dianafilms

Tuesday Tao of the Day

Find a job you love and you'll never work a day in your life.

Confucius

Film Incentives and Production Activity Map (US based)

Well, apparently the site where the interactive map was living is now Kaput. Sorry guys, but hey, here's a link with more updated information, again, only helpful for planning a US based production: http://www.ncsl.org/Portals/1/Documents/fiscal/2014FilmIncentivePrograms.pdf

this is a pretty handy tool brought to you by Credit Scouts

Big question about Branding, positioning for Start Ups

hey start-ups, do you want to build tools for your community

or

do you want to build a community around your tools?

Do you want to position your brand as a resource and a place to grow and co-create a vision, or do you just want to have people buy your stuff? 

Why not be a resource that sells good stuff, not just your own stuff, but generally good stuff? In the age of the curator, its just as much about having good taste (an eye for talent and good products) as it is about being in good company.  Its about D.I.Y. and becoming increasingly more about D.I.W.O.

How else to we filter through the massive information overload, we rely on curators and tastemakers, we rely on our friends.  So while you might be building a brand, now you're building it with and for others and what they say and do on your site matters more than ever. 

Handing over part of your brand story to your end users empowers and inspires everyone, and who knows what kinds of ideas you will be able to put forth, together.  New mantra for brands: Don't hesitate to collaborate...

So, don't be a tool, be a resource who shares tools, information and is there to be of service to a community. 

Do you really need a business plan?

I always thought so, at least it gave the project a structure to work from and a game plan for other colaborators to follow and contribute to. Apparently, unless you're looking for independent financing, you don't really need one.  Still, I'm kind of fond of having a document that we can shape together as we build a world around the script/story, it gives us a place to plan, build and structure.

 

When You Don't Need a Film Business Plan - Baseline Intelligence.

Advice to the budding documentarian

I just answered a question posted by a colleague who is working on her first documentary and I thought this would be useful to some of the folks who visit here as well.  The text is below.

Hey Sabrina,

Great question and open to many answers.  I'll stick to some process oriented bits of guidance:

1) Write a master proposal that you can tailor for different grants and project phases.

i.e. some grantmakers only fund development, others prefer to fund projects at the finishing phase.

 

2) Build a community around your project, find people who want to support you and who would benefit from seeing the film.

         a) Reaching out to this amazing group is a good start, also check out Doculink and folks from IDFA, The Flaherty Seminar

         b) When I think of people who benefit from the film, I think of people who are very familiar with the subject, issues you're dealing with, groups are good for feedback as well as support.

         c) Brush up on Copyright rules, particularly Fair Use law so you can quickly decide which footage you can afford to license, and which footage you can go ahead an use because it falls under fair use guidelines within the specific context of your film. Fair Use Guidelines

 

3) Find a few mentors who can coach you through your various growth phases: 

         a) One type of great advisor is someone who has made many docs before, and will be able to help you make smarter mistakes, LOL. 

         b) Another key advisor group you'll need are the people who are subject matter experts.  

 

4) Once you have a clear roadmap for the film, you've identified your target audience; it’s a good idea to make a realistic assessment of who would fund your project.  A great place to start is the Foundation Library, while you're doing that you can also explore indiegogo and kickstarter and build an online campaign for your development phase.  That is the hardest phase to fund since there's not much more than an idea to demonstrate. If you've made a trailer that closely matches your vision and intentions you can create a compelling case and make that idea more tangible as well as showing your ability to craft a good story.

 

Hope this advice is helpful to you.

Patience, perseverance and persistence,

Every day, just move the project forward a little. 

Make a phone call, send an email, do a little research, write up a pitch document when you're good and fired up.  Take risks, make foolish choices and give yourself permission to make mistakes.

You'll get there.

Warmly,

Francesca

LOVE

Keep the focus on the story, enjoy the work, respect the audience and most of all, find joy in the doing, in the working. Make art in the spirit of generosity. Kvell* because of the community y/our project created, think of all the careers you're supporting and the jobs you're creating.  You're very fortunate!

If you can, allow yourself to fall in love with it (the creative process), just a little.  That bounce in your step and that joy is contagious, that top down happy thing has its own momentum and inteligence.  It makes good projects great and difficulties bearable.

* Yiddish expression from expressing joy at the success of others

excerpt from: Notes to New Producers
© Francesca Prada All Rights Reserved 2010

Advice to the budding producer

Recently I was clearing out my mailbox and spotted this little bit of very simple advice I once gave to a consulting client who was busily shaping her first film:

"the real role of producer is leadership, its as much about who you hire as it is about how you set the tone for everyone else. If you're calm and evenhanded, everyone else will be too, ideally, its a subtle thing to do but it helps.

Also, if during the shoot you have the ability to be at least two weeks ahead of everyone in terms of all the things that need to be ready (money, deliverables to funders/backers, contracts, crew, gear, travel, maybe even the food detail needs to covered by you, and who knows what else lands on your plate?)

Sure, you'll have the thorough check lists to double check everyone's work, and because you're ahead of everyone you can handle anything that comes up during production and in post. Since you've planned ahead and you're ready, you'll be fine no matter what comes up. If you can't fix it, you will know (or you'll find out) who can. After the shoot starts, its about staying awake and open to the opportunity and the challenge of doing the best with what you've been given. 

Its all about showing up, accountability and follow through. Ultimately, the producer is responsible for everything that happens from the moment you sign on (and sometimes before.) Its about taking care of the talented people you surround yourself with, the people who cary out the tasks. When you're managing them, its you putting the right resources into play on their behalf, at the right time and the right place, so really you're facilitating their work as well. Mistakes will be made, so do your best make good ones and quickly deal with the not so good ones.

Here's the bullseye: As a producer you're always in the service of the story, the director, and advocating on behalf of the cast & crew.

ok, stay transparent and lead on, trust the process and put in safety nets so that everyone is better able to take the smart risks that make good films into great films.

go, Francesca

 

Customer Service as a form of Audience Engagement & The New Mail Room

I'm just curious about how people will be doing customer service in the future since its another possible place for brand democracy and consumer-co-ownership. I was talking with a friend this morning about customer service in web 2.0, talking about a new company getsatisfaction.com and how they are seeking to unite audiences and companies to tackle customer support together and hopefully get the companies to improve products/services/etc... Its a form of brand messaging that is subtle and if handled well can do far more for a company in terms of loyalty and brand positioning. 

Currently, Twitter has become a strategy for most corps these days looking to do quick updates and customer feedback and most of these tweets come from social media interns. Although Twitter is currently dominating the next wave of customer support, it seems as though getsatisfaction.com goes deeper and is potentially poised to be more effective or at the very least enhance what is being currently tweeted.

Social Media interns are essentially becoming the dead letter office and tweeting back and forth handling the editorial voice for the co when it comes to audience engagement at the web 2.0 level.
Is the social media intern gig the new mailroom for the next 20 years or so?

I have a feeling I answered my own question.

What is the fastest way for someone new to the workforce to learn the ins and outs of a company? They have to write about it, so they better know what they are talking about. Much as a mailroom assistant at an agency would need to understand who does what and where as well as what the politics are about, a social media intern needs to learn all they can about the company, the internal workings and what the message to the audience needs to be in order to keep to the strategy and drive consumer/audience participation-engagement. 

(c) Francesca Prada 2010

Social media breakdown

What Does a Producer Do? 9 Observations on the Biz's Most Misunderstood Job

What Does a Producer Do? by Andy Lauer

Using the question “What does a producer do?” as a launching point, four producers got together last week during the LA Film Festival to participate in a lunch time conversation about their work and what it took to bring their respective films to the festival.

The panel, moderated by LA Times entertainment writer John Horn, included “Hollywood, je t’aime” producer Charles Herman-Wurmfeld, “Branson” producer and director Brent Meeske, “Public Enemies” producer Kevin Misher, and Kristen Tucker, actress and producer of “Harmony and Me.”

The discussion touched on the challenges of producing movies during a recession, the differences between producing studio and independent films, the role of actors in getting a project financed, and common misconceptions about what a producer does. Here are some of the observations that each participant had to share:

1. Kevin Misher on how the job of a studio producer has evolved in the last 5-10 years.
Observation: Due to the recession, studio producers are having to look increasingly to outside financing to get their projects made.
“Obviously in tough economic times it’s more difficult to find money to finance a script. So heretofore as a studio-based producer I only used to go to the studios to find financing. I think now it runs the gamut in terms of where you look... Now I think studio based producers are no different [from independent producers] in that, though there’s less independent money than there was a year or two ago, there are still independent studios and financiers who you now go to as a regular course of action to find financing for both your development and your production.”

2. Kevin Misher on how the job of a studio producer has evolved in the last 5-10 years, continued.
Observation: Financiers are more interested in giving money to a project based on the stars attached to it rather than the script or concept.
“People used to be much more prone to invest in a notion or an idea that you might have if you had a writer who they could recognize, or read a script and that they recognized had a certain level of quality and if the idea registered as a good idea. Right now, at least in the studio world, and even in the independent world, they’re much more keen to know who’s going to star in it ahead of just investing in an idea. And that to me is the most frustrating thing because when I was a studio executive I would never want any actor attachments on anything ever, because then I was stuck with one actor and you could never actually get rid of that actor if they went off to do three other movies or weren’t happy with the material. And you never had any flexibility on the material. So I was much more prone, and still am, towards investing in an idea that I respond to and then putting it together when you see fit and when it’s ready and having as many options ahead of you as possible because, ultimately, that’s producing: sort of winnowing around every opportunity possible.”

3. Charles Herman-Wurmfeld on selecting actors for low-budget movies.
Observation: Get creative with casting and utilize people you know.
“Especially for small movies, for which its very difficult to command movie star talent, I’m interested in a conversation that includes, as we do in 'Hollywood, je t’aime,' the truth that there are many more movie stars out there than we have ever heard of. Meaning, look around you and really, really understand when there’s someone in your immediate vicinity, friends, family, the person at the bakery where you buy your coffee in the morning who maybe has something exceptional... I think that we can add an uncommon value to our project by discovering those people.”

4. Kristen Tucker on her experience as a first-time producer working on a small, independent film.
Observation: Once a film has wrapped, the producer’s work often just begins.
“I was really just focused on making the film and finishing the film. And I felt really wonderful when we locked. That was a really great feeling. And being the sole producer of a low-budget, independent film, I didn’t realize how much work there was after that and how much money we still needed as far as marketing and festivals and finding distribution, web design and things of that nature. It kind of kept going and I wasn’t anticipating that.”

5. Kevin Misher on the obligation the producer has to the investors.
Observation: The producer has to balance the creative ambitions of a director with what an audience will pay to see.
“At some point if you ask for money that is disproportionate to what you can return to the investor, you’re going to stop being able to make movies. So, while you have to be very protective of the creative vision of a director or the creative goal you see for yourself, you do have to be responsible to the ultimate audience that’s out there and that’s part of the value you bring as a producer...making sure you know what the audience is and that the money that you’re given, you can bring back that return on investment to people who have placed that bet essentially and originally on you... And it’s your word. And ultimately your word sits on celluloid or video and it’s there to be seen and valued by other people.”

—continued on page 2—

6. Charles Herman-Wurmfeld on the idea of basing a project on a basic, marketable concept, which drives many Hollywood films.
Observation: Ideally, creative ambition should precede concerns about marketability.
“To get your words together in relation to story is an invaluable service to yourself and to your fellow story-tellers as filmmakers so on that level I think a concept is a good idea, like the DNA of your project. But I am also not really interested in just servicing a concept just because it’s commercial. Specifically, 'Hollywood, je t’aime' is very directly not commercial. Jason’s [Jason Bushman, the director] vision of the script was to tell a story of gay men that was not accommodating in any way a more hetero-cultural vision of what gay people are… So...I think the budget needed to be tailored to make sure we didn’t produce something that we could not return on. On that level I think we accommodated our market because we did a little research and found out what kind of space we thought we would land in around this time, when offers were being made and we tried to reverse engineer our budget all the way backwards and…make something that we could shoot in our home and our backyard and neighborhood where we lived, utilizing movie stars that we had discovered and that was our conceptual universe.”

7. Brent Meeske on the qualities it takes to be a successful producer.
Observation: The ability to maintain interpersonal relationships is one of the most important skills a producer must have.
“I would say the most important tool is the ability to maintain interpersonal relationships… That’s probably the one thing I spent the most time doing, whether with the people of Branson, Missouri or with my individual characters. And that means maintaining a relationship over three and a half years when I disappear for six months at a time or if it’s with Jack Black, who I went to high school with 23 years ago, maintaining that relationship, staying present, and being in the position at the right time to ask for that favor, ask for that meeting. If I had to boil it down to one job it’d be that: maintaining relationships, no matter who it’s with."

8. Kristen Tucker on distributing an independent film.
Observation: Don't shy away from trying alternative distribution models.
“I think it’s really good that there are so many outlets now and it seems to be evolving. It’s really exciting, especially for an independent filmmaker. We took our last film on a progressive distribution tour… These guys got in a van and they drove our film from city to city around the country, kind of like a band does… I think it’s really important to learn about all of your options and think about what’s really best for your film and how to really reach the audiences before making any decisions.”

9. Kevin Misher on the question, “What does a producer do?”
Observation: Well...everything.
"I think the producer does everything. And it only stops when you meet somebody who is hired to do a certain role or assigned to do a certain role that you have absolute confidence in. Even with that you’re involved in a collaborative process but if somebody doesn’t do their job well you’re either going to fire them or start doing their job for them… So hopefully you hire really well, you collaborate with people you respect and who share a singular vision because the other thing a producer does is set the track that you’re rolling on and have a vision of what it’s supposed to look like on the other side of the field. And if you don’t do that and you can’t impart that to people or hire people who share that vision or are going to enhance that vision, you haven’t really done your job… So I think soup to nuts, you’re involved.”