How to Create a Business Plan for Film Making

Video Transcript

"SCOTT DUPONT: Hi. Scott duPont, welcome back to Film Producing 101. I've produced almost a dozen videos, DVDs, feature films, all kinds of projects and one of the first things we're going to cover in this topic on behalf of Expert Village, is what you're going to include in your business plan. Now, I can't possibly in two or three minutes write your whole business plan for you, outline all the details, but these are just some of the things that once you build your team, okay, you really should have in your business plan and any investor will expect most of these items. First thing is going to be a disclosure of risk. And your entertainment attorney which you already have access to and have on board, they'll be able to help you with that. Number two would be something about your script or the "Script Synopsis" 'cause you gotta start with a great script and investors are going to want to know a little bit about the script, not necessarily the whole script, although that might be something separately they might ask for. Company, management and organization. This would include you as the producer, any other producers or co-producers, the director, of course, and then key production team members. If you have your director of photography on board, if you have any advisers on board, if you have a gaffer that does all the lighting on board, especially anyone that has a resume or a lot of experience 'cause remember this is our first feature film, that really adds a lot of credibility. And then here's some other things I have, an industry overview. If you're giving this to a family member or friend or someone that's never invested in a film before, they might want to have some background knowledge about the industry and about how investing in a film actually works. Then you want to have a budget, normally you can just have what's called the top sheet which is the first page. A detailed budget, we'll get into that a little bit later. How the corporation or LLC is structured, how the investment is structured within that. This is really important-- how money is returned to investors, the specific plan. The track record of any team members, if anyone in your team has successfully distributed some movies. And then I have a page in here, additional steps to lower risk to investors. And then the last page is usually questions, any team member's contact information or any way that investors can follow up in case they have any questions. Thanks for watching Expert Village. We'll be right back with our next segment. It's getting exciting. "