Most filmmakers want to make movies. However, few think about establishing themselves a brand as a filmmaker. In the immortal words of Alex Ferrari of Indie Film Hustle: “If you don’t think you need a brand as a filmmaker, you’re wrong.” As wonderful as I personally find that quote, I think it needs a little elaboration. What follows are 5 reasons you NEED a brand as a filmmaker.
Last week we outlined why your brand is so important to your career as a filmmaker. This week, we’re going to dive into how you begin to define your brand. Your brand is the cumulative outcome of all the interactions anyone has with you or your company. As such, this list is far from completed, however these things are quite important when you’re getting down to defining your brand.
Most filmmakers hate the idea of crowdfunding. While nobody likes constantly having their hands out and asking their friends for money for a whole month straight, it’s something that most filmmakers are going to have to do early in their careers. It’s very possible that most filmmakers will have to do it more than once. But the reason you crowdfund isn’t just about the money. There are lots of other reasons crowdfunding can be a boon for a filmmaker’s career. Here are 4 of them.
Seeing as how a majority of my business still comes from representing filmmakers to sales agents and distributors, it’s unsurprising that a question I get at my events and in my inbox quite often is when is the best time to approach a producer’s rep, sales agent or distributor. Well, as with many things I tend to blog about, there’a a short, true, and mostly unhelpful answer to that question. There’s also a longer, more nuanced, and more correct answer. This blog attempts to answer both in under 800 words.
 I’ve been going to the American Film Market® for 9 years now, and I’ve been chronicling what’s going on with the market in many ways from podcasts to blogs and even a book or two. So given that AFM® 2018 wrapped up yesterday, I thought I would do something of a post mortem. While I’ll outline my feelings on the whole thing in this blog, the long and short of it is that the state of the American Film Market is mixed
In the final part of my 7 part series on writing a business plan for independent film and media, I’ll be going over all of the financial statements you’ll need in your business plan. This is a section that you’ll want to write before you write the financial text section of your plan, as it will have great impact on that section, and potentially other sections of the plan. Each document should take up only a single page.
In part 6 of my 7 part series on independent film business planning, we’re going to go over the text portion of the financial section of the business plan. This is where you explain the methodology you used in your financial projections, the general plan for taking in the money, and then overview what you’re going to present in the final section, the pro-forma financial statements.
In part 5 of my 7 part series on business planning, we talk about the risk management/SWOT Analysis of your project. It begins with a risk statement that goes into exactly why film is a highly speculative and inherently risky investment, and then goes into a SWOT Analysis that illustrates how you plan on managing those risks. For those of you who don’t know SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.
In this installment of my 7 part blog series on business planning, we’re going to take a look at the marketing section of the plan. This section is likely to be the longest section, as it encompasses an overview of the industry, as well as both marketing and distribution planning. Generally, this section will encompass 3-5 pages of the plan, all single spaced. This is among the most important sections of the plan, as it is a real breakdown of how money will come back to the film
Next up in my 7 part series on writing a business plan for independent film, we’ll be taking a deeper look at the project(s) section of the plan. The projects section of the plan is the most creative section, as it talks about the creative work that you’re seeking to finance. That being said, it breaks those creative elements into their basic business points. This section should be no more than a page if you have one project, and no more than 2 pages if you’re looking at a slate.
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AuthorMy name is Ben, I'm an Entrepreneur, Producer's Rep, and Author. I'm the founder of Guerrilla Rep Media, Co-Founder/CMO of ProductionNext, and founder of PRoducer Foundry. Together, the organizations seek to help make filmmaking a more economically sustainable endeavor. I am dysic, I have capitalization issues, and the blogs are often unedited. opinions all my own. 
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