Fringe Friday

While not totally applicable to us, we attended a Fringe Friday meeting tonight. The Fringe festival in Wellington consists mostly of theatre, concerts, exhibitions and other performance based events, but as it turned out we learnt lost of interesting stuff about where to get money from. There were people there from the Cuba Street Carnival, Wellington Council, someone from a new fund called EAT (Emerging Artists Trust), and the usual rabble of artists.

 Since the Fringe events lend themselves to this, there was a lot of talk of finding private sponsors and branding. This made me think that it could be applied to film funding, too, if only in the shape of asking for favours and promising logos in the credits. But even a short film could include branding, if it is appropriate. this started me thinking that at least the boat scene and the bookshop, as well as other businesses in the background could be hit up for sponsorship for product placement. Why not? 

There is a lot of work to be done before any sponsors can be approached, more probably than if we just applied for straight funding: research audience and target market, consider the aims and content of the film to find sponsors who match them. Researching potential sponsors mission statements would help to connect with them and their brand. One other interesting statement made was that when writing a budget, we should always put in proper wages for all crew and cast, even if we can’t pay this in the end, since this is a more professional approach to budgeting and gives a clearer picture what this production would actually cost.

Passive.Cool.

I just finished a commercial short for NZX's passive sharedealing product smartshares. They had contacted me a while ago with a script for a short viral film to be posted to their new blog-based website and to YouTube. They were looking for something that was provocative, but work-safe at the same time, and would promote the idea that passive equals cool.

We filmed the script with a small crew and one actor, and Ben Parsons provided the cheesy music. We did a neat trick where we shot two dolly shots into the same room, one going left to right and one right to left. In Final Cut Pro I flopped the second shot and with a cross fade it looks like one continuous shot from one room to another.

Script to Screen@SPADA conference

I couldn’t attend the whole conference, but made it to Script to Screen’s lunchtime talk with Scott Meek, Jeremy Nathan and Derek Fox. The specifically New Zealand theme was: Creating a National Cinema and a Unique Voice on the World Stage. Scott Meek, formerly managing director of Zenith in the UK, now living in Australia, made some interesting comments on the subject from the British perspective.

He pointed out that Truffaut said that the words ‘cinema’ and ‘England’ should not be mentioned in the same sentence. Meek pointed out that the UK film industry is a permanent film school for Hollywood. He also compared Robert McKee’s approach to film as laid out in his book Story to L Ron Hubbard’s Scientology teachings, refusing the need for films that meander, films that have no structure. He also said that he prefers making films with few people over a longer period of time than with lots of people very quickly.

Jeremy Nathan, who has been making films in South Africa for almost 2 decades told an instructional story of the Nigerian film industry, which receives no government funding whatsoever and still produces 800 feature films per year for the Africa-wide market. Budgets are in the region of $40k, with one week pre-production, one week shoot and one week post-production. They are generally love stories, voodoo films or historical epics with an average length of 3 hours. Eight years ago there were no Nigerian films on TV, now some of those film makers are being picked up as a reaction to this surge and make - presumably - classier fare for TV. He talked of the uphill struggle of making films in South Africa, with a distribution model of 400 cinemas for 40 million people. The whole of Africa has only 600 screens for 900 million people, so new distribution methods are developing, where mobile phone users can subscribe to 30 minute episodes, or businesses screen DVDs to a paying audience on their TVs. He called it a post-theatrical model of distribution.