My personal problem in this area is inexperience. I have a completed feature. I have good reviews from Film Threat and Creature Corner. It's been shown in front of a paying audience. But other than selling a few home made copies myself, it's been seen by very few people. I've sent several screeners to distributors, but I know I'm not doing nearly as much as I could to get it out there. When I see posts like Chitty, it's very tempting to make a deal with him, simply because I'm frustrated and want my film to be seen. At this point I'd be happy to break even and just get the movie seen. I hate feeling so desperate, and ignorant about the "process".
How many sales agents have you sent the film out to or are you just targeting distributors?
Have you been putting the film into the festivals that sales agents attend and if your have, did you actively market the film to those guys?
The trick here is to identify which sales agents handle the kind of film you make. The only way to do this is to get to the major festivals and network, and also to get on the phone and talk to sales agents before sending your film out. That way you know what kind of films they take and how they like them packaged.
The other thing is, what format did you shoot your feature on? Most distributors and sales agent automatically reject anything shot on mini-dv, dv-cam or any of the other low end digital formats. Some won't even touch films shot on formats like Digi-beta, except for direct to TV.
At a major festival like Cannes, they produce a book which lists all of the attending companies, what they do and who the key contacts are. This kind of information is starting place for getting distribution.
The interesting part of this process is the bit where you discover that in order to sell your film there are a whole lot of things you should have done in production.
A sales agent is going to ask you:
a) How big was your budget? (Anything less than $250,000 and you are going to need a fantastic sales hook)
b) Is there anyone in it I've heard of ?
c) What format was it shot on? (Anything less than High Def and interest will wain)
d) Has it won any awards?
e) Are all your contracts in place? a sales agent won't touch a film that may run into legal problems further along the line.
Before speaking to the sales agent, you need to know why it is that your films is going to do good business for them?
So if your sales story is "Hey, we did this under $1 million picture but Nicole Kidman loved the script so much she came out and worked for free" then you chances of distribution are pretty high. A sales agent can sell that picture.
If your story is that you spent $500,000 shooting a film on High Def after winning several awards as a filmmaker and you have a really beautiful film to show them, then again, they can do business on it.
However, if you have low format, no name film, on which you spend under $250,000 they you need to create a buzz about the film, so that you've got something to sell. If you can demonstrate that your film's website get 35,000 hits a day, you've got a strong case for selling your film.
The key is in understanding what is it about your film that will make people want to buy it/rent it/watch it.
The great thing with low budget horror is that the budget, names, format issues are often put to one side provided that the film hangs together and has a good enough hook to drag in the punters. Most of the really famous cult horror films were dreadful pieces of work that would died on their asses in any other genre.
Going to an inexperienced, direct to DVD distributor should always be the last port of call for any film maker. However, I really believe that even before going into production, a clear idea of where the film is going to get sold, for how much and why it's going to sell, is the most important discussion to have.
