Pirating for Distribution

james.fandom said:

Would you pirate your love and joy for exposure, and take the risk of finacially ruining yourselves? Can the any press is good press translate to any exposure is good exposure, considering that independent filmmakers can't usually take the hit in terms of lack of sales, seeing as they rely on that money so heavily?

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it isn't pirating if you allow it to be downloaded

free distribution has its perks and its cons, just as running without does, and any other business tactic.
for example, there is the merchandise economy, give everything free except the merchandise, a large number of web shows etc do this one.

there is a thousand of ways to do things, no one can really say what is the right one really....

personally, i would if i felt it wouldn't get promoted in other ways, or promoted as well.
(this is assuming im in complete control and i am the one who funded it.)

Though they are protected, I have set all of my show pilots up so they can easily be downloaded. They are sizzle reels... demos. By that, the more eyes on them the better. They are but business cards. It'd be pretty silly for me to start spatting hands for people doing what I hoped they would.

TRAILERS are promotion that has worked for years just fine. If you want to GIVE your entire movie away on Pirate Bay then go ahead.....

I wouldn't purposfully release my film to piracy...that's kind of going against everything.

BTW, I really like the look of INK. Very cool looking.

The thing with Ink is that with out the piracy, it might not have been seen by so many people. Piracy definitely helped it get the exposure it deserved. It did have a trailer, but I don't think it would have garnered as much attention as the piracy did.

Ink was great.

I'll play devils advocate here. While I would rather link the article I read that brought this up as an idea I'd rather not go searching right now. Not my idea, but I do find it interesting.

Anyway, the gist is that yes - volunteering your work up for download isn't piracy, but why not use the very effective infrastructure that supports digital piracy which is already built, frequently maintained, free, and ubiquitous.

The downside is fairly clear - if someone already downloaded it, then are they likely to actually spend money on it in some fashion after having seen it? Probably not, though some may if the enjoy it enough. There is also some level of ripple effect that is more difficult to measure. I would be wary of looking at any singular example - especially in indie film gone massive territory - and expect it to become the norm. Ink's success was because it was a good story with solid acting (for the most part, I thought), a nicely executed production design, good cinematography, good sound, etc etc.

The piracy was just a vehicle by which people became aware of this. A lesser film would not have been given as much of a boost, if any at all.

A more relevant question for me currently is: Is it a possible avenue for shorter work which was not going to net you and direct income, but is for "business card" and name recognition purposes?

As far as a feature? Seems pretty risky to leak it unto the torrents, and if you have anyone else's money involved it's most likely to risky to deal with. In some cases, if nothing else is happening? If, for some reason, no one is biting despite your well executed marketing plan? If your self-printed DVDs just aren't selling and your website traffic is abysmal?

Why not?

This is from Double Edge blog in early Nov.

http://doubleedgefilms.blogspot.com/2009/11/360-degree-view-of-internet-piracy.html

A few interesting points. In response to number 5: I want instant and easy access, and I am willing to pay for it.

At some point you gotta make money. People will spread the word about a great trailer just as they will about a great movie they see online. Do a scene release if you want to release more. If you want to give your movie away for next to nothing then get it on NetFlix via FilmBaby.

Well deliberately allowing your film to be pirated and acting like it's been stolen would be a media ploy that could blow up in your face. I understand offering it for free is a little different, as there is not as much hype around it, but people usually don't like tactics like this. Boy in the balloon? lol.

A better idea is make a great film, with a great trailer and smart marketing campaign.

indietalk said:

people usually don't like tactics like this. Boy in the balloon? lol.

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Other examples would be the way that Blair Witch and Paranormal Activity were promoted.. Paranormal Activity even went so far as to not provide any credits to try and maintain the "authenticity" of it being found footage or whatever.. Personally I find the tactic rather cheesy.

I agree with indie.. make a good movie, one worth watching, get it into festivals and the film markets, and it'll generate money, if it doesn't it's probably because the film isn't as good as you think it is... for one reason or another.

The bottom line though is this, if you want to make money making film, you have to make a film that is marketable and salable.. which also means it's got to be watchable (generally... there are exceptions to the rule of course)

Some people might see that as selling out, or compromising artistic vision, but if you're in it for the money, do it for the money -- it's a business venture at that point, not art.

james.fandom said:

Would you pirate your love and joy for exposure, and take the risk of finacially ruining yourselves? Can the any press is good press translate to any exposure is good exposure, considering that independent filmmakers can't usually take the hit in terms of lack of sales, seeing as they rely on that money so heavily?

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Your answer depends upon case to case. If one's film is a no budget he might like to give the movie free of cost to people via piracy (which actually is not piracy at all). It also depends is your major portion of income is being invested in your project or not? other then this another important question is do you have any plans to get money by any other methods from the film which you are showing via torrents etc.
Personally i will try to make it sure that atleast the investment is recovered so that i can think of other project. After all passion also needs money

Just to be clear - I'm not necessarily endorsing this for everyone's feature. If it were my feature then this would clearly not be the route I used. At least not yet. But I see some interesting potential in the notion of using the torrent infrastructure to distribute work to an incredibly wide audience. Especially short material.

Imagine being able to say "Sure, this will be my first feature, but my last 3 short films were downloaded by a total of 2 million people world wide within X weeks of their release into the wide world of torrents which increased my web traffic by X%, netted my company's facebook X number of new fans, and indirectly resulted in $X worth in donations through my website" when trying to garner support for your next work.

For features, it's pretty clear that the primary goal is to make a solid, watchable (subjective), good (again, subjective) movie. The only reason that the pirating went well for Ink (in fact, the only reason they got that many downloads all at once) was that they made a good movie out of an interesting story and execute their craft well. Anything less and none of us would have heard about it.

I don't necessarily agree that making a good movie and having a solid marketing plan is a guarantee of success. Pretty sure no one here is implying that as this is a business with no guarantees what so ever; however, I do think that given the number of truly awful movies that end up in theaters vs. the number of truly great ones that never do - we are looking at an opportunity in disguise that is still too young to be fully examined. Maybe it's just the standard xMas pessimism talking, but I don't believe that every single well made indie film with a decent marketing plan gets picked up by distributors and lives happily ever after. Certainly the ones that see vast commercial success are incredibly rare.

I agree as well on the "let it leak and pretend we didn't thing." That would just blow up in your face eventually. But that's not really what I'm are talking about here. To me the idea of using torrents to get your name into the world of people who watch movies may be a viable option when either A: It's a resume piece anyway, or B: no other options remain.

I think the only time I would willingly do this is as mentioned in my post above - when no one is buying, the website is tanked, and when there is 0 chance of distribution through other means. Then why not. I'd rather lose the money and have people watch my work, than lose the money and have it sit unseen on a shelf.

Perhaps I am just jaded, so if anyone with more experience wants to reassure me that all good indies with some level of marketing plan in place make back their full production, post, advertising, duplication, and distribution budgets please do. It would make me feel better.

If it were me, I would ask myself if my film was good enough TO give away.
If it was, then I would try to sell it. Others will pirate it for you.

However, if I literally couldn’t even give it away, then I wouldn’t worry about how trying to could hurt sales.

If I DID decide to inject my film into torrent land, not as a contrived hype mugging attempt, but to utilize piracy as a distribution channel, then I would only let loose a lower quality version that had a link to my personal site from which a better quality version could be had free, and a full quality version with extras could even be purchased at a reasonable price. The site would be a vehicle to generate awareness about a next film.

I think torrents could precipitate or re-precipitate a more integrated product placement industry sub-genre based on “If you can’t beat them, then might as well build advertising revenue worth right into the only version of the film that exists and join them.”, so not if, but when its pirated, it’s worth grows in proportion to it’s popularity in an advertising framework.

These films could be downloaded from the advertiser’s own torrent like sites.

It seems piracy is fostering a drug like content consumption addiction to media by way of a “More More More! ‘cus its Free Free Free!" speedball. I know several people that watch 3 to 5 (usually more) movies a day, a few times a week. They are junkies by way of theft. and to feed their need they continually download anything if the title is cool and they haven’t seen it yet.

I think as this addiction becomes more wide spread, then capitalizing on it with advertising will emerge.


-Thanks-

Will Vincent said:

Other examples would be the way that Blair Witch and Paranormal Activity were promoted.. Paranormal Activity even went so far as to not provide any credits to try and maintain the "authenticity" of it being found footage or whatever.. Personally I find the tactic rather cheesy.

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ditto
For them to think viewers would buy any part of this low budget video as authentic is insulting. From the chicks never ending hyperventalating to the dudes neverending wtf after like the 12th time of a sound, man it was hard not to turn it off and watch Curb Your Enthusiasm instead. When the credits came up, I was the one saying wtf. Looping relatives names like a disclaimer on a pharmaceutical ad was less than effective for me.

I didn’t like The Blair Witch Project or Paranormal Acitivity either.

When I looked at their titles I recall immediately thinking “Thank God these are real ‘cus that’s a whole lot of Oscars to just be giving out for nothing!”

After blinking I began to suspect something could be amiss, so I hoped in my car and drove it straight through the wall of the movie theater in case there was some kind of mix up, and they needed my help.

To this day I remain confused and let down by what I saw.
I fault the makers of these films for accomplishing what they set out to do.

SOB

Did a search today to check, and sure enough, my new film is on torrent sites. I haven't risked a download yet to confirm it's "real", but damn these asholes to hell.

How the hell?!

Dreadylocks said:

How the hell?!

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If it's for real it's a screener sent to a film festival or otherwise set lose into the wild, or a download from Vimeo (set to not allow, but there may be a way to hack that) while it had a password that was public. It COULD all be fake, but it lists about 5 servers.

I hate to think those screeners make it into uploaders' hands. You should really be able to trust that when you sent your film to a fest, it won't be stolen.

My best guess would be the public listing of the password on vimeo. It's actually quite easy to rip an flv copy from anywhere. There are even programs that can steal hulu and netflix streams

On the upside, it's a short, no real commercial plans for it other than maybe a double disk of it and my first film later this year, so no real monetary loss, and somebody liked it enough to go to that much trouble.