Hi Producers and Distributor,
I genuinely want to ask and learn about your process of producing a film and distributing the film may its feature or short one? How producers works and their workflow? How a you makes money with producing films and yeah how about the financing part?
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I am just about to take one of these Stage 32 courses to learn more about these things for features. The short film I made this year, I've done the festival circuit to get the word out for now. I have all those questions you do!
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It depends on what your expectations are. Most short films are not going to make you money. If you have a big name attached, you may be lucky to find short distribution — which again, is fairly rare.
Financing can happen in a couple of ways, personal funds, crowdsourcing, and investors who may believe in you. But again, you want to walk in with the expectation for you — and them — that there will likely not be a ROI. They need to believe in you and the vision.
Distribution is usually self distributed after festivals in my experiences. You might partner with someone with someone like ShortsTV which specializes in distribution of shorts, or an online platform like Omeleto that reaches a large audience. But again, neither is likely to get your money back.
All of that is to say — make the budget sensible so this doesn’t matter, and hopefully, you can utilize festivals and platforms to build an audience and your calling card
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Xochi Blymyer My questions are mostly for feature one. James Kicklighter Yeah indeed I have the experience with short film. I myself worked as producer form my short films and I know bit of short films. I wanted to learned mostly about feature film.
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Hi Xahid Khan - I highly recommend Clay Liford's upcoming Stage 32 class on the entire independent feature film process. Clay is a wealth of experience and information. Here's a link so you can check it out: https://www.stage32.com/classes/Stage-32-4-Part-Class-The-Filmmakers-Pro...
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Hi Xahid Khan -
While Short Films can make money, it's not likely to be enough to talk about. Regarding features, the secret to actually making back your budget is to do one for as cheap as possible and make it look like it cost more.
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My college classmate is a DGA union director for past 15+ years. He used his short film to parlay to paying jobs which lead to joining DGA. The shorts were his audition reel to show corporate employers he is hirable.