At the 41st Annual International Quorum or Motion Pictures Producers a panel of noted documentary producers and directors spoke about successful funding, marketing and distribution techniques for documentary filmmakers. This panel includes Doug Block, driector of 51 Birch Street, J.R. Morley, producer of Super Size Me, and Amy Sewell, producer of Mad Hot Ballroom.

Watch the Video: The Business of Documentaries

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My Notes from the Video

Business of Documentaries

Doug Block
Director, 51 Birch Street

• Starts off with a passionate idea that you want to get out.
• Do well to not lose money in theatrical, hold on to rights — pay a distributor a fee, share advertising costs, and do a lot of the work yourself.
• Film cost was 300K. 75-100K to get out
• Most money was from HBO as pre-sales…this led to conflicts from major distributors who’s parent company was a rival of Time Warner.
• GO out and make the best movie you can make. There is a place for docs in the market if its good.

Marketing

J. R. Morely
Producer, Super-size Me

• Cost of theatrical of a doc is a crap-shoot, cost of doing it compared to the benefit is usually not a good one.
• You’ll make the money back on Cable and DVD. The only time you would do it as a theatrical is if you want to qualify for the Academy

Distribution

Amy Sewwell
Producer, Mad Hot Ballroom

• Targeted a market, soundtrack, etc.
• There are smart people in pockets all across America that WANT to see documentaries, don’t care about what others say.
• Lawyers, sales agents, investors — the doc was an LLC business model, shares were sold. It was a $500K movie, $10K was 1 share. Investors got 15% return on investment.
• Good side for the LLC is if its a loss, you count is as an income loss, if you make a salary of $100K a year, and you lost $10K, you report that you made only $90K that year. Tax write offs aren’t that good though in LLC.

Leveraging the Web

Doug Block
Director, 51 Birch Street

• Many web doc-makers don’t exploit their resources.
• Give active daily updates for people to watch and be engaged, this way you can grow an email list. All those names move forward to your next production.

Truly Indie

Doug Block
Director, 51 Birch Street

• Put up a certain amount of money for every city you want to open up in
• Open up in five cities
• They opened in; NYC, LA, Miniapollis, SanFran, Chi-town — $50,000 was the result
• Have a national publict that coordinates for each local paper.

When not to seek Theatrical Release

J. R. Morely
Producer, Super-size Me

• When you sell off the rights, make sure that you get a sizeable advance for it. They sold it to a large distributor and to showtime.
• For a small doc do a simple small contract deal only if you will make money. DVD sales is where the smaller documentary film was to make its money
• Film business is chaning. How money comes in and goes out is diff. Netflix is now buying films and they want to do that.
• The way they did the funding for their film was to fund it themselves as a private corporation

Where do you keep stuff that you want to actually keep?

Last year I made a post about proper file management: http://www.leechonfilms.com/file-management-25.htm — An addition to file management on your drives is file management off of your drives.

I’ve learned that off loading completed projects from your hard drive into an efficient archive system is very important, ESPECIALLY when you have limited disc space.

My Current setup:

• Internal Hard Drive - 150 GB - — - System files
• External Hard Drive - 200 GB - — - Download Files
• External Hard Drive - 250 GB - — - Personal Files
• External Hard Drive - 500 GB - — - System and Personal backup
• External Hard Drive - 750 GB - — - Project Files

750 GB may seem like a lot, but when you have a handful of small projects with uncompressed video or even a large scale project like (documentary, seminar, feature film) it fills up quicker than you would think. Currently I’m working on two large scale projects; Tufaan (documentary) and a Seminar…both projects have over 40 one hour tapes that I want to have live access to while editing. If you do the math, that’s 500+ GB per project.

If you are working on more than one large scale project at a time, make sure you have a dedicated drive for it. Heck, its useful to have a separate editing machine per project. If you can afford it, two to three editing machines per project to make the editing process faster if you have more than one person doing the editing.

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How do you archive after the project is complete?

If you are dealing with a small scale project (total size under 50GB), then compress the entire project folder using WinRAR (make sure you select the option where it chops it up into DVD size chunks) and then burn the .RAR files to multiple DVDs.

If its a medium or large scale project (50+ GB in size) compress the footage files using WinRAR seperately (works as a backup for your tape footage), and then compress the project file without the footage.

Where do you keep all these DVDs of archived footage?

buy yourself a few of these binders to keep the archived stuff easily accessible when needed.

That’s a LOT of DVDs! I don’t want to have to store that much stuff for a single project.

The other option I can think of is you invest in a Blu-Ray (50 GB discs) or HD-DVD drive (25GB discs), but each disc comes for $20-$25 each. Not to mention $500+ for the drive itself. Personally I think it would be worth it to invest in this if you are working with HD (high definition) video.

In the case of HD video, you will also want TB (Terabyte…1000 Gigabytes) size drives, especially since HD footage takes up a lot of space.