a tax deduction when they give $ to support your film. That might encourage some people who are on the fence to give. IndieGoGo integrates with some of these nonprofit sponsors so it's a seamless experience for your donors. And the sponsoring agencies are often fantastic clearinghouses of info on fundraising and marketing. Examples include the amazing San Francisco Film Society (our fiscal sponsor for our indie sci-fi feature In-World War) and Fractured Atlas, which has a wide array of filmmaker services (including cheap production insurance for indie films).
• Bottom line: Invest the time and careful thinking to do it right.

Create an advisory committee from your target audience
Crowdfunding through your friends and family alone can be quite successful (we've raised about $7,000 in donations without going much beyond people we already know). But the true success for a crowdfunding campaign comes with strangers who you've never met donate to support your film simply because they love what you're doing.

Generally, these types of donors are tough to get, but Peter suggested you build an Advisory Committee for your project of representative individuals and groups from interested communities. Create partnerships with organizations that are a natural fit for the film. Essentially, these are the taste-makers and formal structures in the target audience you're trying to reach. The orgs might include nonprofits, business groups, faith-based organizations, schools, websites, publications or virtually anything that has an audience or mailing list that has excellent crossover with your target audience.

These types of relationships will serve you well during the distribution and marketing of the film, but also during the fundraising stage, they can help as well. By forming an advisory committee of key players you invite them to buy into the project on an emotional level and then you have the basis to ask for a link or shout-out in a newletter or website to support the project through the IndieGoGo page.

Let's be clear: it's very challenging -- if not virtually impossible -- to get strangers to give you money for something that doesn't exist. Even when you're done with the film this can be near impossible to get anyone to pay attention (which is why marketing a film is the hardest part of the filmmaking process).

Generally, only people you know (particularly family and close friends) will donate cash. But by engaging with communities and community leaders in your target audience you're building the audience for the film -- even if it's not finished for years down the line. Eventually, some will end up helping you spread the word, perhaps even co-sponsoring screenings or hosting them outright.

And if you're lucky, you might get some early donors too.

IndieGoGo best practices
One of the IndieGoGo big honchos (didn't write down his name, sorry) shared with the audience the strategies that successful crowdsourcing campaigns have in common (these are the people that make and surpass their $$$ funding goals). If you're considering using IndieGoGo or Kickstarter, use these as your guidelines:

• A length of 50 to 60 days seems to be the sweet spot for successful campaigns. 
• Set a reachable financial goal, rather than something too aspirationally high. It's far better to go over (which happens frequently when the goal is reached) than not reach your goal.
• The rate of giving tends to go up as the amount raised approaches the goal. In other words, nothing succeeds like success and more people give the more people have given. (Consider personally asking some close friends and family to be the first few donors to get things moving quickly to show momentum).
• As Captain Picard always said: "Engage." Interacting with your donors and prospective donors makes a huge difference. Keep them posted, solicit suggestions, respond to questions and find ways to engage with them. This doesn't just apply to fundraising, but cultivating an audience in general. Treat your donors like your inner circle.
• And, of course, make a great video asking for contributions and getting them excited about the project.

Now go out there and make your movie.

(And for more thoughts on crowdfunding, see a previous post about Kickstarter, IndieGoGo, and buckets of cash.)

This is part of a special report series from DIY Filmmaking Sucks: DIY Secrets of Sundance. The series covers lessons learned at this year's Sundance Film Festival from an assortment of indie distribution and funding panels, in addition to conversations with filmmakers.

Preview new indie sci-fi at WonderCon

Join us at WonderCon in San Francisco for a sneak peak at a number of upcoming and in production indie sci-fi films, moderated by our own DJ Bad Vegan (that's me -- I get sick pleasure from writing in the third person plural).

Please join us and tell all your Bay Area sci-fi friends to come on by. Last year, we got swamped; it was standing-room only, so show up early to get a seat!

WONDERCON SPECIAL EVENT:
What’s Next in Indie Sci-Fi
Sunday, April 3
2:00-3:00pm
ROOM 236 - Moscone Center, San Francisco

The most innovative sci-fi movies aren't from Hollywood, but from the exploding indie/DIY sci-fi film movement. Get a sneak peek at clips from upcoming indie sci-fi projects with filmmakers DJ Bad Vegan (In-World War), Henry Barrial (Pig), Kip Rasmussen (95ers:ECHOES) and other special guests.

That's right, we'll even have a small preview clip or two of raw footage from In-World War, the indie sci-fi feature we keep talking about (currently in post).

Support the cause: Please give us a Facebook "like" or retweet it to all your sci-fi peeps or give us a terrorist fist bump or something.

The two most important things in marketing an indie film

It all boils down to a great poster and, above all, a great trailer.
There's a lot of thinking and experimentation going on in the indie and DIY film distribution world, but the most important remain the old standbys: the film's trailer and, to a lessor degree, the poster.

If you have a kick-ass trailer, you're more than halfway home in terms of marketing your film.

After all, if you spend all this time and money making the film and then trying to get people to watch your trailer on YouTube or Facebook or on your website, and the trailer sucks, your movie is screwed. Why would people want to watch a film where the trailer is crap? It just makes the movie look like crap too.

It's the same with the poster. If you spend a ton of money and/or time printing up crappy posters and then go through the trouble of putting them up around town (and shaping the lame design into a website), you've just wasted all that cash and effort. The poster is also the "key art" that is used on websites to represent the film, so in a line-up of movie posters on a random website, if yours doesn't perform, you miss the clicks.

But above all, the trailer is where you seal the deal. It's where a random person turns into someone who wants to see the movie.

What makes an amazing trailer (and a great poster)? That's a topic for a deep dive another day, but for now, these are the key outcomes to measure against:

• Does your target audience get it immediately that this is film for them?
• Does it introduce us to the main character(s) and the main conflict(s)?
• Does it convey the "type" or "color" of the filmmaking: the emotion, audio/visual feel and tone of the film?
• Does it make the audience wonder, "what happens?"
• After seeing it, can someone explain to a friend what the film is about -- ideally a friend who is also in the target audience?
• Does it have a call to action -- letting people know how they can see it, rent it and/or buy it? Or, for an unreleased film, how they can learn more and stay in touch?

Want to see an example of a trailer that works well? After the NY panel, I overheard a two of the panelists talking about the film I Love You Philip Morris. They agreed that the film is fantastic but hugely challenging to market -- how do you convey the quality of the movie given the odd subject? Likewise, they agreed that the trailer was fantastic and was a huge factor in the film's success. Watch it here and as homework, watch as many trailers as possible, especially for films with the same target audience and/or featuring similar genres and subjects.

The great trailer for I Love You Philip Morris:
  

As we start to work on our trailer for In-World War (our indie sci-fi feature), I'll post something about the structure of trailers in more depth.

In the meantime, if you have favorite trailers, please post them (or at least links or titles) in the comments.

This is part of a special report series from DIY Filmmaking Sucks: DIY Secrets of Sundance. The series covers lessons learned at this year's Sundance Film Festival from an assortment of indie distribution and funding panels, in addition to conversations with filmmakers.

Next Monday the final installment -- Week 6: Secrets of successful IndieGoGo and Kickstarter crowdfunding

The secrets of indie film release strategy

Give it to people how they want it
Increasingly, small indie films are being released in non-traditional schedules, mixing up the old standard release roadmap of festival, theatrical, DVD, on-demand, pay TV, free TV (to say nothing of the heresy of giving away the film for free online).

Repeatedly, panelists at Sundance this year echoed this theme: "Different audiences consume content different ways" (as put succinctly by Todd Sklar of RangeLife Entertainment, one of the panelists at the  Distribution panel hosted by the NY Film Office). Don't spend time and money trying to get people to change their behavior -- give it to them the way they want to see it.

For instance, it might make sense to show the film online (perhaps even for free) for an exclusive preview for the right website that targets your audience, in order to build up buzz.

Or, you might want to do a "day and date" approach where you release the film on DVD and on demand on the same day you're in theaters (or even in festivals). However, as another panelist put it dryly: "Exhibitors are not necessarily on board" for day-and-date release or VOD prior to theatrical, so be careful and cognizant of the dangers of releasing out of order. If you're going to piss off the theaters or other distribution partners along the way, be prepared to be shut out of their channels.

But the cost may be worth it. Getting to your audience at the right time, when and how they want to watch your film is crucial. And building buzz is more important than protecting a meager release window that wan't going to make you much money in the first place.

Or maybe you go off the grid completely. Buy/borrow an old VW bus and tour the country for months with the film like an indie band on tour, playing the film where-ever people will let you: libraries, schools, cafes, clubs, bars, maybe even movie theaters. Create your own film festival ("Matt's Wacky One Night Film Festival") and sell DVDs and t-shirts at the shows. That's basically what Kevin Smith is going to do with his new film Red State (which premiered at Sundance this year -- followed by a very inspiring diatribe by Kevin about self-distribution vs. the Indiewood system).

Above all, understand your target audience
Central to these plans is understanding your target audience. Who will love this film? Who will pay for it? And most importantly, who are the raving fans just waiting for a film like yours who will tell their friends about it?

Identifying a target audience is difficult and requires the counter-intuitive skill of thinking small: the best target audiences are tiny, well-defined and almost insular slices of humanity, not large general populations (bad: "college-age guys", good: "college-age guys who play professional poker"). It's a lot easier and more affordable to reach out to a tightly-connected community than a wide general audience (unless you have $100+ million to spend on advertising like Hollywood).

Once you know your target audience, figure out how they watch movies (ask them!) and then create a release plan that caters to their habits and interests.

Also, you should learn what other recent small indie films they like and reverse engineer their marketing and distribution plans. Always try to avoid having to recreate the wheel. Steal the good ideas and build on their success.

What are your ideas for releasing the film? What interesting approaches have you seen other films do successfully? Let us know in the comments.

This is part of a special report series from DIY Filmmaking Sucks: DIY Secrets of Sundance. The series covers lessons learned at this year's Sundance Film Festival from an assortment of indie distribution and funding panels, in addition to conversations with filmmakers.

Next Monday -- Week 5: The two most important things in marketing an indie film

Secrets of Facebook and audience engagement

Audience engagement is key
Why wouldn't you build and engage with your audience? It's crucial to getting traction for people to actually want to watch your film (regardless if via theaters/fests, DVD, on-demand, or even just online for free), but having a large following of engaged fans demonstrates to a wide array of potential distribution and marketing partners that you have a hot property on your hands. Little else will move the needle, in fact (a great film that nobody wants to watch is just a film that no one has seen).

Audience engagement was on everyone's lips this year at Sundance, from the Distribution panel at the NY Lounge to Peter Broderick's presentation at the start of IndieGoGo's party.

If you're wooing sales agents, distributors, co-production partners, investors, high profile PR agents, or other potential distrib/marketing partners such as Netflix, nothing works better than a ton of rabid fans wanting to see the film already.

Measuring audience engagement
How do you prove you have an audience ready to see the film? The stats are on your film's Facebook page, Twitter feed and YouTube trailer. These are the numbers that matter. For a small no-budget indie, you should aim for 5,000 Facebook friends, 10,000 Twitter followers and at least 50,000 YouTube views.

You got that covered? Is your audience locked in yet?

Actually, these numbers are completely bogus -- I just made them up. But they're definitely in the ballpark for films that deserve a closer look. Showing off your couple hundred Facebook friends or trailer views on YouTube might be worse than not being there at all since it only proves you've failed to reach beyond the inner circle of people you know.

Work that social network
Your Facebook fans and friends are more than just a number; the true power of Facebook is expressed when a social network is galvanized toward a common goal. There are countless examples of this, from the revolution in Egypt to the Double Rainbow guy to the sold-out NYC screenings of our film New York City (back in the MySpace days).

The holy grail of social marketing is going viral: where each person passes something on a crowd of other people and they do the same and so on until seemingly everyone has seen it. Going viral is awesome, but you can't plan for it -- it's almost solely about the content rather than a particular viral strategy (I doubt the Double Rainbow guy had a social media marketing plan).

So while you can't dictate what will go viral, you can create the conditions and get the ball rolling. Or, to keep the virus analogy going: you can't guarantee an epidemic, but you can sneeze a lot in public and stop washing your hands.

On Facebook that's as simple as asking people to view your trailer and post it in their status updates and via Twitter. Or asking them to go to IMDB and rate your film a perfect ten. Or asking all your Facebook fans and friends to put your film into their Netfix queue so Netflix buys more DVDs and pays a higher licensing fee. And then rating the film highly on Netflix too.

Buy ads to build up your Facebook friends
Here's a crazy idea from a guy who hates spending money (since I have so little): buy ads! That's right, Facebook's ad program actually has an amazing microtargeting capability and if it puts your ad in front of people likely to like your film, it's money well spent.

One panelist, Paola Freccero of Crowdstarter, said that for $50/day, a filmmaker could use Facebook's amazing super-targeted ads to get 30-70 new "Likes" each day. Using that calculus, each "Like" will cost you about $1.

Is it worth $3000 to get 3000 new Facebook "Likes" for your film? It's a no-brainer in my view. Those 3000 followers may turn into an additional 300 units sold to Netflix (even at only $10 each, you've basically made your money back), or may be the tipping point that convinces a cable VOD provider to carry your film, or may get you a foreign sales agent to take our movie to Cannes. Or it may convince an investor to take a chance and invest in your distribution strategy.

Yes it means you need to put out some cash. I'm a notorious cheap-skate as a filmmaker. I LOATHE to part with money in making movies. But I learned this the hard way: while it's sexy to say you are doing it all with no budget, you're just holding yourself back.

It's like saying you're going to run the Boston Marathon on your knees. It's certainly possible you could cross the finish line, but it's not very likely and damn will it hurt (and it's also certainly possible you'll never walk again).

Another way to say it: It takes an investment to get a return.

Best way to start is to start small with the low hanging fruit. Should be cheaper too. As I wrote in last year's post about distribution best-practices from Sundance:

Buy ads that target ONLY friends of people that are already fans of your film (via the fan page you can create on Facebook). The ads show up to these friends-of-fans indicating that the friend is a fan already, hugely increasing click-throughs.

We're going to buy Facebook ads for In-World War as an experiment once we have more material to show off (stills and perhaps a trailer). We'll keep you posted. Supposedly, it's pretty damn affordable. Don't believe it? It's the reason why Facebook is worth tens of billions of dollars. A lot of very smart, very rich people are throwing money at Facebook right now, with the success of this advertising approach the key to their massive valuation.

Bribe your friends
Even if you're highly allergic to paid advertising, there's a lot that can be done to grow your Facebook fans. Consider bribing people to recommend your film's Facebook page.

Okay, technically Facebook doesn't like this, so you have to be somewhat sly about it. One panelist at the NY panel at Sundance suggested you reward people for helping spread the word. Example: get 10 friends to Like the film in Facebook and get a free DVD. Reward them for the behavior you want -- and make it fun.

Your turn now
In the comments, please share the best-practices and clever ideas you've seen (or done) to build up an army of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube fans.

This is part of a special report series from DIY Filmmaking Sucks: DIY Secrets of Sundance. The series covers lessons learned at this year's Sundance Film Festival from an assortment of indie distribution and funding panels, in addition to conversations with filmmakers.

Next Monday -- Week 4: The secret of indie film release strategy