by Voyage | Aug 7, 2014 | Audience, Entertainment Business
Last week, Voyage announced the latest film we’ve produced, Valley Uprising: Yosemite’s Rock Climbing Revolution–an in-depth documentary about the history of thrill-seekers climbing Yosemite’s treacherous granite cliff faces. Soon after the announcement, we received a pretty interesting email, which brought up some questions about Voyage’s project selection process–Why would we spend money on such a specific-interest documentary? How could we ensure we broke even on marketing a project with such a relatively small target audience? After all, rock climbers and adrenaline-junkies are such a small and specific part of the overall moviegoing audience…isn’t the goal to reach as many of the “4 Quadrants” as possible? As with any other film we’ve helped develop, we’re very excited for and confident in Valley Uprising’s success. But this email created an interesting opportunity for us to debunk several myths about the industry, financing, and what makes a marketable project. Plus some details about how smaller films get financed—and many of them can be applied to non-documentary film projects as well. So if you’ve been burning with some of the same questions, now’s as good a time as any to clear up a few misconceptions you might have about the niche filmmaking process! Misconception #1: Producing a niche film will put you into debt A financially successful film can be measured in not just its total sales, but rather more accurately in its percentage of return on investment, or “ROI”. Of the top three genres with the highest returns on investment, two may surprise you. The first on the list is horror—less surprising, since many low-budget horror flicks like The Blair Witch...
by Voyage | Jun 11, 2014 | Audience, Book to Film
Keys to Turning Your Book Into A Film Or Original Series – Part 4 Make Your Film Project Stand Out — Get Ahead on Time and Money In Part 3 of Keys to Turning Your Book Into A Film Or Original Series we talked about creating short form materials to help facilitate getting producers to read your work and this week we’re going to talk about why creating short form materials help a producer not just save time, but also save money. When a producer is deciding which projects to focus on, which aren’t projects to consider, and which projects to option and acquire, they’re largely considering three major things: What is their cost to bring the project to market? How much of an investment are they going to need to make? What’s the probable speed to market, meaning is the project efficient or inefficient? How much time will it take? Does the project meet the producer’s creative and market needs? These questions can help your film project stand out. A Closer Look at Costs The other thing to really understand is that producers in Hollywood are signatories of the Writers Guild of America. The Writers Guild of America is the union that manages all screenwriters and authors. In the case of a producer in Hollywood who’s the signatory to the union, when they’re looking at a novel to adapt, one of the first things that they’re likely to need to do is hire a screenwriter to develop the material into a treatment or screenplay. The minimum union scale for a writer in the Writers Guild of America is roughly...
by Voyage | May 2, 2014 | Audience, Entertainment Business
Know Your Market We always recommend starting at the end of the game. The end of the game is when you have audiences watching your content. Ultimately they are the buyers of the material and everyone else between you and them is basically trying to interpret and predict their needs, so you too will be well served to understand who your audience is and then develop the right product that they will want to “consume”. If you don’t know who your audience is, then you really don’t know what market you’re operating within. When I say market, I mean like are you operating as a studio, like a studio project. Is this a cable television project? Is it a network television project? Is it a meaning maker project? Is it an indie film? Is it a digital web series? What is the market that you’re operating within? In turn if you don’t know what market you’re in, then you won’t know how to potentially do two things: 1. Budget: You won’t know how to write the right material, meaning you won’t be creating the type of material that’s needed for that kind of market at the right price, meaning you can’t make $150 million web series, but you can make $150 million studio movie. That’s just a broad example of how the market’s going to dictate the budget. 2. Tone: You won’t know how to write your screenplay to hit a specific budget or you won’t know what budget you need to target and then you won’t know the correct tone. For example, a made for TV movie has...
