1001 Positively True Stories of An Indie Filmmaker

Angelo Bell's Painfully Exhilarating Adventures in Independent Filmmaking

Posts Tagged ‘Internet’

Insomnia Pays Off

Monday, May 11th, 2009

 

Can't Sleep

Can't Sleep

Tonight I watched 24, as usual. I like to start watching it 30 mins after it has started so I can fast forward through the commercials. Afterwards I started getting sleepy but it was still too early. I watched Seinfeld and then decided to jump on Twitter. Twitter led me to check my email as I expect a contract from an indie musician for a song I’d like to use in The Broken Hearts Club. Email led me to Facebook, where I saw a notice about the film festival site, Bside, as part of the promotion campaign about the Hollywood Black Film Festival.

 

I was familiar with Bside because I spent the better part of today resizing and uploading video and pictures for my film. I jump over to the site, search for my official film link and I find it.

WTF?

There’s a trailer uploaded that’s from YouTube — a trailer I never uploaded nor programmed. This was one of the first and most raw trailers I ever created. The sound sucks and it was resized too small. Additionally, the “official film site” link points to my old site. A site whose address I rarely use because I’m phasing it out.

I was mortified. Here is another presence for my film and its world premiere and the information I painstakingly put together was wrong. The sound on the trailer is horrible. I’m still baffled how someone decided to arbitrarily point to a YouTube trailer without consulting me. 

I promptly deleted the trailer from YouTube, along with other versions of the trailer except the main one. At least is someone decides to link to YouTube again they’ll have the right trailer. That is, unless someone links to the trailer for the short film.

Arrgh! Thank God I couldn’t sleep. I sent a corrective email to Bside at 11:15 PM

http://hollywoodblackff.bside.com/2009/films/thebrokenheartsclub_hollywoodblackff2009

Into The Wild

Tuesday, August 5th, 2008

Hollywood is a palm-tree lined jungle much like New York City is a concrete jungle. It’s wild. It’s unpredictable. But within the bush of mayhem and backstabbing awaits untouched opportunities.

I’ve never been a fan of direct to DVD distribution. To me it the distributor’s cowardly way out; it’s the cheap road to profits without regard to the filmmaker’s desires. Not so with The Wall. With this upcoming film I am more than happy with a direct to DVD distribution. My research has told me that DVD releases, if properly marketed, can yield enormous results and word of mouth. Even mediocre genre films gan ‘blowuptuate’.

The key is in the marketing, promotion and advertising of the film. But that is where genre films rule, especially when promoted on the Internet. In just a few minutes of Internet research I came across a slew of horror film websites. The Internet is sick with horror films sites, thus making it fairly easy to promote quickly and inexpensively. And there are just as many “general interest” film websites, each looking for  content on the latest and greatest films — studio, indie or otherwise — to promote to their eager fans.

If we take a step back and look at the bigger picture, these websites can also be used to promote our low-budget indie films which we hope will be picked up or sold at a film festival. Word of mouth is the most powerful form of advertising. Why? Because it comes with a built-in recommendation from a reliable source — someone you know. So the more people who know about your film, the more peple who’ll talk about it.

Hollywood: it’s a jungle out there; we might as well get used to swinging from vines just like everyone else.

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