How to Distribute Your Indie Film

Video Transcript

"You're all done with your film, and what do you do with it? Distribution is a whole other thing. It's as much works as making a production. So, you know, you have a feature. Let's say you did a vampire movie, or an alien movie or something. Who do you send it to? Well, you've got to find, and it's easy enough to find these companies, you want to try to get into the video stores or get it distributed by a company that distributes this type of stuff. Look them up on the Internet, go to your local video store, look at the horror movies, look at the back of the box, see who distributed them, and get their address and their name and send off an email or send off a sample of the movie and see if they'll take it to look at it. The general rule though is if you have a distributer who really loves your movie, its like, "oh yeah we could get it into the video stores, make a lot of money" blah blah blah, and they just want to give you residuals, you know, a percentage of whatever they sell. If they are just offering that, that means you are not going to get any money whatsoever, because you just never will. From my experience of doing twenty movies, I did that a couple of times, especially with my early films, and I got like no money for it. So it's not even worth it. So make sure if they want it, if they want it bad enough they'll give you something. It may only be a couple thousand dollars, but at least you have that money. Nowadays, I think its come back to you're able to sell the movie yourself. So sell it on the Internet, sell it at horror festivals or Sci-Fi conventions, whatever. There's definitely a market for that. I mean DVDs are easy enough to make you know, quality is high. You just have to make your box art, find somebody to do that, that's easy, and you know exactly where all the sales are going, you can keep track of it, and really you will probably make more money doing that then giving it to a distributor who is not going to pay you anything. But then again it depends on what you want. If you just want to get exposure, you want to get the movie into a store, well you might have to go through one of those distributors and just have a loss, and make another movie and hope you'll make more money on it. But, generally the people who basically get ripped off, get no money, those are the ones that never make another movie again, so, if you want to continue to do this, then there has to be, you know, the incentive is making the movie and making a creation that's really important because that is what got you through this entire thing. But you don't want to give it up at the end with distribution. You want to get it out there, have people see it. So do whatever you can to get it out there and hopefully not lose any money, hopefully make some money, which will allow you to make more movies because hey, if you want to make movies, you know, if you want to be a filmmaker, you've got to continue to make films."