by Voyage | Mar 24, 2015 | Entertainment Business, Screenwriting Tips
Getting Lucky in Hollywood Los Angeles is the entertainment industry mecca, and while it’s helpful to live in the city to gain traction and success, it is not entirely necessary. Our team has compiled 7 tips and strategies to help you stay relevant in the eyes of Hollywood producers, especially if you don’t live in LA. 1. Create A Social Media Presence For Yourself Social media is the simplest, most inexpensive, and accessible way to build a brand for yourself. Make it known to your followers/friends who you are and what makes you tick. Develop your unique voice, and build an audience with it! Having the ability to market yourself is becoming about as important as your project itself – if you don’t sell it, who will? Creating an online presence using sites like YouTube, Twitter and Facebook is a great way to connect with an audience, engage with like-minded people and stay up to date with the goings on in the Industry. Another viable option is to create a blog! You never know who may stumble across your personalized site and like what they see… Take Diablo Cody, for instance. She started out putting her thoughts and ideas on a blog, which ended up catching the eye of Hollywood producers. She later went on to write the screenplay JUNO, which won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay in 2008. Twitter is another great forum to showcase your creative ideas and get noticed. The hit TV show “$h*! My Dad Says” began as the Twitter feed of a semi-employed comedy writer, Justin Halpern, who moved back in with his...
by Voyage | Feb 24, 2015 | Book to Film
Unless you’ve been hiding your head under a rock, then you know how hot Book Trailers are… All the major publishers use them to promote their books – Penguin, Random House, Harper Collins, and others… And self-published authors now follow suit, with trailers of their own. Book trailers simply make sense when it comes to book promotion… People are much more likely to buy a product when they see a video about it Trailers are visually exciting and entice readers more easily than text They can be used effectively on all the social media platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Vimeo, Twitter, Instagram, etc. They act as a great centerpiece to an author website Unlike paid ads, they live forever, garnering more and more organic views over time As an art form, book trailers are just beginning, but already it’s easy to see what separates the great ones from the lackluster. A great book trailer is cinematic. They are filmed and edited by talented professionals – often with original footage, talented actors, professional voiceover, and exceptional filmmaking. A great book trailer piques a reader’s interest and makes them want to see more! Even celebrities and Hollywood heavyweights have taken notice of this new art form and its power to attract an audience… Check out this trailer for Neil Patrick Harris’ Choose Your Own Autobiography, starring none other than NPH himself. Or this trailer for One More Thing by B.J. Novak, starring B.J. Novak (“The Office”) and Mindy Kaling (“The Office”, “The Mindy Project”). And then there’s some cinematic book trailers that rival those of big-budget movies, shot using 4K...
by Voyage | Feb 11, 2015 | The Expert Network
Whether you love to do it or not, marketing your work is a necessity if you want it to reach people. So you’ve got all your marketing materials together, a logline, a treatment, a clever synopsis. Your pitch is ready to go, but you’ve forgotten one vital thing – visuals. We live in a primarily visual age. One where Instagram has overtaken Facebook as the premiere social media platform to be on, and one where Facebook has reinvented itself to showcase user photos in an effort to keep up. Twitter has shown that moreover, people digest text in smaller and smaller bites. They say a picture speaks a thousand words, and if you’re in it to win a shot at seeing your film on-screen, that has never been more true than right now. Why is visual marketing so important? Rouse an emotion. People make choices on feeling – capture a producer’s emotions, and you’ll have a better chance of capturing his signature on an option agreement Complement your worded materials in a way that: A. tells a story and then B. shows a story – this is a winning combo that works! Visuals tell a story in microseconds (a picture speaks a thousand words – multiple pictures can speak millions) Click Here to see examples of visual from our film project marketing Consider the film GRAVITY, directed by Alfonso Cuaron and starring Sandra Bullock and George Clooney. GRAVITY’s tagline is simple enough: “Don’t Let Go.” It communicates a simple message, and may or may not capture attention on its own. But then let’s take that tagline, and pair it...
by Voyage | Jan 23, 2015 | Book to Film
What do “Hunger Games,” “Harry Potter,” “Jurassic Park,” “The Godfather,” and “Gone with the Wind” all have in common? Obviously, they’re all major big-screen successes, but did you know that every one of these film properties is based on a novel? Would it surprise you to learn that many of the most commercially and critically successful movies of all time started on the pages of a book? Seven of the top ten highest-grossing movies of all time (when adjusting for inflation) are book adaptations, and in 2015 alone, nearly half of the Oscar nominees for Best Picture are book adaptations (including The Theory of Everything, The Imitation Game, and American Sniper). So why aren’t you adapting a book for the screen yet? Here are 4 reasons why your next screenplay should be based on a book: 1) “True Stories” are hot right now! Audiences love movies based on real life events, and the pile of autobiographies and provocative life stories just waiting to be adapted is infinite. Just watch the dollar signs appear in the eyes of development executives as you pitch your project – they’ll perk up faster than you can utter the words, “based on a true story.” 2) Adaptations carry more weight than original screenplays in Hollywood A book provides an established concept with solid characters, which saves both time and money. Bottom line: from a buyer’s perspective, an adaptation will be taken much more seriously than an original screenplay. Regardless of how popular the source book actually is, an adaptation implies that an audience already exists for the story and that it is marketable. 3)...
by Voyage | Jan 21, 2015 | Blog post, Uncategorized
It’s been a big year at Voyage and I wanted to take a moment and thank you for being a part of our growing family of creators! Without you, none of what we accomplished would have been possible. We set some big goals in 2014 – we wanted to get some films made and we wanted to expand our ability to make a real difference to creators (and their projects) around the world. Toward that end, one of our successes was officially launching our “Originals” program, specifically designed to partner with select creators to bring their projects to market and arrange for packaging, financing and distribution. We took on 14 new film and television projects in the program this year, all of which are now partially packaged or financed and in various stages of development. A couple standouts include producing and releasing our award-winning and highly profitable film, VALLEY UPRISING, and bringing the scripted TV series, UNBRIDLED to market and securing the participation of 2 well-known and respected showrunners. You can read more about our Success Stories here. We’re also proud of our partnership with Amplify Releasing/GoDigital, which enabled us to guarantee distribution to some of the film projects in our Originals Program as well as for several clients who took advantage of our new distribution business plan / strategy service, “Distribution Deep Dive”. Our Professionals Program is in its 3rd year and took a surprising and unplanned twist. Not only does the program continue to serve as the incubator for projects that enter our Originals Program, but it also now acts as a crucible for nurturing and identifying...
