by Voyage | Oct 25, 2019 | Audience, Entertainment Business, The Expert Network
Voyage Media, with the help of our talented producers, writers, and storytellers, has built out incredible projects into films and television shows. Our projects have been written about by well-known media outlets, such as Variety and more. Check out our projects in the news below! In addition to the Voyage story in Variety, our platform has been featured quite a bit in the news, including on Broadcasting Cable News and Student Filmmakers! We’re also proud to announce our new joint venture with Impossible Dream Entertainment & Fortress films to develop and finance prestige independent films from the Voyage community. The partnership pairs Voyage’s extraordinary development track record with the production prowess of IDE’s Shaun Redick (GET OUT, THE BLACK KLANSMAN[i2] , BAND AID) and Fortress Films’ Patrick Rizotti (MALICIOUS, THE SUPER). Both IDE and Fortress have private equity backed financing. Finally, we had an incredible time at our IGNITE! 4.0 workshop, hosting thirty special storytellers and producers to collaborate and create market-ready projects. At our charity gala dinner, we raised money for our non-profit partners, Young Storytellers, which uses the timeless techniques of mentoring, collaboration, and performance to provide public school students with an opportunity to write stories and see them brought to life. A big and wonderful surprise came out of our IGNITE! weekend: an anonymous donor established the first ever Voyage scholarship, that provides deserving storytellers with financial assistance to gain access to high level mentor-ship and develop their stories for market. We’re always astounded with what comes out of those special weekends and what’s possible when you connect like-minded people all working toward a common goal! All...
by Voyage | Oct 10, 2017 | Book to Film, The Expert Network
3 TIPS FOR BOOSTING CREATIVITY IN 10 MINUTES OR LESS As creators we have all experienced the dreaded Writer’s Block in one-way or another. Whether you’ve caught the bug for a few hours or several days, you know just how debilitating it can be. So next time you’re feeling less-than-creative, blast your writers block with one of these three tips we love to use at Voyage. 1. Meditate Meditation is a wonderful way to clear your mind, which comes in handy when writer’s block strikes. Taking 10 minutes to yourself away from your creative project, technology, and other people can work wonders for the brain. And the best part is, there is no ‘right’ way to meditate! Sitting quietly in a cozy corner of your office for 10 minutes with your electronic devices silenced and out of sight, or counting your breaths for a couple of minutes are great ways to unplug. We love the app Headspace at the Voyage Office and use it to meditate every morning as a team. There’s an awesome 10-day free trial that gives all levels of users wonderful guidance for how reset and find clarity. Each guided meditation is 10 minutes and is a great way to start your day! 2. Do some wacky creative writing When you’ve been working with the same story and characters for months or years, it’s pretty easy to get bogged down by the details. To counteract that obstacle, put down your project and write something totally different. You still get to flex your writing muscles and by focusing on a new story, you will get your creative...
by Voyage | Oct 8, 2015 | Audience, Blog post, Entertainment Business, Font Page, Pitching, Presentations, Producer Interviews, Screenwriting Tips, The Expert Network
Inside The Comic Book Industry’s Latest Cool Thing… Let’s transport ourselves to a simpler time for just a moment… Imagine you’re back in middle school and your favorite limited edition comic book has just been released… You and your friends race to the local comic book shop after school to get your hands on the newest edition of “Captain America” or “Wonder Woman.” You wait patiently in line, with 25 cents burning a hole in your pocket… Finally, you get up to the counter and hand your pocket change to the clerk who slides over the goods. At last you get your hands on your coveted new comic book… And as you begin to flip the pages, a whole other world emerges… While this may or may not have been a reality for you, we can all agree that comic books and graphic novels have played an important role in pop culture and media. What you may or may not know is that there’s a thriving digital marketplace for NEW comics and NEW graphic novels with distribution and sales portals populating various corners of the Internet with readers of all ages scrambling to get their hands on the latest thing. And while we all know many of the blockbusters films we’ve come to know and love are based on comics from Marvel and DC, you may not know that comics and graphic novels have paid a very significant role in the development and sale of numerous other movies and TV series, some of which might surprise you… -30 DAYS OF NIGHT -CONSTANTINE -MYSTERY MEN – 300 -HELL BOY -THE...
by Voyage | Sep 11, 2015 | Entertainment Business, Producer Interviews, Screenwriting Tips, The Expert Network
John Crye, Producer Find out how to make Hollywood producers want to work with you again and again by building producer rapport using advice from industry veteran, John Crye. As part of our ongoing series, which asks our producers about their work in the entertainment business, I talked with John Crye, a current Hollywood producer and Voyage team member, about his work in the industry. Here you can read some of his own personal advice on building producer rapport in Hollywood, what a writer can do to make a producer’s life easier–and get them to fall in love with your script while they’re at it. Crye–the former director of Creative Affairs at Newmarket Films, who had a hand in acquiring such modern-day classics as Donnie Darko, Memento, and Whale Rider–has more recently moved on to independent writing, directing, and producing. In his many years in the entertainment business, he’s learned a lot from experience about the production world and the professionals who inhabit it. I asked him about any advice he had to give to writers thinking about entering the business, from the perspective of someone who had not only written himself but also worked extensively with writers as a producer. A common theme tended to reappear in his advice: understanding your producer’s needs is crucial to getting your story made in a way that’s satisfying for everyone. In the most basic terms: you need to make their job as easy as possible. So the question remains: why do YOU need to make their job easy? Aren’t THEY supposed to work for YOU? While a producer is indeed there...
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 | Aug 13, 2014 | Entertainment Business, Producer Interviews, Screenwriting Tips, The Expert Network
An expert producer’s look at the past, present, and future of serial programming Last week, I had the pleasure of talking with Kelly Hayes, a current Hollywood producer and Voyage team member, about what it’s like to work in all corners of the industry, and how the classic forms of development for network, cable, and film compare to the emerging market of digital streaming. This is the first of an ongoing series that asks our producers about their work in the entertainment industry so that YOU can learn from their wealth of experience! Hayes’ many credits have ranged from formats in scripted and reality television, film, and digital streaming series. Today, he has a lot of plates spinning in every market you can think of, with ongoing projects in half-hour comedy, hour-long drama, reality, and feature film. To say he’s got a bit of experience is an understatement. Although Hayes started his career in film, an economic downturn coupled with the WGA strike of 2008 served to destabilize the film industry, and prompted Hayes to look into other options. Television was his next best choice to keep following his passion—and it took some relearning to make it work. Looking Ahead The biggest change to the process of development in film and television was the notion of planning much further ahead into the future of the project. “It’s ’where do I see this show at episode 100?’” says Hayes of the development process for the life of a series, “versus, ‘I have 90 minutes to tell my story and then it’s done.’” The core of making a great...
