by Voyage | Aug 10, 2015 | Audience, Book to Film, Entertainment Business, Pitching
The Key to Getting Your Project into Production For creators like us, generating content comes pretty naturally (excluding the occasional writers block of course). That’s why we do what we do. But as you probably have experienced first hand, writing and conceptualizing isn’t always the hard part; it’s money. Finding investors who are interested in funding your project can be incredibly difficult. It’s the ultimate catch 22 in a creator’s life—investors want to give money to projects that are well known and bound for success, but a project can’t become well known and successful without money from investors. If you don’t have a very generous great uncle waiting in the wings to donate to your creative project, I have the perfect solution to help you out with this age-old dilemma… ***Crowdfunding*** Crowdfunding is the practice of funding a project or venture by raising many small amounts of money from a large number of people, typically via the Internet (google.com). Whether or not you’ve heard of crowdfunding before, I’m here to tell you that it should absolutely be on your radar as a tool to finance part (or all) of your project. Websites like Kickstarter.com and Indiegogo.com give you the chance to get your project or ideas off the ground without having to go out and solicit investors the traditional way. These crowdfunding platforms by nature create a reciprocal relationship between investors (who pledge money) and creators (who offer various perks to backers who donate). And it works because everyone is benefiting from the partnership, and the momentum that comes with having so many supporters is exactly what you...
by Voyage | Aug 5, 2015 | Audience, Entertainment Business, Screenwriting Tips
How to untangle the web “Googling yourself” has sort of become the punchline of the digital era—it’s degraded as a vain and silly pastime of the erstwhile millennial. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. Far from just an ego trip, Googling yourself can be crucial to building your online presence as a writer. I’d like to encourage you to Google yourself right now. Take a moment, I’ll wait. What are some of the first pages that pop up. Your social media sites—Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, your personal blog? Or is Google drawing a big blank? There is a time and a place for the reclusive, mysterious, off-the-grid writer—but falling into that description can be dangerous for the up and coming. The Internet makes it easier than ever for producers, directors, and financiers to find out what you’re all about. And social media searching has become more and more commonplace as a tool for weeding out the unprofessional or unmotivated writers from the writers with serious passion and marketability. Make no mistake: the question on the forefront of a producer’s mind is going to be “how can I market this?” If your website or blog has any sort of following, it means your Internet presence comes with a built-in audience AND that you’ve already got a huge advantage over the throngs of other writers trying to get noticed! It gives the producer a sort of “cheat” into your market—they’ll thank you for having less work to do to create a finished product that people will watch. With so much riding on the kind of persona you exhibit online, there’s...
by Voyage | Jun 25, 2015 | Audience, Entertainment Business
One of the worst things that a screenwriter or an author or any content creator can do in their career is operate in a vacuum or think that they’ve got to figure everything out on their own and learn everything by themselves. For some reason, content creators take it upon themselves to think of their pursuit as a lonely one – like this romantic image of a writer stuck in a hotel room in a foreign country writing by himself. If you’re a content creator looking to achieve a result in Hollywood, then you’re going to be really well served to not just learn on your own, but learn from other people’s mistakes and successes and then leverage that learning into your own career. What Makes a Good Mentor There’s a world-renowned success psychologist named Martin Seligman and one of the things that he modeled or created was a framework for identifying who’s a mentor. In other words, who’s worth listening to and who’s not? He said a mentor, a quality mentor who can help you achieve a significant result or a significant outcome, has to satisfy one or more of the following three things. 1) They have to have done successfully what it is you’re trying to do. 2) They have to have helped others achieve success – helped other successfully do exactly what it is you’re trying to do. 3) They are world renowned experts in the field. Anyone who does not satisfy one or more of those equations is not a mentor worth listening to. If they’re not meeting one or more of those equations, they’re...
by Voyage | Dec 12, 2014 | Audience, Entertainment Business
One of the most frequent requests that we get here at Voyage Media is, can you give me some names and contact information? Or, how do I get contact information for producers so I can send them my material? Getting contact information is actually quite easy. I can tell you right now exactly how to do it. You get an IMDB Pro account and research contacts yourself. You can find their production company contact info, their representation info, and info for their agents, lawyers, managers, and so forth. Pay a small subscription fee and you can have it all right there at your fingertips. But there’s nothing special about getting that information. Why “Contacts” Are a Dead End The problem is that it’s not the contact information that matters. Even if you have some incredible pitch prepared, that contact is not going to take your call in the first place. And even if they did take your call, odds are, they’re not going to accept your script or whatever it is you’re trying to send them. There are simply too many people out there with books or screenplays or projects in development, trying to get something to happen for their project. There are so many people out there doing this that if you don’t have some form of credibility and you haven’t been vetted by someone trustworthy, there’s no reason why they would spend any time with you. These agents, managers, and producers have 30 other projects on their desk that have been vetted by the industry in some way and have proven their credibility…. How Do You Gain...
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...
