The Long Shelf Life of a Feature Film

We just received a lump sum payment via Filmhub for a license deal on our feature film Friends, Foes & Fireworks. The buyer was ReelShort, a new streaming network, which opted to purchase the film upfront rather than paying a percentage of sales or ad revenue, as most platforms do.

This marks the second buyout of Friends, Foes & Fireworks this year. A Belgian streamer also purchased the film for their network earlier.

Friends, Foes & Fireworks was originally released in 2018, six years ago. Back then, it performed poorly in terms of revenue — and, to be honest, it continued to underperform, with only brief spikes in revenue here and there.

But this year, out of nowhere like the RKO, we received two licensing deals that nearly doubled the revenue Friends, Foes & Fireworks had generated in the previous five years. This just goes to show the value of owning the rights to your film — feature films have long shelf lives, even those that didn’t initially succeed.

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The Older You Get, The Harder Micro-Budget Filmmaking Is

Micro-budget filmmaking is bloody hard work.

After wrapping production on ForeFans – our sixth micro-budget narrative feature – at the start of the month, I can feel that in my tired bones. And creaky knees.

We spent two weeks filming guerrilla style all over Zagreb and Paris, 18 different locations, a skeleton crew of only three or sometimes two (only Sarah and I), 12 to 14 hour days, 5 hours sleep a night. 

To say it was exhausting is an understatement. We were stretched too thin, multi-tasking like mad, putting into practise philosophies for micro-budget filmmaking that we teach in our own educational courses: “Use a small crew to move quickly and keep costs down.”

But halfway through filming I realized something about this philosophy and perhaps micro-budget filmmaking in general: I’m getting too old for this.

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Are Film Festivals Worth Your Time & Money?

In 2022 we have been paying attention to an aspect of film distribution we have largely ignored for several years beforehand: film festivals.

We have had rejections of course. With many festivals receiving thousands of entries, there will always be rejections. But we have also found some success. Machination has picked up several awards at film festivals for Acting, Directing, and Sound Design. Cats of Malta has been selected for the Melbourne Documentary Film Festival, New York Cat Festival, and other festivals we cannot reveal quite yet. Our latest Life Improvised film, The Dance, screened at Kinemastik International Short Film Festival in Malta last night.

But this handful of success has come at a cost of almost $1000USD so far in festival submission fees. Could this money have been better spent elsewhere? Like running Facebook ads for the release of Machination? Have we gotten enough return for our funds? In short: are film festivals worth the cost and effort?

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Is Piracy Damaging for Indie Film?

Generally speaking, most people believe that committing piracy is not really a big deal. It's not that harmful. For most of us average folk, it's simply not feasible to sign up to and pay for a multitude of subscription streaming sites. We pick one service, maybe two if we are on a steady wage, but how many people can afford to indulge in memberships to Netflix, plus Amazon Prime, and HBO Max, and Disney+, and Hulu, and all of the other streaming services out there? It becomes much too expensive, so when it comes to cost, piracy can be understandable too.

WHAT THE CURRENT STATS SAY

Certainly, more and more people are turning to piracy, not just in TV and film, but across all industries. The international piracy stats in 2021 indicate:

  • The USA is at the forefront of piracy with 17 billion clicks on illegal piracy websites in 2021 alone.

  • Russia has the highest piracy rate in Europe with over 14 billion piracy site visits, while Indonesia is the leading country in Asia for piracy with 6 billion visits.

  • 70% of online users find nothing wrong with online piracy while 34% of Gen Z (people born between 1997 and 2012) use stream-ripping programs and websites to download films and audio from streaming sites.

  • Pirated videos get over 230 billion views a year.

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Releasing an Indie Film During a Pandemic

In February this year, Sarah Jayne wrote an article about self-distributing our feature In Corpore. She talked about screening the film in a cinema in New York, one of the settings of the film, perhaps doing a tour of the country à la The Joyful Vampire Tour of America, and then doing cinema screenings in the remaining countries we filmed in: Australia, Germany, and Malta.

Well, none of that went ahead. The world changed, as we all know; a global pandemic brought everything to a standstill. And still we aren’t clear of the spectre of this virus, with different parts of Europe facing another lockdown, America still out of control, and Australia suffering too. The way films are distributed changed, perhaps irrevocably. Cinemas shut like so much else. The traditional release windowing model was scrapped, blockbuster films like Mulan streaming for free on Disney+ as a $200 million dollar experiment, while Tenet by Christopher Nolan stuck to its guns and became the first Hollywood tent-pole to launch in theaters following their prolonged shutdown, the bold move hailed by executives and media as the saviour of cinema.

It bombed. Studios were spooked. Cinema wasn’t saved.

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How We Shot a Feature Film in One Night, Without a Script →

Not only did we shoot a feature in a single night. And not only was it entirely improvised (without a script, without a shot list, without regrets), but we decided to do it on the craziest and most chaotic night of the year... New Year’s Eve.

The film is called Friends, Foes & Fireworks and it explores relationships, love, friendship, and the truths we try but fail to keep to ourselves.

We have been asked one question numerous times: “How did you actually manage to shoot this in a single night without a script?”

The second question, often unspoken, but lingering on lips nonetheless is “…and have a story and structure that actually makes sense without a script?”

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