Becoming a filmmaker in 2020, who’d be crazy enough to try such a thing without the adequiet capital and resources? Well, i decided i am ready, and just about crazy enough.
I’ve been working with video production, primarily in the documentary format since 2014, i’ve produced over 500 videos from startup commercials, social ads, journalistic interviews to short form documentary to long form documentary in a second language.
I am fast approaching the 10 000 hours apparently needed to be called a professional by certain persons in certain industries. Either way, i have now grown the skills and confidence i needed to produce a feature length film, and monetize it, that is to turn this passion project in to a production i can actually sell. It begs the question, how does one monetize a film in 2020?
Having been down the road with a number of taxpayer funded organisations over the years i am acutely aware that as a amature filmmaker, time spent chasing funding, making connections and filling out paperwork is time spent not making films.
Coupled with the notion of being put in competition with thousands of other filmmakers and you can see how the fiery passion can quickly get extinguished by the shear pre-production work load brought about by this path toward publication.
That’s not to say there is any less workload taking the filmtrepreneurial path, or indeed any less reliance on industry organisations, quite the opposite in fact.
However, it is a path that offers more individual control and potentially less unforeseen complexities, as it is the films producers that drive everything forward in tandem. The pre/pro/post production processes appear to be merging in to one another, having to build awareness about your project before you’ve even pressed record.
Developing an audience for your film before even having materials to promote it with, forces you to define the film in the public realm, before you the filmmaker are even sure of the end result.
While The Fakefluencer Film has a clear story structure and defined fleshed out characters, with reasons to be and motivations to enact, what is not clear is the unknowns up ahead in production, the known unknowns.
This is a tricky line to walk for anyone creating something from scratch, but in the digital realm, it is nothing new. New consumer products go up on web shops all the time that have only been developed to a prototype level; in order for manufacturers to gage consumer response and so decide whether to pursue the new product or not.
While this makes sense for consumer products, when building an audience for a film where do the motivations between consumers of physical items and consumers of visual content converge? where do they deviate? At this stage in the production of the film i am not sure, but by going down the filmtrepreneurial path i intend to find out.
I was inspired to do so after watching the video below featuring Alex Ferrari, an industry hustler, check out how he explains the filmtrepreneurial model in this excellent video with This Guy Edits.
Want to support me on this filmtrepreneurial journey?
Grab a free ticket to the show: https://www.thefakefluencer.com/freeticket
Follow the project on Twitter: https://twitter.com/thefakefluencer
And share this post with a friend.
Respect to all the filmmakers out there mad enough to take on such a journey.