Find a niche and a name for your feature film
If you are not already an established and well-connected producer, your odds of selling a film are usually next to zero. One way to work around this is to team up with small distributors that serve a specific niche market. You should find the niche where product fits and will best sell.
Film distributors are risk-averse and want names attached that can sell the pictures. It is the well-known celebrities that the mainstream media are looking for in order to make a profit. If you have one or two names attached that distributors deem bankable, you will likely have a deal.
Who is going to see your film?
You have finished your film. You spent hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars, sweated blood and doubted your sanity, but finally your masterpiece is playing on your den’s widescreen TV. But other than your mother, a handful of friends from high school, and the odd anonymous teenager on an online platform, who is going to see your film?
With the advent of digital technology, filmmaking has become more accessible, but it has also become increasingly difficult to achieve a high-quality sale. Each of the better-known distributors receive hundreds of projects from around the world every day. The output is so colossal nowadays that distributors tend to cherry-pick only no-risk, high-return projects, projects that are almost completely financed or already finalized, with bankable names attached and a high-concept script that falls in one of the successful genres.
Yet, at the end of the day, a producer’s job is really only about one thing — in order to be successful, all it takes is to turn a NO into a YES.
And in order to do this the producer has to find the best and most accurate way to get directly to the right people–the people in charge–without wasting time with those whose role is essentially that of gatekeeper. A daunting task, similar to finding the “needle in the haystack”.
So where to start?
Over the coming weeks and months we will provide tips and resources on how to go about this seemingly impossible mission. Stay tuned for our updates..
