Jon Reiss

7 Deadly Sins of Self-Distribution Hot Docs Presentation and Notes from the Forum

Earlier in the month, I had the pleasure to present and attend Hot Docs.   As I am pitching a few new projects to direct and produce, I was especially interested in attending the Forum (5 notes of pitching to forums below).

But first – I want to share the presentation that Sonja Henrici of the Scottish Documentary Institute and I did at Hot Docs – The Seven Deadly Sins of Self Distribution.  (This presentation includes an introduction to the PESO concept.)

To be honest there are so many mistakes that filmmakers make, it was hard to narrow it down to seven!  Here is what we decided on:
Sin #1: Not Having a Strategy that is Appropriate for Your Film

Sin #2: Don’t Rely on Distributors to Save You

Sin #3: Not Knowing Your Audience

Sin #4: Not Knowing the Language of Marketing

Sin #5: Not Engaging Organizations Early Enough

Sin #6: Thinking Organic Social Media Is All You Need

Sin #7: Not Collecting Data From A Variety of Sources

It was very informative to watch this year’s pitches.  Twice Colonized (a really wonderful pitch and potential film) won the Hot Docs Forum Pitch Prize. But the IFP Filmmaker Lab project Socks on Fire: Uncle John and the Copper Headed Water Rattlers won the Cuban Hat Award.  Here are 5 takeaways:

1.  The amount of money given to projects that are pitched has definitely declined in recent years with nearly no project receiving a verbal commitment of money from any of the broadcasts.  Instead there was a lot of “we are interested, let’s talk”.  There was even a panel outside of the forum on whether pitch forums are still useful.  However some of those conversations did lead to some deals being made. Pitching at the Forum does the service of raising the profile of your project on the international documentary stage.

2.  You need both an effective pitch and an effective video.  While this seems to be a no-brainer I was surprised by a number of projects that either had an amazing pitch, but the video was unfocused, or the other way around.

3.  Have a good logline.  It was interesting that the pitches that didn’t have a concise logline that succinctly said what the film was about, had the less focused verbal pitches.  A good logline is a way to figure out whether you really know what your film is about and can convey it to others.

4.   Team work.  The panel was very impressed by a presentation in which the team was very practiced and took turns nearly every third sentence in conveying the pitch.  They commented on how this indicated that the team worked well together.  Personally I though it made the pitch a little too rehearsed – but it was interesting to see its strong effect on the panel.

5.  Let the funders talk.  Each project only has 15-20 minutes with 7 minutes alloted for the pitch (verbal and video).  Some filmmakers spent a long time answering questions beyond what was needed, using up valuable reaction time from the panelists and in fact only getting a few responses in the limited time.  Keep your comments pithy and to the point!

The Power of Social Advertising A Case Study on 3100:RUN AND BECOME

I recently sat down with documentary filmmaker, Sanjay Rawal (Food Chains, Challenging Impossibility), to discuss the release of his latest film 3100: RUN AND BECOME.  The film is a documentary about endurance and determination which follows participants in the world’s longest certified running race – the Self-Transcendence 3100 Miler – as they attempt to shatter boundaries of human possibility. In terms of getting one’s film out into the world, Sanjay is one of the savviest filmmakers I know.  Since 3100: Run and Become has such a potent niche audience, Sanjay decided that it made sense to pursue a hybrid strategy for this release.  What Sanjay wanted to discuss the most – and what he (and I) feel is most relevant for other filmmakers is how he used social advertising to promote the release.

Release background:  3100 Run and Become had its festival premiere at Illuminate in May 2018 and was released theatrically in August of 2018. The film was rolled out to 15 markets over 12 weeks, culminating in New York City (during the marathon) and Los Angeles. 3100 was released on TVOD in the US and Canada in December of 2018 with international sales commencing in January of 2019.

Sanjay started our conversation pointing out the difficulties of getting “earned media” in today’s media environment. As a recap, ”earned media” is content about your film that is created by someone else on other people’s platforms. Reviews by reviewers, feature stories or audience reviews.  Traditionally, earned media is what has driven and still drives much of more commercial independent film releases.

But with today’s crowded media landscape, getting this coverage is harder and harder.  Smaller market papers are eliminating film departments and instead are dependent on syndication from a few major sources. Even new digital media companies are slowing down or laying people off (see Buzz Feed).

Finally, Sanjay noted that traditional media is not setup for slow rollouts of films that benefit many independent releases.  Media outlets still favor the large nationwide release.

The flip side of this phenomena is that now it is possible via social advertising to track your ROI (Return on Investment).  You are also able to (and need to) use social advertising to promote the earned media that you are able to achieve and promote your own owned media (the media you control and create) through shared media (social media channels and organizations).

Now, for $1 you can get marketing impressions which never would have been possible in the traditional space!

I asked Sanjay to break down some specifics with his film 3100: RUN AND BECOME so we could get a realistic view into how targeted ad spend on social advertising can help your campaign.

First, his film did get some publicity/earned media with online publications such as “Outside Magazine.” But unfortunately what they learned was even though they had some great placements, his team still had to spend money to amplify those images and get the media media out to audiences.  Sanjay noted that with the decline of print publications, many articles get lost in the shuffle.  People used to read magazines cover to cover which would introduce them to smaller stories, but now articles need to be promoted in order to get eyeballs.  So even if you do get press – you should be pushing that out through targeted ads (and earned media makes one of the strongest ads since it is validation from a known source).

To aid in tracking ROI you should embed a Facebook Pixel into your website’s HTML code, which will then track traffic from Facebook to your website. Facebook will begin creating a profile of this engaged audience that’s much deeper than what you could select for (ie, age, sex, location). The Pixel aggregates the entire history of this small set of users to form a target profile, which you can multiply through Facebook look-alike audiences.  Sanjay found that with as little as $1500 in ad spend, Facebook was able to develop a look-alike audience in the millions.  This wasn’t totally perfect all the time, in some cities it worked – in other cities they would have to add audience metrics to hone the results.

You need to also decide what you want your call to action (CTA) to be in the platform as well as what you want the ad to accomplish.  If you are in the wide part of the audience gathering/awareness funnel and you want views,  FB knows people who will watch.  If you want the audience to click on a link – you specify that in the Facebook ad manager etc.   If you want people to watch it on Amazon, make sure you have a button in your ad that goes straight to Amazon.  For their film trailer, they got over 750,000 views on Facebook.   Remember you have to build awareness before you can convert.  Often it takes people seeing an ad 3-10 times before they act.  That action may not be a purchase, but it might be an add to watchlist, cue, etc.

As noted above you should of course create your own media (owned media).  A trailer is no longer enough.  You not only need trailers for different audience segments, but you need this content in a variety of lengths.  Here are some of Sanjay’s owned media for 3100 with some of the metrics:

https://vimeo.com/306098920
This had a 45 cent cost per click thru to our iTunes/Amazon page, with about 200,000 impressions

When they chose to be billed by 10 second video view, impressions went up and their our cost per video view was 4 cents each.

This was highly targeted to people most likely identifiable as Navajo:
https://vimeo.com/306098004

Here’s the 15 second Instagram ad (note the vertical orientation): https://www.dropbox.com/s/mz7eeu6mbrjlb88/TRAILER%2015%20sec%20IG%20CM%20quote_1.mp4?dl=0

This had a 20 cent cost per click thru for about 300,000 impressions. FB now has a feature that only bills you if the whole video is viewed.

Facebook vs. Instagram. Facebook will always promote its newest tool.  When the 3100 campaign was running, Facebook was promoting Instagram Stories and they realized that Stories were outperforming Instagram Ads, which outperformed Facebook ads. In the end, they pulled most of their money from Facebook Ads and put directly into Insta Stories.

You can geo-target audiences as well as target specific demographics based on what audiences like in Facebook.  For instance they were able to target people who like Navajo Times, geo-targeted to northern Arizona.  The film did a $5,000 opening box office in Flagstaff, Arizona – which is a lot for Flagstaff Arizona.  They targeted only the cities they were playing in avoiding a large national spend.   They also targeted cities for theatrical release based on their relative success of their ads.  They nixed some cities where their ads were not performing well at all.  Because of their strategy and tactic, they were held over in every city they played in except NYC.

3100:RUN AND BECOME was in theatres from August 18th to November 17th on a rolling basis. In the end, their theatrical release earned $80,000 in gross. $65,000 of this was trackable back to their ad spend.  This resulted in a net of $37,000.   The total costs of booking, publicity, ads for the theatrical was approximately $47,000.  As a result they lost $10K on their theatrical but more than made it up in digital.

The film was then released digitally Dec. 12th entirely on transactional platforms such as iTunes and Amazon.  They’ve discovered their sales are 8 to 9 times more on Amazon than on iTunes, so, naturally they’ve redirected all of their click thru advertising to Amazon. With the digital release they are taking roughly 30% of their net and spending it on advertising.  Roughly 25% of that spend is going to Facebook and 75% going to Instagram.

Sanjay had a successful film release by navigating the ever-changing social media advertising space and using a custom crafted distribution strategy. I hope you find his experience helpful as you begin developing your own marketing and distribution strategy!

Cheers!

Jon.

A BITTER MESSAGE OF HOPELESS GRIEF SCREENS AT BERLINALE

This week I will be traveling to Berlin Germany to attend the screenings of my 1988 short film, A Bitter Message of Hopeless Grief. The film was selected to screen in the 40th edition of the Panorama section of the Berlin Film Festival, a section that has always included films with the intention to inspire, provoke, and challenge the audience. To celebrate the 40th anniversary, the festival will be screening 40 past films as a reflection program.

A Bitter Message of Hopeless Grief is a fractured narrative featuring large anthropomorphic robots living in their own fictional world devoid of humankind, the machines act out scenarios of perpetual torment, exasperated consumption and tragic recognition. The film is a fast paced glimpse into the disturbing nightmare of machine psychology.

During the 1980’s I worked closely with Survival Research Laboratories (SRL) directing four documentaries of their live performances in addition to  A Bitter Message of Hopeless Grief.  This film was an outgrowth of that relationship. The founder of SRL,  Mark Pauline, and I wanted to create a fiction film using the machines to go beyond the restraints of documentation and the traditional utilization of non-human characters in narrative cinema.

For the original shooting we were able to get access to an enormous warehouse in San Francisco which enabled us to create the incredibly large sets (15 feet high – 30-60 feet wide) in order to have enough space to film the machines, some standing 10 feet tall.

In 1988-89, Bitter Message had a nice festival run,  in addition to Berlin, it also screened at Sundance, New Directors New Films, San Francisco International, Chicago International, Seattle, Cleveland, Edinburgh, Sao Paolo and more.

I have had great fun these last few months restoring the original 16mm mono film to a beautifully remastered 4K DCP with a 5.1 mix. I had tried doing a conventional telecine from the interpositive but it didn’t look as good as I remembered. Ironically for those of you who remember 16mm finishing – I kept the interpositive IP and dup negative DN in pristine shape because back in the day – this is what you needed for telecine and reprints.  However when I brought the IP and DN in for the restoration. The people at Roundabout said “this is ok – but don’t you have the original cut negative?” I started to freak a bit since I hadn’t seen the negative in some years. After much digging we found them in my office attic. I was a bit nervous about the potential for heat damage but when they put the negative on the scanner it looked exactly the same as 30 years ago. Bryan McMahan did an amazing job restoring the color at Roundabout.

For the sound – we had tried remixing the film a number of years ago but were not able to find all the original “voices” of the machines. Matt Heckert and Naut Humon from Rhythm & Noise did an amazing job with the original soundtrack – but it only existed as mono.  We fortunately found a 2” multi-track tape that had all the original sounds from the original session. I teach part time at Cal Arts and I was able to get Judy Kim, a super talented Cal Arts grad student to not only reconstitute the complicated sound edit but to create a 5.1 mix as well.  I was then lucky enough to have Aidan Reynolds who teaches sound at Cal Arts do the final mix on their stage.

I can’t wait to see the “new” A Bitter Message of Hopeless Grief play in Berlin! The film will screen on February 13th at 11am and February 14th at 7:15pm. You can learn more about the Panorama 40 section on the festival’s website: https://www.berlinale.de/en/presse/pressemitteilungen/alle/Alle-Detail_46996.html

Film Restoration by
Post Services Provided by ROUNDABOUT ENTERTAINMENT INC.
Digital Intermediate Colorist BRYAN MCMAHAN
Digital Intermediate Editor VAHE GIRAGOL
Data Management RENE CLARK, STEPHEN HERNANDEZ, JOSHUA GOMEZ
Film Scanning JAMES ATKINS
Audio Restoration and 5.1 Mix
Re-recording Mixer and Additional Sound Editing: Judy Kim
Audio Restoration and Additional Sound Editing: Stephan Wunderlich
Additional Re-recording Mix: Aidan Reynolds
Mixed at California Institute of the Arts
COPYRIGHT. Reiss/S.R.L 1988-2018

Cheers!

Jon.

The Gate – 2018 Case Study

2018 – A Year in a Glimpse

This last year has been busy, busy, busy!    Hot off the presses – we are super excited that one of the projects we have been acting as consulting producer and distribution advisor on, Stuart Swezey’s film debut Desolation Center, just got selected for its US Premiere at Slamdance 2019 following a healthy 2018 international run including CPH:DOX, Sheffield International Doc Fest, Cork, Docx, Dokufest, Indie Lisboa, and more. The feature doc is about a series of Reagan-era guerrilla punk and industrial desert happenings in Southern California which are now recognized as the inspirations for Burning Man, Lollapalooza, and Coachella. Interviews and rare performance footage of Sonic Youth, Minutemen, Meat Puppets, Swans and more.

In addition we worked with our first non-film non-profit Next7.org created by one of the co-founders of Food Democracy Now.  We not only advised and helped with the launch of Next7.org but helped run their first campaign Protect Organic.

Not to mention running the marketing and distribution campaigns for a number of other films this year:

Father’s Kingdom, directed by Lenny Feinberg, about the little know civil rights leader Father Divine who declared himself god. 

Generation Zapped, directed by Sabine el Gemayel, on the dangers of cell phone and wifi radiation.

American Visionary, directed by Karen Everett, about the mother of conscious evolution Barbara Marx Hubbard.

The Gate: Dawn of the Baha’i Faith, directed by Bob Hercules, about the origins of the Baha’i faith.

A Case Study The Gate: Dawn of the Baha’i Faith

For the last 6 months, our company has been managing the global release for the film The Gate: Dawn of the Baha’i Faith, directed by Peabody Award winner Bob Hercules. The release premiered in LA and Chicago followed by broadcasts on ABC affiliates rolling through July.  It was a particularly intense release because we weren’t able to start marketing it until the first week of April and it wasn’t finished until the end of April.   Hybrid Cinema managed the entire campaign including all marketing, social media, outreach and screenings, advertising, creation of all marketing elements (website, key art, trailer and lots of extra video content), publicity.  We also handled all distribution: screenings, broadcast, digital and DVD.

I want to share the beginnings of our case study on this project:

Goals and Strategy – The Gate

I know I am a broken record on this – but you can’t release a film (or any project) without knowing your goal(s).   With this film, the most important goal was to spread awareness for the film and the Baha’i faith to both Baha’i and non-Baha’is. Additionally, this film had a unique secondary goal, to build an engaged core fanbase that could be carried to planned future projects, as the production company plans to produce and release three more films. These two goals included strategic moves that of course overlap. Over the next few sections, I will quickly breakdown our work overview.

Distribution – The Gate

The film started with large premieres in Chicago and Los Angeles, quickly followed by the launch of the ABC broadcasts in May, that eventually reached between 2-3 million people. Although having the public broadcast so front-loaded might narrow more traditional distribution avenues (festivals and films sales) – and create all kinds of windowing problems and other difficulties – it was a key component in achieving the main goal of audience reach.  It is hard to argue with the power of traditional broadcast.

Even though the film was available for free – we found that the audience still wanted to book the film for community screenings – which 6 months later still continue.  We have sold over 450 screening licenses in over 20 different countries. All of these sales not only funnelled into our database but we strongly encouraged the screenings organizers to use our Eventbrite account which gave us access to the email addresses of all who signed up for the screenings.    We were able to track the results of our Facebook advertising through the sales on Eventbrite so we could target ads to screenings that needed a bit of help. (I’m not saying I love Eventbrite – but it has tools that are helpful – I am looking for a better platform for ticket sales). Finally we were able to survey the hosts and attendees which gave us important information for our ROI.  

We eventually started selling the film off the proprietary website and eventually transactionally on iTunes, Amazon etc. (We have had a very good experience with Distribber but we are going direct to Amazon through Prime Direct).  There will be a blog post coming about why it is still important to sell from your own website even if you aren’t building an email list.

Marketing – The Gate

Our marketing was a blend of outreach, social, advertising,  publicity and content.

Outreach has had their hands full servicing the core audience’s screenings for the past number of months and we are just getting able now to expand into the wider interfaith community (hence the trip to the Parliament of World Religions – one of the largest interfaith gatherings in the world). We have also attended the largest Persian conference in the US as well as the Religious News Association conference.

We have had great success with the content/social media and social advertising part of the campaign.   Based on early test screenings, we knew that most audiences wanted to learn more about the Baha’i community today, as this film is primarily focused on the history of the Baha’i. With that new information in hand, we created a cross media campaign to broaden the scope of the project.   We shot additional material and brought on a content producer and editor creating over 40 new short pieces of content for social channels.

We quickly discovered that most of our audience was on Facebook and doubled down on that platform.  While our organic reach was very strong – Facebook is now a pay for play platform that does give you incredible targeting and measurement of your campaigns.  In our first six months we reached 14 million people through our Facebook page

Our 6 month social stats were off the charts: 12 million reached through organic and paid social an additional 6 million reached through advertising, 10,000 followers on Facebook, another 1500+ on Instagram, 300,000 100% views of our short form content and over 380,000 engagements (emojis/likes/comments/shares).   I’ll be diving deeper into this data – especially the ad component in further posts.

Short Wrap Up – The Gate:

Even at the midpoint of the release (we plan to expand SVOD in late 2018 or 2019 and we have a number of other broadcast opportunities in 2019), the film has reached a huge audience and continues to do so.  The film is coming out on Cable VOD (Comcast, Direct TV and Dish) and wide to to large retailers through Passion River on DVD in November. We are just starting the educational release through Outcast.

Hybrid Cinema News

A Busy November

This past month has been a whirlwind of travel! I kicked off November in Toronto from the 1st – 7th for the Parliament of World Religions (this was for one of our projects – but I am getting quite a few spiritually oriented projects lately).

Then it was on to NYC for November 8th-15th.  First at Doc NYC to deliver a “manifesto”on independent film releases and data as part of the DOC NYC: PRO Series on Tuesday the 13th  This is approximately nine years after my manifesto on hybrid distribution that I gave at CPH:DOX just prior to launching Think Outside the Box Office. (I still remember going over proofs in my Copenhagen hotel room).  While in New York, I was also helping to run the IFP Filmmaker Lab in Marketing and Distribution for first-time filmmakers.  This year’s lab was full of exciting and inspirational projects including: 

512 Hours, directed by Giannina La Salvia and Adina Istrate. For 512 hours, hundreds of thousands of visitors from around the world flocked to experience the latest exhibition by acclaimed performance artist, Marina Abramović.

Socks on Fire: Uncle John and the Copper Headed Water Rattlers, directed by Bo McGuire. Socks on Fire documents the fluidity of identity, personality, and performance in one particular place, after a failed poet returns home to Hokes Bluff, Alabama to discover that his aunt has locked his drag-queen uncle out of the family home.

Border South, directed by Raúl O. Paz Pastrana. Told against the backdrop of the North American migrant trail, Border South weaves together migrant stories from different vantage points.

The Burning Field, directed by Justin Weinrich. The Burning Field presents a unique portrait of life in an environmental wasteland through the eyes of four young people who live and work in Agbogbloshie, one of the largest unregulated E-waste dumps on earth.

Flood, directed by Katy Scoggin. In Flood, a jaded filmmaker convinces herself she can fix her strained relationship to her evangelical dad by writing a father-daughter screenplay with a happy ending.

The In Between, directed by Robie Flores. The In Between is a poetic ode to a greater reality of the border than the one portrayed on the news, offering a nuanced and intimate portrait of a place and its people at the heart of Mexican-American identity.

1982, directed by Oualid Mouaness, and edited by Sabine El Gemayel, director of Generation Zapped. In the narrative feature, 1982, an 11-year-old boy is determined to tell a girl in his class that he loves her but has trouble finding the courage to do so until the unexpected occurs; an air invasion reaches Beirut and the school is being evacuated. He gets even more determined.

Clementine, directed by Lara Jean Gallagher. In Clementine, a heartbroken woman steals away to her estranged lover’s lake house and becomes entangled with a teenage girl.

House of Hummingbird, directed by Bora Kim. Seoul, 1994 — In the year the Seongsu bridge collapsed, a teenage girl named Eunhee wanders the city searching for love.

Lost Bayou, directed by Brian C Miller Richard. After news of her mother’s death, a struggling addict ventures out into the Louisiana swampland to reconnect with her estranged “traiteur” (Cajun faith healer) father, only to discover he is hiding a troubling secret aboard his houseboat.

The DOC:NYC manifesto on data was the 2nd talk I am doing on this subject and not the last – stay tuned for more presentations as well as information coming through this newsletter and the updated blog. Sonja Henrici from the Scottish Documentary Institute and did a joint presentation on the importance of data for filmmakers at this year’s IDA Getting Real Conference in September.

Check back for our next blog when I breakdown a short case study for one of my current projects, The Gate: Dawn of the Baha’i Faith.