There are timeless elements about the cinematic craft which never change, no matter the season, no matter the hippest trend.
When it comes to the movie business, everything almost always tracks back to the twin fundamentals of story and dialogue. When it comes to these two items, filmmakers need to be ruthless and precise, and those who don’t heed this age-worn advice do so, really, at their film’s detriment.
When an independent film isn’t selling in the marketplace or securing distribution, the root cause of the dearth of buzz surrounding projects has to do with the lack of time invested getting stories as ship-shape as they can be.
Scripts belonging to poorly-performing films are usually rushed, with dialogues that are way too on-the-nose, with stories which at once seem much too predictable for discerning indie film audiences who might be looking for edgier, more contemplative fare from their artistic vanguard.
If audiences aren’t flocking en masse to watch your film, one of your first diagnostic areas of fix should be your screenplay.
#BlogSomething2012 | Stark raving mad: turning your eager viewers into film evangelists…
Congratulations! You made it. You’ve reached the end of #BlogSomething2012 for this week only (more content coming soon!). For those of you who toughed it out with a smile, good on you!
It was fun reading over the educational posts of the week, with heapful kudos going out to Christopher S. Penn for suggesting the initiative in the first place and especially to professional speaking consultant Dr. Nick Morgan of Public Words for being so stalwart in keeping up with the overall rat-tat-tat. On both counts, I learned heaps. On both counts, I left better off than when I started.
For those gates catching up today, posts one, two, three, and four dealt with the techniques professional marketers leverage to collect prospects, sift meticulously through them for juicy qualified leads (yum!), then how marketers engage them copiously while closing the proverbial deal.
Today, my sweet babies, we’re topping it off with the coup-de-grace: once you entice said customers firmly into the fold (in our indie film case, audience members/niche audience/target audience <—interchangeable), how do we convert them into stark raving mad book-brandishing tablecloth-wearing horse-riding evangelists, maintaining the old quasi-religious message? The sort of audience folk who’ll only be too glad to follow you into the roiling heat of battle, to heave themselves once more over the bloody parapet into the muddy, mustard gas-y (thank you Fritz Haber for that invention!), razor wire-y, corpse-strewn Vimy Ridge contretemps we call the competitive marketplace.
See that image above? See that complete meshuggeneh jumping off the roof at the Museum of Fine Arts in Beantown, likely into a hill of pterodactyl feathers? That’s the kind of total self-nullification, self-abnegation we’re looking for! HEAR YE, HEAR YE: seeking all roof jumpers, please report to the castle precincts! Basically, here’s the job profile: something like what we saw in M. Night’s The Happening. You feelin’ me?
So how do we even achieve this?
Continue reading →