The Importance of Box Art for Movie Distribution

Video Transcript

"KEVIN LINDENMUTH: This is Kevin Lindenmuth for Expert Village talking about distribution for your independent film or documentary. Another thing that helps with sales and distributors and such is many times distributors want like box art and photos and all that. They want the filmmaker to do those. I mean the distributors like nowadays, are somewhat lazy in my opinion because long ago, ten, fifteen, twenty years ago, you need to send them the movie or whatever and they were going to distribute it, they come up with a box art and all that stuff to make it saleable. I mean that was their job, they were the distributor. But nowadays, they want all that stuff to kinda come to them already so they don't have to do the work, which is kinda lame. But it'll help regardless because when you send, let's say movies, out to like a local paper to get reviewed on internet sites or something, it's always good to have something visual because for now, I was going to show a clip of it. So if you have like a picture or a poster, a documentary might just be the title with the couple of people's faces, what it's about, just to have something. For a feature, it's a little bit more complicated because if the science fiction film, you want to show that it's a cool science fiction film and probably find somebody to do the artwork, the box art. So, that's definitely the whole selling thing as well whether you kinda need that, whether you're going to do it yourself and just kinda sell it on your own, or if you go through distributor and for publicity. So you need like photos from the production whether they're frame grabs from the actual video or photos you take while you're there, that's really important. The box art, as I said, posters, flyers, whatever will help get the movie out there or whatever will get it noticed by people. That's the most important thing. So, definitely keep in mind that you need material to send along with your program."