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

Comments

[Matt]

Great post! I'm really getting a lot out of this series. Since you made a call for trailers, I thought I would post the trailer for my soon to be released, no budget, feature "Wireless" and see how it stacks up to your stated criteria. Again, great post, and I'm looking forward to the next and final installment.

[Matt]

Ooop.... the embed code didn't work. Here is the link.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWYhj7e8c5c

Thanks again!

[Filmmakingstuff]

I totally agree about the both the trailer and the poster. The good news is, thanks in part to sites like YouTube, you can test your trailer to see if it gets any response and tweak as needed.

Also thought your "call to action" was key. This is what really helped us promote our movies. It let's folks embed on other fan sites and drives traffic back to the film site.

Jason Brubaker
www.FilmmakingStuff.com