Cultivating A Fan Base Provides Your Film With Potential Long Legs
You've made your film. (Believe it or not, that's the easy part.)
You peddle it on the festival circuit.
You sell DVDs and/or digital downloads off of your own website.
Eventually you break down at the end of it's rope and whore it out on Netflix et al.
So... now what?
You gotta actively work at fanning the fan-embers into fan-flames and keep that flame not roaring but at least burning so that maybe fans will make requests that your indie film be sublicensed.
http://www.aintitcool.com/node/63670
BUG: ... I’m really curious how this works, how you guys find the movies you re-release and that whole process. I think a lot of people are curious about that aspect of these re-releases and how you choose them, what do you use in them and everything...
JN [marketing director]:... When we get a list of titles or we have access to titles that we can get films from, we will scour them like “I like that one” or “fans have been requesting this one.” We take that into account and go from there. As far as roles are concerned, Cliff is a big driver. He’s the person who actually acquires the titles. He goes in to our heads at Shout Factory and there is a process, a projection process like sales process…it’s kind of boring, but you get the gist of what we think has potential and then we talk about the titles, fan bases, what hasn’t been released, what hasn’t been exploited, you know...
CM [acquisitions and production]: Our acquisitions come to us in many different ways. There are independent producers of movies that approach us and the other is we have…Shout Factory has deals with all of the major studios for TV product,...
JN: Yeah, and then we had a title from Fox, TERROR TRAIN, that was at the end of a deal at Fox and we wanted to do something with it and we were like “Well, let’s put that in so it beefs up that.” I think Scream got off to a very successful launch because we announced these nine or so titles right off the bat, like we came in thunderous. People were like “Oh my god, what do you mean? Not only do you have two HALLOWEENS and a John Carpenter movie with THEY LIVE, but you’re putting out DEADLY BLESSING, which has never been put out before from Wes Craven, and a couple of other stuff...” I think that got peoples’ attention very quickly. For me on the marketing end, I managed the Facebook page and the now Twitter page, but it was always my intention, and it has become it, to foster a horror convention mentality on Facebook, so fans who love going to horror conventions, that’s their thing but can’t go to them all of the time, well, on Scream Factory, at least on our Facebook page, we hope we get the kind of community in the sense of we’re talking about our titles, but we are also talking about horror titles, not just ours. We are talking with the fans and doing fun polls, because then it helps our titles, because you’ve got fans to a degree running the show putting them on a platform and seeing what they are. Not all the titles are everyone’s favorites, but boy every time we announce something people are like “I thought I was the only one who liked that one” and people are like “No, I do too.” It’s a fun process.
Okay. So, did you catch that?
This outfit signs sublicence distro deals with the major studios.
Judging from their library it's mainly old stuff that really isn't moving anyway but still has fans.
But Shout Factory [SF] also deals with independent studios.
The point to understand is that before they invest in distributing or redistributing a film it MUST have a fan base, AKA an active consumer market.
Customers will goto SF's website looking for titles A B or C, and run across titles D E F G and H and think
"Oh! Yeah! I wanna see that again! Let me buy that."
And the [infernal] social media page has got to be "big enough" to discuss more than just the narrow selection of what they do carry.
Likewise, for our indie films we should also be "big enough" to discuss similar films, inspirational films, even competitor films.
The point is to engage the fan base.
But then again... you gotta produce and direct a film worth making fans fanatical in the first place!
Wanna know why there's sometimes several different cover arts for the same film?
BUG:...How do you balance speaking to the fans and giving them what they want, but also trying to give something to those people who have never heard about that film before?
JN: ... You have to make sure that your original fan base is satisfied first, and that’s where I think we go out of our way. If you are doing a collector’s edition of THE FOG, what can you do to make sure that a FOG fan who has seen this movie for thirty years is going to appreciate it? As far as new people to the table, we think that the positive response to these titles brings in those younger people that see the veterans of horror films buzzing around and they are like “what is this film?” We use newly designed art work on our collector’s edition, which sometimes has a comic book approach or a fun kind of fresh remixed feel to a classic.
BUG: I was going to ask you guys about the covers. Where do you guys find the artists, and where do you come up with the imagery?
CM: I’m a big fan of the Mondo posters that they do. I think that stuff is just great, and that was really where the inspiration came from. A lot of people were like “They just did what Arrow does over in the UK.” Well actually, that wasn’t even who I was thinking of at the time, it was Mondo, and I just started looking for artists that I really liked and thought were really talented and that’s how we got the slate of people that we use now.
JN: And we are bringing on some more, too. We’ve had artists contact us. We get a majority of positive on this stuff. We do have, I would say, five percent of people, hopefully less, that are just more vocal that no matter what new artwork we do, they’re just like “just stick with the original” and, you know, we give them that option.
CM: Studios don’t.
JN: Studios totally don’t, but we know that as fans ourselves, yes a new design attracts, it refreshes, it remixes the title so to speak, but on a reverse rack there’s an original poster with what you saw either on the video shelves or what you saw in the theater back in 1982 or whatever. That’s important to a collector.
BUG: And sometimes those old video releases had multiple covers as well. I’m thinking of THE BURNING, and I can think of almost three of them that they had, the shadow, the painted cover, a romance novel looking cover as well...
JN: Yeah, I mean, we try to keep as purists to that. Believe me, when we are getting the design and we are looking at it there are taglines and things where I’m like “Okay, you’ve got to keep it like this or fans are going to knock it.” We are very sensitive and the fans are very passionate and sensitive on it. I mean, these are movies that they love.
CM: I think some of the fans also scour the artwork when we put it up to find stuff. It was Q, somebody noticed that we had spelled something wrong on the current cover.
JN: But it was on the original poster that way, too. That’s the whole thing. There will be grammatical errors that a copywriter will try to change and it’s like “No, that’s how it was on the other poster. I know that’s not how it’s supposed to be, but let’s try to keep it here and see what happens.” I mean, we try our best to try and accommodate and make sure that at the end of the day when somebody is plunking down their twenty dollars or so for one of our BluRays that they are coming home and they are looking at it and they are enjoying it and displaying it.
Interesting.
At least to me it is.
Just more affirmation of both how uninformed most people are and how fanatical fans are.
They even want the imperfections reproduced. And they wanna show off their faux antiques. Crazy, but true.
The interview further goes on to discuss how invaluable ADDITIONAL material and interviews are to marketers further and further down the road when they're marketing to the true hard core collectors that MUST have THE authoritative COMPLETE set of everything about your film.
So, with this in mind, make your film (as I said, the easy part), collect more material about the film's production than the film itself even contains (probably by a factor of four to ten times), winnow out the most immediately marketable extra's for your own film DVD+extras for your crowdfunding campaign's "next level" up from just the base DVD only, and hold that pile of bounty for a rainy day.
After ten years of building and maintaining your film's fan base some distributor may email you asking if you have any MORE material your fans haven't seen yet.
And it just so happens that there is.
But you only mete out another 30min worth of material.
Sh!t. It's a good enough plan for Apple iPhones and their incremental improvements.
Gopherit! If they can do it... !
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