Running Time & Film Distribution

Video Transcript

"KEVIN LINDENMUTH: This is Kevin Lindenmuth for Expert Village talking about distribution for your independent film or documentary. The running time of the program is important because it somewhat determines your distribution. With features, I believe they have to be over seventy-five minutes, seventy-seventy-five minutes before they're considered like a feature film. And, of course, DVD distribution, people want extras. So, not only do you have to make the program and you got to put together a mini documentary or blooper reel or whatever, 'cause they always ask for the extra stuff now. For documentaries, it's a slightly different thing, for like an hour long documentary the longest it could be is fifty-eight minutes and thirty seconds. Let's say for PBS there's the general broadcast length they want, it could be between fifty-six minutes, fifty-eight-thirty and that's for documentary. For a feature, again, seventy-five minutes, it could be as long as you want but I wouldn't advise making a three hour movie. For shorts and stuff, it just depends of where you want to send it. Some websites and such and some competitions they specify, you can't be any longer than twenty minutes, fifteen minutes, whatever. So, the length really again depends on what you have in mind for distribution and even though distribution might not be in your mind until where you're going to send it and while you're making the movie, you just should have some inkling of it. I mean, it just kind of think it out that, well, when the movie is done, I'm going to send it here, and as for this, it should be this long. It'll just make it a lot easier because the whole filmmaking process, and there's all the planning now stage. And so, distribution is the same thing. I mean, you're planning it out somewhat as much as you can."