Fly free, my pretty.
Today almost felt like being a filmmaker again. No alarm
clock, no creased shirt, no office peer-pressure to have a shave. Just a cheeky
midweek trip to London.
I should start this posting with an apology. To everyone
that has gone to the blog vainly trying to find out what’s happening with the
movie, to everyone that has called, texted or emailed me this year – sorry.
It’s not because we’ve been distracted by too much suckling at the teat of
the man, it’s because we’ve not had too much positive to report.
I blame HMV. The bottom has fallen out of the UK
distribution market since it went into administration. The distribution
companies are all, one imagines, creditors of the ailing high-street DVD
stockist. And some companies, such as Revolver, are faring
worse than others.
Besides, I’m a sucker for making the whole movie-making
process look easy. Easier, at least.
But today was an important day. Today we handed the whole shebang
over to a Sales Agent.
Yup. As of this afternoon, responsibility for the sale of
all UK and international distribution rights finally lies where it should –
with the experts. And, rather incongruously, this is where the real hard work
starts for Jake and me.
Anybody that has been through the process of engaging a
Sales Agent to secure distribution for their movie will tell you all about The
List. The exhaustive catalogue of a hundred things you need to sort out to enable
the movie to get sold. A 16:9 version of the film on HDCam. Ditto a 4:3 version and a 1:2.35 version. Both PAL and NTSC equivalents on
DigiBeta. Music cue sheets. A hundred pictures. An MPAA certification. E&O
insurance. Re-written screenplays and every combination of music, sound effects
and dialogue delivered on ten different flavours of digital media.
It’s genuinely horrific.
However, this is early in the process, and certain things
are more important than others at this stage. For them to take the film to
Cannes and start the selling process, we really only need a trailer, a poster,
a whole bunch of DVDs to give away, and a short synopsis.
Oh, and to be clear here – they’re talking about our
existing trailer and poster art.
Yeah – the trailer that we cut together last January
before we had any sensible gore or grading. That one. I had, naively, imagined that this would be useful only to break
the ice with industry professionals, and, to be fair, it did that fairly
admirably – the Sales Agents that we are going with were people that we met and
auditioned at Cannes last year. But, at some point in the process I did think
that responsibility for a proper trailer and key art would be passed over to
someone that knew what they were doing. It may look like art, but it’s all
craft and experience.
Oh no. It turns out that this is up to us.
And this is where our hard work starts. A complete
re-working of the trailer to improve the picture, sound and blood content. Oh,
and losing the swearing and adding in more running. And if we can come up with
an easier-to-understand tagline, that might be helpful too.
But at what point in the process do we get relieved by the
professionals? Is there a possibility that whatever trailer Jake and I pull
together by Easter will actually be used to coax unwitting members of the
gore-buying community into purchasing the DVD? And will Amo’s temporary poster
art be on the box?
More importantly, what’s going to happen to the 18,000 hits
that the last trailer has already amassed? Don’t think that you’re not going to
be expected to help out once the new trailer is up on-line. Counting.
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