Posts

Showing posts with the label THR

PRODUCTION TIPS: Get Hollywood To Notice By Becoming A YouTube Star

So there is a benefit to becoming famous on Youtube. Feature-length films starring YouTube stars are getting Hollywood's attention. In their quest to de-risk a film and make a film with a built-in audience and marketing potential at little cost, they have decided to invest in films starring people popular in the digital world. According to THR : There were about a dozen such "film" projects in 2015 alone, and that number could double this year as major entertainment players look to cash in. These digital-focused films follow a similar, and more inexpensive, formula on their way from concept to completed project. According to numerous industry sources, studios will pay between $500,000 and $1.5 million to produce the movie, and the marketing spend is a fraction of the minimum $20 million that a studio normally would shell out.  Instead of going to theaters, studios typically distribute the films through iTunes and Vimeo, where viewers can download them for about $1

PRODUCTION JOURNAL: THR's Interview with Nicolas Chartier on Anti-Piracy Crusade and Why Union Workers Need Less Pay

Image
The Hollywood Reporter recently interviewed French producer, Nicolas Chartier . You might know him for the Oscar-winning films (The Hurt Locker and Dallas Buyer's Club) his company, Voltage Pictures , has produced. Or you might know him as the guy who went on a tirade about union workers. Or you might know him because he sued you for illegally downloading The Hurt Locker and his other films. Love him or hate him, in The Hollywood Reporter's recent interview with him he speaks clearly about the success and difficulties of filmmaking including how he has charted a path producing both indie dramas and action films, why a union-worker should not be paid so much and why piracy has made him have to shoot 5 films instead of 10.  +++++++ Nicolas Chartier  has an issue with impulse control. The 40-year-old France-born president of Voltage Pictures — which, since it opened nine years ago, has been releasing a steady stream of Oscar-nominated dramas ( Dallas Buyers Club ), scrapp

CASE STUDY: Marketing A Film Based on Its Content NOT the Race of Its Characters

Image
www.hollywoodreporter.com It seems like common sense that the best way to market a film with minority characters is to emphasize the presence of those minority characters and draw in minority audiences in large numbers.  End of Watch is a good example of this;  "The film stars Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Pena as two cops assigned to South Central L.A. Pena's character is of Mexican descent and from East L.A.... When End of Watch debuted over the Sept. 21-23 weekend, 32 percent of the audience was Hispanic, both Spanish- and English-speaking (separate breakouts by language aren't available). The film, distributed by Open Road Films on behalf of Exclusive Media, won the frame, grossing $13.2 million (a solid number for an indie)..." But studios and distributors walk a fine line between promoting the film's minority appeal to get minority audiences and downplaying it's strong minority presence to avoid alienating white audiences.  As a 2011 study

CASE STUDY: The Days of Summer for Broadcast TV

Image
Reading this article by Lacey Rose, was an eyeopener (almost as much as this one ).  The broadcast networks are truly trying to come up with ways to deal with their loss of ratings and audience viewership and one of the ways is by offering original summer programming.  The time when they could take summer off and leave show development for the fall might be over for good now that cable has exploited that window to great success with year-round original programming.  Although the 4 major networks are aware of the dilemma, the networks are going into summer with different strategies based on trying to answer the following question: How to offer originals in a way that's economically feasible at a time of year when viewership and ad money are down? Each of the networks are answering the question in different ways (see below). In turn, the answers made me think of  what that could mean for TV producers and production companies developing future projects and which of the current/