The Art of Film Funding
Discover the secrets to funding and creating successful indie films with The Art of Film Funding Podcast. Join Carole Dean, President of From the Heart Productions and author of The Art of Film Funding, and Heather Lenz, director of the award-winning documentary Kusama-Infinity, as they chat with top film industry pros. Get practical insider tips on crowdfunding, pitching, saving on budgets, marketing, hybrid distribution, and the latest in A.I. filmmaking. Whether you’re funding your first project or navigating new trends, this podcast has everything you need to succeed. Subscribe and let’s get your film funded!
The Art of Film Funding
Who is Your Film's Audience and How to Find Them
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Love Hope Radio. Now, in its second edition, Carol Dean's popular book, The Art of Film Funding, has 12 new chapters to cover all areas of film financing and how to avoid expensive pitfalls. Learn how to start with an idea and end with a trailer. How to make an ask for money. Create your story structure and your trailer. Legal advice, fair use, successful crowdfunding, how to ask for music rights, and what insurance you can't shoot without. Available on Amazon under Carol Dean and at FromTheHeart Productions.com. Hi, and welcome to the Art of Film Funding. I'm your co-host, Sarah Capan, along with Carol Dean, author of the best-selling book, The Art of Film Funding. Carol is also the founder and president of From the Heart Productions and the host of the show. Our guest, Sherry Candler, directs digital marketing strategy for the Film Collaborative, also known as TFC, which is a nonprofit film sales and distribution company. And she also consults with the TFC members on using social media to build audiences. She's also the co-author of a book with case studies for filmmakers called Selling Your Film Without Selling Your Soul, and regularly writes, speaks, and teaches creators about using social media. And it's really a great pleasure to have you with us, Sherry. And I know that Carol Dean is also very happy to have you with us. Carol, I know that you just joined us.
SPEAKER_06Yes, uh Sherry, I'm so happy to get to talk to you because I love your blogs. You give us all so much great information. Thank you for that.
SPEAKER_03Oh great. Well it's great to be talking to you too. Um that's my aim in writing the things that I write, either in a book or in a blog or doing these kind of um interviews where I can share as much information that I've learned and experienced with other people so that they can take some value from them.
SPEAKER_06Well, uh I uh teach uh a filmmaking class called intentional filmmakers, and I usually start off with marketing. And I uh tell you, I feel like if if I was on a stage uh and had them sitting in front of me, they'd be throwing rotten tomatoes at me because they don't want to hear it, Sherry.
SPEAKER_03I understand that this seems like the business thing that they don't really want to get involved in, but what I normally say to them is one, if you're planning on having a career uh beyond this one project that you're making, you need to pay attention to this because the part of show business is not just the show, it's also the business. And you want to get money to make your projects, you want people to see your projects, you want to be able to make other projects, you're going to have to face the marketing and distribution questions that are going to go with your project.
SPEAKER_06Well said. All right. Well, in reading one of your blogs, uh you said, in fact, there is almost no point in incurring the cost of making a film if there's no budget and concrete plan on how it will be released. So let's get into that right away. Let's start. Do you believe that people should have a marketing plan that's backed up by a strong budget?
SPEAKER_03Yes, and I believe that for all artists. I don't believe that we are all creating just for ourselves. Or it would just be a hobby, something that you put on the shelf and it's just for you to look at. I I think that most people who are listening to this podcast are interested in having people see their work. But that means you have to know what people you're talking about, who are you making your story for, because you won't be able to reach them if you don't know who they are. And that is really the basics of what a marketing plan is. It identifies the audience that you need to reach and how will you reach them and the budget you have to do that and connect your work with the with the audience that you hope will watch it and enjoy it and spend money to see it and tell other people about it. It's bad enough, really, that risk taking that you just bringing your vision into you know into a screen. Um and that's you know, hard work as it is to try and get that vision out clearly so that it accomplishes what you want to accomplish. But it's all for naught if you don't connect it with people who need to see it. And there's just so much competition these days for the audience of the film. You know, filmmaking has gotten cheaper, the equipment's gotten cheaper, the ability to edit it and to even to distribute it is much cheaper. But it also means so many more people are doing it. So we have this glut of content where there's just tons of it in the world, and it's very difficult to just release something and hope it does something for you. Um you can't just target this wide demographic, you know, women or men or even an age, you know, group, 18 to 35. When you were 18, you probably didn't think the same way a 35-year-old thought. So having that broad age range is not gonna help you. You need to know what exactly about your story is going to appeal to these people, no matter what sex they are or what age they are. There's got to be something at the heart of it, an emotional core of it, that you need to start from. And that comes into consideration for your script, for the dialogue, for the way the story is going to be edited, for the casting choices you make, for the visual elements like key art and the short clips and production stills that you're gonna use for releasing the film. You have to know these things very early in in advance so that you can set it all up during during the whole process of production, or you're gonna really be in trouble when you get to the end.
SPEAKER_06Absolutely, I totally agree. Well, I just wanted to uh follow up on something you said there about finding you have to know your market and find your market. So um the we I suggest that they take the keywords for their film, the um keywords for the audience for their film, and then Google those and start finding organizations to attach as um strategic alliances and also to look for um organizations or groups to join and then drive those people back to the website to sign up or opt-in box to get their names and begin to build your community around your film. Now, how do you what do you think on this?
SPEAKER_03Well, I think that's um one of the the keys, definitely. Uh first, you know, the aud uh audience identification would come from an interest group. So I don't I don't usually start with just keywords. I thought start with um, you know, what is at the heart of this story? Is this a romantic story? Is this an adventure story? Is this a coming of age story? Um, you know, what is it that's supposed to be attractive, not just genre-wise, but attractive to the kind of people who like this story? You know, and and do they like this story usually told by certain kinds of actors? Now they may be, you know, well-known actors, but they may you might think of, I d I can't afford, you know, um uh b um Bradley Cooper, but but I can find somebody who has some element about him that is likening to that, you know, that that I think my audience would be attracted to that quality of actor. You have to know this very early in advance, as as we said, as you're getting into the c casting process. But you also have to know what kind of books would my um target audience read, what kind of publications online, what kind of events would they go to during the year, even what kind of food would they eat, or where would they go on vacation, and why would they be attracted to those locations? Um, and so then you start to really break down and almost be able to visualize in front of you exactly what your key audience person would look like. And that will make it easier for you to know where to go. Now, of course, there are documentaries and other kinds of very niche content that have organizations and uh interest groups built up around them already, and so those make them easy to find, you know, online. And then there are other kinds of stories where there is no, you know, um uh coming-of-age drama hangout, you know, there's no place where people who like that kind of story go to find out more things about it. So that's gonna make it much more difficult for you to find that audience. And it just means that why are you attracted to that story? What is about you that wants to tell it? And start really identifying those things in yourself. Where do I like to hang out? What do I like to read? Where would I go on vacation? What would I wear to the premiere of the film if it wasn't mine? You know, um, and then you can start to find those communities where you would go online. And it will be much easier for you to embed in them because you are like them. It's very authentic and human rather than the advertising-based model that we've you know had for so many years, which is I make a film in secret and then I throw it out into the world and try to advertise my way into an audience. Hollywood still does that, very much so, but a low budget independent film cannot do that, will not have the funds to do that. So they can't even approach their filmmaking from that perspective.
SPEAKER_06Right. Okay, well said. All right, those are very interesting tips. Thank you so much for that. Now, let's go back to this marketing plan. So tell us some of the things that you would put in the marketing plan.
SPEAKER_03Right. So, like I said, I'm going to be answering the strategy, which is the who and the where. A lot of people get mixed up about strategy and they think, well, is it Facebook or Twitter? Those are all hows to a marketing strategy. First you have to know who you're going after, and you have to know where they live. You know, where are you going to find those people? And um, and then you're going to figure out how can I reach them? What tactics am I going to use to reach their attention and to keep their attention and to entice them enough to want to come and see the project when it's finished. So, you know, that will also include making decisions about what social networks you're going to use, what kind of story ideas you can pitch to the outlets that are going to reach your audience, what kind of advertising you're going to place, what's going to look like, where is it going to be. All those things come later. They come after you've already laid the foundation. And that's, I think the confusion comes from most of us as consumers, we see the how, but we don't see the decisions that are made on the who and the where. We don't really think about why am I seeing this ad or why am I seeing this news story in the publication that I normally read. It's because the person thought about it ahead of time and knew where they should place the story. So that's the the hardest part, I think, and and the part that I try to figure out for filmmakers is first you have to have a good foundation of your strategy before you can jump right into the how. So when I get filmmakers who say to me, Well, I have a Facebook page, and I go, Okay, so what's your general marketing strategy? I have a Facebook page. I'm like, yes. Um, but that's not that's not a strategy. You know, you have to have it all written out. So I usually uh do the research well ahead of time, write out the marketing plan, break out the marketing budget into the elements that will absolutely need to be used in general. And this is not an exhaustive list, but it would include things like a well-designed website that's gonna change slightly over time. There are two reasons for this. One, eventually you are going to have a function where you can sell directly to your audience, but you don't need that function when you're in pre-production. So you just need to work with a web designer to know that later on we're gonna turn that element of our site on, but I just want to have a placeholder from the start. To begin with, we're gonna do like a director's notebook, or we're gonna have some pictures that we're gonna show from the set, or we're gonna change or do Vine videos or whatever. So your website's gonna change as you go along in your production, but it's also because you don't want to have a static website. You don't, for search engine reasons, you need to have a constant basis of new material coming into the website so that the search engines will continue to rank you high in the search results. So you have to have a budget for that. You also need a hosting service for this website. You need an email service provider to capture the audience contact tales. You're gonna need short video clip editing. And I don't always recommend that somebody on your production team does that because most of the time those people are too close to the story and they don't really understand what the audience is looking for. They understand what they want it to say. So it's usually better to take that out of house and work with how is this going to appeal to the audience. But also, do you want to have a professional trailer edited? You're gonna need graphic design for key art, but also for advertising, for photo editing. You might want to make some memes, or you want to have cover photos for your Facebook page or your Twitter account or your Google Plus page. You're gonna need a publicist at some point, you need someone to handle the day-to-day community building and keeping the social sites growing and fed. You're gonna need festival submission fees, travel expenses, social advertising on sites like Facebook and Twitter because increasingly they're not free for businesses anymore, especially not Facebook. So you're gonna need to have some money set aside to do some promotional advertising. You might want to do other advertising like on mobile or on in newsletters. You may want to do a screening event, like a test screening, um, and then when you get into distribution, you're gonna need stuff like closed captioning, subtitling, DCP mastering, EO insurance, all these things that go into the marketing and distribution budget that most producers don't think about and don't realize until they get to the end of the to the production and they've spent up all their money and they go, Oh, uh, well, unless we find some kind of distribution, this thing's dead in the water because we don't have any way to put it out.
SPEAKER_06Incredible. Okay, well, let's go back. I've got some questions here on this budget. Um, key art, graphic design, cover, photos, that kind of thing. Right. Um what would would you budget, let's say that your budget is 250 to 300,000 for the film. And so the marketing, uh let's pretend that's the budget for the film. So what would we would be marketing for the um for these for this marketing uh side, would that be for the photos and the graphic design? How much would you put in there?
SPEAKER_03Well, uh, you know, a photographer, a professional photographer to come for three or four days on set could cost you a couple thousand dollars just to do the photography. Then you want to go back into the studio and clip it and and you know, retouch it, and you're gonna have a graphic designer doing that so they can figure out how to get the key art down, whether they want to use actual photos of your cast, or if they want to use atmospherics that were taken on uh while you're on set. Um, you know, good key art could cost you $5,000 to get that's a low budget price, actually, not anything near what a big studio would pay, uh, just to get the photos taken. Um in the past I've told people to to earmark a minimum of 10% of the production budget, but that got really misunderstood because people thought that I meant 10%'s enough. Like that's all they would put aside. And I said, no, no, no, no, that's the bare minimum, meaning you're gonna be able to do very little with that money, but at least there's something there you can work with. So if you only put $25,000 aside for a $250,000 budget, you're gonna be limited in what you're gonna be able to do. Just to get a professional trailer edited, and I mean professional, not like your cousin who knows something about final cut and can throw some scenes together, could cost you about $7,000. Web design could cost between $3,000 and $5,000. And then so basically you've almost gotten up to your $25,000 budget and you haven't even really started doing too much with it. You have festivals and advertising and a publicist and travel and all those other things that you probably want to do. And then for how long are you gonna do this? Six months before the release and a year after, which is very normal, you're gonna easily run out of that $25,000 in just a few months. Um you really need to think about how long are we talking about preparing for the release and then doing the release? Um, are we gonna have theatrical and roll into digital? Are we gonna have day and date? Are we not doing theatrical at all? Are we not going to festivals at all? You start having to think, what am I gonna back out of? What am I not gonna spend my money on? Um, and and what can I do with the money I have left. I mean, it it w the sky's the limit on how much you could spend. You could spend, I mean, getting a um a decent release, you know, from a Sony Pictures classic costs some twenty million dollars. We're not gonna be spending anything close to that. So um, you know, it's really sort of balancing out how do we see this film being distributed and what elements are we gonna need to be able to support those different um uh avenues of distribution. Which, you know, again, it's not just the marketing that you're thinking of, but ultimately you're also thinking of how once we get people's attention, the first thing they're gonna ask is when can I see the film? Basically, they have their wallet in their hand saying, I want to see the film. If your answer is I don't know, usually that the attention drops. The wallet goes back in their pocket. So you do need to have an idea of about when you're gonna be finished and about when they're gonna be able to see it. So they can have patience if there's an about date. They have no patience for we're gonna get a distributor and see what happens. Okay, then contact me later, you know, if you can get my attention again. So you do need to have in mind how are you going to start your distribution. Even if you do find a partner later on, you need to be thinking about you're going to be launching at festivals or you're going to do your own theatrical because more and more these days distributors are not going to fund your theatrical. And if you really want one, you're going to have to pay for it yourself. So that means when are we going to be finished? When do we need to be booking cinemas? Then work backwards from there. What elements are we going to need to be have in place in order to push to that date?
SPEAKER_06Oh wow. Well said, well said. Well, okay. Um let's go back to thank you so much. So basically, I would say from for a documentary where they really have to do most of the marketing themselves, that 20% is a minimum.
SPEAKER_03Yes, 20% could be a minimum. Although with a documentary, if you can make some partnerships very early on with some very strong or influential organizations, they can save you promotional money by agreeing to cross-promote the film for you. Um and that's a help. That's sort of a a cost savings because you won't have to spend as much money advertising or you know, d trying to get a lot of uh broad publicity because you know who your audience is and you've got very strong partners who can help you reach them without having to spend a lot of money. And that's an advantage of a documentary. But it can also be an advantage if you think and spend a lot of time considering if you're making a narrative film, it better have a niche audience that you can tap into. And there are interest groups that are not charities and that are not socio-political groups or anything like that. They're, you know, interest-based, that are strong, that have a lot of members, and if you can convince them to be a partner with you, they can be very beneficial to the release of your film.
SPEAKER_06Well, those are the key words if you can convince them. So give us your strategy on doing that. Let's say that this filmmaker has a trailer, uh, a proposal, is still raising money, has maybe a third of the film shot, and that's what I'm telling them. By now you have to really identify your strategic uh partners and start making uh connections.
SPEAKER_03Right. It usually starts again when I th when I talked about starting with yourself, starting with looking at, you know, w where are you involved? Um if you're really starting out and you and you don't really ha ha are not really connected to big investors or big sources of funding, you're going to need to think of stories that of audiences that you're already connected to that you can please. That's the smartest strategy that you should take. It may not be the biggest story that you had thought of or the script that you were writing that was for a much, much broader public, but that's probably not the script to start with. The script to start with is the one where you are pleasing an audience that you know well because it will be easier. You already have their trust, you already know. them personally to be able to introduce you know what you're doing and get their buy-in early on. And you talk a lot about crowdfunding and the ability to raise donation money from a community of supporters. If you don't have any supporters, it's very difficult to get crowdfunded donation. It's very difficult as well to get investment from a group of people who have no idea who you are, no connection to you, no idea of your talent. So don't start your first project or even your second project with this broad, undefined, vague audience that you think you're going to be able to reach. But you know it is possible as well to, if you are making a film that's specifically for for the fanboy community that would go to Comic-Con or something like it, you might spend a few years visiting the Comic-Con convention and meeting people and looking to see who are the influential people here that I can get to know that will be beneficial for me in the long run. You're not going to run up to them and go, I have this idea and I want you to help me because they're going to look at you and say, who are you and why should I help you? What's in it for me? Just like any one of us would, you know, if someone walked up to you on the street and said, give me money. You don't know them. You're not inclined to do that. But if you if you cultivate relationships with people who la down the line you feel could be beneficial to you, you should start doing that right away. And think about what kind of stories you can create for those people that you know they would love and would want to see on the screen that perhaps they don't get to see.
SPEAKER_06Well said. Thank you so much, Sherry. Well all right let's uh um tell me more about the best way to use social media for marketing. Um which ones do you recommend? Which uh social media platforms do you recommend and how do you suggest people use them?
SPEAKER_03Well to me social media is kind of a non-negotiable part of every professional person's work. You don't just jump on it because you have something to promote or something that you want to market. You're always creating and perpetuating your identity every day. This is like a a core skill that every professional not just filmmakers every professional person needs to build. Believe me the the teenagers coming up today have no problem figuring this out. It is the older people even sometimes I'm surprised to find mid-twenties and early thirties people who are like I don't see why I have to do this. It seems like such a time suck. Why why do I have to to to share anything? I I just I just want to do my work and not pay attention to other people. Those people are obscure and probably never going to go anywhere. So I don't pay too much attention to them because this is not something that you can just turn away from and say I don't need to do it. We didn't always have email and we didn't always have cell phones and people couldn't always contact us at every minute of the day but now we're used to that happening and we have developed those skills to handle it as a business and core you know professional skill this is one of those. This is something that you have to to fit into your into your abilities. The same way that you're able to network in the physical world you're able to network online. So it's not only just marketing yourself but it's also expanding your professional network, forming relationships with like-minded people, learning new information that helps you do your work and sharing information you have with other people because that's the the core of social media is back and forth. I share with you, you share with me. And we have to be open to both of that. It's not I share with you and share with you and share with you and I don't want to hear from you which is more of advertising you know mentality which is I show you my message and I don't want you to do anything but what I say. That's becoming less and less what people want to do. So I don't really see social media as a campaign because a campaign is a short-term effort to push people to do something that you want them to do. And we as consumers are now resisting anything that's trying to push us to fit into somebody else's timeline. We want to do what we want we want to do it when we want we want to do it wherever we want and on whatever device we want because we're all selfish people. Not just the creators but the people you're trying to create for are selfish people. So people who are still in that mentality of I'm going to get on social media and I'm going to corral people to do what I want are going to lose. You're not going to find too many people who are receptive to that message anymore. So you really need to think of these channels as a way to tell your story. A story about who you are about what your company is about what your work is about how your audience might be able to accomplish something or share something with them that you think they would really love, it isn't about you. It's about them. So you're trying to pull them to you rather than push out your messages. So I'm we're when you ask me which platforms people should choose, they should choose platforms that they can use or learn how to use easily that they enjoy using. Because if I tell you you have to use Twitter and you go, I just hate Twitter. I don't understand it. I hate being on it, you're not going to use it and it won't be successful. So you're right don't use it if that's not where you're comfortable and not where you're willing to spend time. You know that if you're open to it there are definitely people there who are willing to help you and I find it a very valuable place both to find audience and also to use in my professional life. But maybe for me Instagram I don't I don't care about like I don't take pictures every day of my everyday surroundings or life. I'm not a big photographer so it's not a big platform for me. But for other people they love to share photos. They in a in a way they see their picture taking as a way to tell a story about who they are or what they're working on or what they see in the world and what inspires them and that is a good place to start from because that is what will touch someone else who goes oh I've seen that. I think that's cool. Let me show you something of mine you know and so you kind of have this back and forth. And so that's if you're really into photos, taking photos, immediate photos, Instagram's a great place. If you rather pin photos from other places and show people what you aspire to be or aspire to buy or aspire to wear with clothes or something that you found was really cool then Pinterest is going to be your best bet because that's not about the immediacy of the picture. It's about the beauty and about showing who you aspire to be or your intention to be, what you're working toward. So each of these platforms have a different purpose and it's a bad thing to use a tool where you load up one thing and blast it out to all these different platforms, blast it to Facebook, blast it to Twitter, blast it to Instagram because all of those platforms attract different people for different reasons. And so they can tell that you don't understand them if you post something there that's not appropriate to the platform. So it really does take some thought into what platforms you're going to use and how you're going to use them. How you're going to use them to tell a story and they're all different and you can't you can't do one thing and blast it out to all of them.
SPEAKER_06Well said thank you very much yes I I'm learning that but um but getting on there and paying attention to what is being said is the first uh rule of thumb I guess, right?
SPEAKER_03Definitely definitely listening for if you're new to the platform, don't burst onto it with here's me and here's all about me and it's all about me. Nope nobody, not in there's no platform you're going to go on where that's going to be a receptive message. So it's better to, you know, I set up accounts on lots of things that I never come back and use because I just want to see what's happening here. You know what I can experiment with different things or just look through people's posts. You know, follow find some people to follow that I know or find interesting and just sit back and listen for a while. And after a while I may decide this is not for me. This is not something that I can see using or see really valuable. And it's okay. You don't have to be on all of them. You know in fact it would be a management nightmare if you were on all of them. So don't try to do that. What you want to do is find a couple that you really can understand and you do see yourself creating regular content for and just use those.
SPEAKER_06Okay that makes sense. Now what do you think of YouTube as a marketing tool to promote I think YouTube is a great marketing tool for filmmakers because video is how they tell their stories and that's the perfect place you know to be um to be a storyteller with video.
SPEAKER_03Now one thing about YouTube that a lot of people kind of don't get is um even though YouTube is trying to make inroads into very professionally produced video, the videos that still continue to do the best they are user generated, low quality edited on the fly kind of material. So you don't have to sit and do this painstaking video once a quarter or something like that because you think that that's what you're s you want to show the world is how professional I look, you know, you can have those every once in a while but the key to using YouTube and building up a subscriber base is having a consistent pattern of video on your channel because people want to subscribe to a channel that they like to see the content for. So if you're going to make YouTube one of your big outlets for social media content, you need to commit to doing it on a regular basis. So you really have to think do I have the resources and do I have the time to create these short little videos a lot because that's what it takes. You know YouTube is is like any other social platform hugely popular worldwide. There's something like a hundred minutes a hundred hours of video uploaded every minute so it's very difficult to just be found. So not only are you just are you going to be uploading material but you also have to think how am I going to get people to see it. Same problem different platform you know same problem you're going to have to have with your film you're going to have on YouTube you're going to have on Facebook you know that the more popular the platform, the more people are there and the more noise there is. I have sort of migrated myself more into Google ⁇ . Now I imagine that Google Plus will you know catch up and everybody will want to be there and and eventually the noise will get deafening. But at the moment I find it very interesting level of people who are on it. It gets so dissed in the media that it keeps the riffraff away but there are very interesting people on on Google and it ties into to YouTube. So because it's owned by Google you have a good cross promotion between Google Plus which is a social network and YouTube which is a video social network. So I think YouTube is um is a good resource. There's a a channel that I subscribe to called Real SEO and they talk all about how to to make the most of your YouTube channel. They do like once a week three or four minute videos to teach you about different aspects of of YouTube channels and subscriptions and getting subscribers and downloading that into your email database and all this kind of stuff. So I I really think that people should um subscribe to their channel and uh and look through their archives and see what you can learn.
SPEAKER_06It's realseo.com?
SPEAKER_03Yes.
SPEAKER_02Real R E L Okay.
SPEAKER_06Okay great that's a good idea we'll do that. All right so Google Plus go back to that and tell me more how do you interface with people on Google Plus?
SPEAKER_03Well I find you know if you have a Google Gmail account that you're already set up on Google Plus because they kindly do that for you. Also if you had a YouTube channel you have a Google Plus account because Google has kindly set that up for you. It doesn't mean that it's perfectly optimized so if you didn't know that that happened you might want to go through and find where your pro your profile is set up now because you want to put a picture and a description and all that kind of stuff. But I use Google Plus the most because I set up a community there because they are allow community pages. They also allow company pages and then they allow personal profile pages. I have a community that's dedicated to independent film marketing and distribution. It has a little over 1400 members at the moment. It's going been going for less than a year and that's the place where I put a lot of information that I don't share in other places about marketing, distribution, crowdfunding things that have to do with specifically with the business of film, not about filmmaking and it's not a group that's for promoting your project. So because there's so many other platforms, there's so many other communities where people can go and talk about watch my film, here's my trailer, all that kind of stuff, that we wanted to make this platform very much about not don't share your trailer unless you're telling me how you promote it. Like the information we want to share here is for people to learn how they should be marketing and distributing their work, not promoting their work within the membership. So it's very specific and I and I wanted it that way intentionally. But Google Plus is very easy to search to find people with keywords. They are always giving if you're connected to a certain amount of people they also suggest to you the people that those people are connected to so it helps you to to expand your network out. So from a professional standpoint that's a good thing to do and it makes it fairly easy to find those people. Also recently it's been it they made it possible for you to email people even if you don't have their email address. You can just email them through Google. I don't know how successful you'll be at it because I don't know if you know people want you emailing out of the blue asking for favors when you don't know them but use it judiciously but it is one way to to contact influential people if you don't know their email address. Like I said it's integrated with Google with YouTube and it also makes your profile stand out in Google search results. So there's a benefit to having an active profile on Google Plus because they will highlight if you liked a piece of material or if you wrote something or if you were interviewed somewhere that you will get more Google juice behind your name if you have a Google Plus profile. So there are a lot of good benefits to being on the site and I feel like the more Facebook is pushing everybody to buy access to their network, the more Google Plus becomes attractive for people who are still wanting to expand their networks without having to pay to reach people every time.
SPEAKER_06Yes, I totally agree with you. Well tell us how do we find your platform? If we go on Google how can we join your platform?
SPEAKER_03If you go into my Google Plus name which is it's a plus sign Sherry Candler it will have in my about box communities that I am either a member of or that I moderate and the film marketing and distribution one will be in there. Also it'll have all the websites that I am a part of my own website sherrycandler.com as well as thefilmcollaborative.org is the company that I work with. It has a link to the book it has a link to Facebook pages my Twitter account I think it even has you know my direct email address there as well so um so if you just find me and you can add me to your circle so so whenever I post something I show up in your newsfeed it's just plus Sherry Candler, the the plus sign Sherry Candler.
SPEAKER_06Okay, great. I'd love to join that sounds fantastic to be able to watch people uh telling each other what they're doing and how they're marketing and sharing information. This is fan fabulous.
SPEAKER_03Right and and a lot of people will post up a question I I you know somebody with the other day was talking about should I use create space? Does anybody have any experience with that? And it led to lots of comments with lots of other people going oh this is great I was just thinking that myself and I didn't know all this you know so and that's why I created it you know so that there would be a place online for not just me but everybody to be able to who are interested in this specific topic to find information pretty easily. And I post articles and tips and things like that from all over the net there at least two to three times a day. You know every day at one post but usually much more and there are other people anybody can post not just me but there are other people there is that are active as well.
SPEAKER_06Wow. How much time a day do you spend on this Sherry?
SPEAKER_03Online? Uh yes, particularly with this community I spend oh it's a good twelve hours a good twelve hours online. I mean I have a smartphone too so wherever I go I'm connected to the internet in some way and and you know check in uh to notifications. I mean I have you know Google alerts and I have hyper alerts that come from my Facebook page and I I'm not just on their you know marketing or sharing with the community that I've built but also doing research for other projects. When I have you know a counseling uh session that's set up with a a film collaborative member I'm going on to their sites and looking at what they're doing and seeing what else they could be doing, how can they expand out their network, other influencers they should look into getting in touch with you know uh it I if I didn't have the internet I wouldn't be able to do what I do.
SPEAKER_06So I'm online uh all day really okay I see that now wow it would take that but I think this is fantastic for you to put so much energy into teaching people about the proper way to market your film. Well done. Now what what I find when I'm teaching filmmakers is when I talk to them about this these are early marketing concepts they uh they get very upset because they don't have the time or they say they don't have the time to handle all of this. So uh how how do you suggest that people put it in their budgets early on that they bring people in to help them with this or that they just have to schedule their time so they're doing it themselves along with producing the film?
SPEAKER_03Well I mean just like producing a film doesn't mean you're doing literally everything yourself. I do think that you need to have a team together especially when you're in production when it's going to be the most difficult to keep up the your relationship building with your audience, with your partners, keeping a steady stream of content when everybody else is on set doing the work, you know, making the work somebody needs to be not making the work. Somebody needs to be devoted to this aspect of it. And there definitely are some tools you can use in the day where you're not online I mean where you're not connected to the social networking sites 24-7. Hootsuite has scheduling capabilities where you can set up some tweets that you want to put out throughout the day and schedule that in in you know in different timeframes. Facebook has the same where you can you know schedule and I think through Hootsuite you can post to Facebook, you can post to twit to LinkedIn and different social networks at different times of the day. I don't advocate doing that only. You do have to go back and check what was the reaction, did it spark a conversation if you have too much of a drive by drop off message and cruise off people tend to know that you weren't really there because especially with Twitter it's very immediate when somebody asks you a question. So if you weren't really there it might be three hours before you find out somebody came back to you and that opportunity was lost because you didn't check back soon enough. So there are definitely ways for you to set up different alerts as well tweet alerts or hyper alerts is what I use for Facebook that tell me immediately when somebody leaves a comment on a post that I made so I can go back and check it. But definitely during production you need somebody who's devoted to just this work and not let it fall down and not try to pull somebody off the crew to go and do it for you because they have are, you know, your you want your total focus to make the best work that you can. So have somebody who's not involved in that working just on this. But I still think that directors and producers and everyone else needs to have their own profile. They need to get used to doing this work for themselves, for their professional life. Don't ever have somebody pretend to be you. Don't allow an assistant to post in your name because one, they're not you so they don't really know what you would say and two that you're giving that your community building your name, that power goes to somebody else because they know those people who are who are being gathered and you don't. But it's in your name. So that doesn't even make sense to do something like that. If you're if you're going to learn how to do the social networking stuff, you're going to have to do some of it your own on your own. You know, you're good in order to really understand it and really communicate with people this way, you have to do it.
SPEAKER_06Goodness, that's that I know you're right because of what you've said over this whole show. But convincing people to do that, they just have to readjust their schedules so that they can devote an hour or so a day to do No, it's really readjusting their mindset.
SPEAKER_03You can't be the selfish grumpy artist anymore. The audience does not want the selfish grumpy audience aloof, removed artist. That guy is dying. So if you think that you can you know I can Steven Spielberg doesn't tweet, you know, yeah, you're not Steven Spielberg. He came up in a whole different time frame than you. This is a new world and people expect you to be accessible and they expect you to have some humanness to you that you want to know who likes your work. Isn't that novel? Isn't that kind of why you made it? You're making it because you want people to enjoy your work. Why would you keep yourself from those people? Why would you not want to know them? They're they're your cheerleaders. They're your evangelists. Why why would you not want to interact with them? So I tell artists, you know, don't make your life lonelier than it already is by keeping yourself from people who would give you words of encouragement because you're going to need it. There's going to be a lot of times where this is lonely and and and you want encouragement and those people can be there if you keep that relationship going.
SPEAKER_06Oh thank you so much. Now one last question because I've I've learned so much, Sherry, thank you for all this. Can you give us some films to review that you believe had very good marketing plans?
SPEAKER_03Well it's it's harder to I I don't like to give people that idea because they think oh if I just take their marketing plan and just replicate it, it will work the same for me. Every marketing plan is different, every film is unique, every audience and what triggers them is unique. The best ones to look at are documentaries because those people have no illusions that they're going to get picked up for millions of dollars and they're going to have a big full significant release. For the most part that doesn't happen. So I would say to look at IndieGame they made a great series of posts about how they marketed and distributed their documentary Girl Rising did the same. The Square, which is an Oscar nominated documentary from this year, Crowdfunded and found an audience for their work and Buck, which was a documentary from a few years back about Buck Brannaman who's the horse whisperer all of those films have been well chronicled in some of the industry publications on how they distributed the work and how they marketed early, very early in their production to get uh to get an audience. But I'm also updating the Selling Your Film Without Selling Your Soul book with my co-authors. It will be released right before Cannes in May and it's going to have case studies of not just documentaries but also narrative films and how they found niche audiences and how they distributed their work. The same with the the previous edition which was more focused on US films. It's not all documentaries. You know we really dug into how did these films become successful, what kind of money did they spend? What kind of tactics did they use and what were the revenue results from that and very few books will tell you. So go to go to our website sellingyourfilm.com and and get the free PDF. It's free so there's no excuse and read about lots of different kinds of films and how they found their audience.
SPEAKER_06Sellingyourfilm.com and get the PDF of your book it's free, right? Mm-hmm. Okay, I would definitely do that. Well tell us um every way that people can find you you do work as a counselor or a consultant with people who are making docs as well as features.
SPEAKER_03Yes, just and you know it doesn't matter the kind of film. Generally I don't work directly with short film because short film doesn't have much of a distribution path. But the short film maker who's making that work has a path toward a career and so that's when I when I consult with short film makers that we talk about how are you going to position yourself to be more known in the industry with your shorts, not selling your shorts necessarily. But you can find me online at Sherry Candler, S-H-E-R-I-C-A-N-D-L-E-R on Twitter. I have a Facebook page, Sherry Candler Marketing and Publicity. And so you can message me there or you can leave something on my my wall. As we said, my Google Plus community and my email address is info at sherrycandler.com. I tend to respond better to emails than to phone calls because phone calls usually I get on a tear and I take 45 minutes out of my day to talk to people that I should have only spent 10 minutes on. So it's better if you send me an email and you tell me exactly what you're looking for and what you need help with and we can set up a time to talk later. I have my hourly rates and different rates listed on my website under services so people can get an idea of of what kind of pricing I charge. And so you know there's lots of ways for people to get in touch with me and work with me.
SPEAKER_06Fantastic. Thank you so much for the information I hope you'll join us again in the future.
SPEAKER_03Yes me too I I really enjoyed it.
SPEAKER_06Thank you Sherry.
SPEAKER_02Claire thanks very much for hosting our show sure yes it was a pleasure thank you very much Sherry.
SPEAKER_03I learned a lot from you today great great I I hope that um people were taking notes but if anybody has any questions they can always send me an email sounds real good.
SPEAKER_02See you well everyone thank you Claire thank you Sherry I want to remind our listeners that David Rakelin is a brilliant and talented award-winning musician who scores films and can compose music for a trio or for a full orchestra David is a very good friend to the independent filmmaker and comes highly recommended by From the Heart Productions. If you need music to help tell your story please contact him at davidrain.com that's david r-a-i-k-l-n dot com and Carol and I want to thank you for tuning in to the Art of Film Funding. Please visit our website at From the Heartproductions.com You can also find us on Facebook and Twitter.
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