We were thrilled to have so many of you join us for our webinar last Thursday, where we had a case study on the breakout success of the independent film, Hundreds of Beavers. The replay is above. Below you will find:
My Takeaways
Kurt’s responses to my long case study rubric - you will find lots of detailed information - some of it in the webinar - some not - in a systematic presentation.
Kurt’s 10 Things the HOB Team Did Well.
The 5 Things that HOB would do differently.
NOTE: This post is VERY LONG. The questionnaire itself is 22 pages. You will only get a portion of it in this now. But you can click to see it on the web and it will all be there.
We would also like to extend a special thank you to Hundreds of Beavers Producer Kurt Ravenwood and Filmmaker Magazine’s Scott Macaulay for being so generous with their time and information.
Our next webinar case study is scheduled for November 15th at 1pm ET - stay tuned for more information. Also below - I am doing a free workshop for IDA members tonight at 5pm PT on strategizing distribution. You can sign up here if you are an IDA member.
My Takeaways:
1. People Want to See Films in Theaters/Films Can Make Money
The film world has been struggling. New indie releases can have a tough time at the box office, motivating people to go to the theaters. TVOD revenue can be elusive.
HOB earned $650K gross in global box office (which means approximately $260K net after theaters take their split) and $150K+ in TVOD sales to date. They did this in part by:
2. Know Your Goal
If you read this Substack, you will know that having a goal is essential to a strategy. Kurt and his team were clear from the beginning - make money to pay back the investors.
3. Use your Festivals to Adjust and Hone Your Strategy
“Every film has obstacles and strengths. You need to find out where your strengths and obstacles lie - and market the film towards THAT.” Kurt Ravenwood and the HOB team used festivals to test audiences and what was resonating with them which informed their strategy. Filmmakers should be creating a strategy before festivals - but festivals are a great way to test that strategy.
4. Pivot when Appropriate
Kurt and filmmakers originally thought their audience was middle aged dads. However at festivals they saw their true audience emerging (the dads never did show up live). Nerds, collectors, Adult Swim fans, Rick and Morty fans, silent movie fans. They then doubled down on these audiences.
5. Eventize Your Events & Invest in Your Ground Game
Invest in making a GREAT SHOW for people who come to theaters. Make events FUN. (They had mascots, wrestling, merch.) Interact with your audience, try to really build a community that is responsive around the film + that gets more excited to share it with their friends.
6. Organic Social Can Work - If you Work it (and if your audience wants to engage).
Create content people want to share. If it makes sense for your film - tell jokes through your content that resonate with your audience. HOB made Parody posters from other films and funny videos. Advertise the fact that your events are FUN. Team filmed content to illustrate people truly having a BLAST at their screenings. For their LA premiere, they went ahead to make a fur-red carpet + got Getty images to cover the LA premiere. This lead got write ups in Variety and publications.
Look for what is resonating well in your social media posts and do more! You must be hands-on and attentive to performance on social media for it to be effective. Engage with people’s comments. See what is resonating content-wise, and do more of that! With a caveat that Kurt was on social constantly and devoted many hours to this for himself and the staff of his marketing agency.
7. Eventize Your VOD Release
HOB realized that people can have fun + make an event around their movie at home on TVOD. When they worried people wouldn't have as much fun watching at home, they created an at-home drinking game and encouraged watch parties. They learned pets liked watching their film and created funny ads directed at pet owners to encourage them to rent/buy the film.
8. Consider Using Influencer Marketing
Kurt and team hired an influencer marketing agency to support their VOD release.
The agency sent out 50 packages (merch, video link to VOD launch and a ‘beaver pelt’.) Influencers would then record themselves “unboxing” the package +speaking in their own voice about the film.
9 Letterbox for Ads When Appropriate
On Letterboxd - the team noticed they were the 2nd most popular film in people’s “watchlists” on the site. HOB spent $2500 on Letterboxd to put the film in front of the people who had it on their watch list and display ads. Nice targeting if appropriate for your film’s audienc.
10 Be Careful how you Split Rights
The 100 Beavers team made a deal with Cineverse/ Fandor. They carved out various rights (theatrical/ physical media/ merchandise + TVOD) AVOD and SVOD went to Fandor. They wished they had kept AVOD - they didn’t realize what a revenue stream this was. Working with a more conventional distributor also means that you need to cater to their timeline and HOB would have benefited from a much longer TVOD window than the 1 week they had because they didn’t want to rock the boat with their distributor by arguing to push back the SVOD which canibalized their TVOD.
Bonus Takeaways:
1. Merchandise Can Work If you Have the Right Film
The 100 Beavers team noticed early-on at festivals that members of their audience included people that were avid ‘collectors’ of things. Having merch available at their shows helped spread the message of the film, and deepened some audience member’s connection to the experience they had in the cinema. Merch became a part of the income the team began to rely on to cover things like filmmaker travel to appear at events.
2. Low and Slow
Listen to what's happening around your movie rather than pushing it out in one big swoop. As Kurt said: “Low and slow (like a brisket)” is the way to do it.
Sticking to our guns and not signing a distribution deal that wasn’t going to get our film into culture.
Storytelling, press, creating a “scene” around our movie.
Always entertaining people at every chance we got - never being boring, or presumptive, or lazy. Shaking hands, being proud of our film, having no shame.
Fanning the flames of cult fandom. We did a LOT to encourage a rocky-horror type scene around the movie.
Engineering the entire film to be truly “like nothing you’ve ever seen” while also delivering a pretty straight-up-the-middle satisfying hero’s journey.
Being very kind and supportive to indie theaters, providing them with a lot of marketing support and materials to pack the house.
We played the organic social media game really, really well - the social channels became their own “scene” around the movie with in-jokes and recurring memes.
We feel that we ordered our windows in a good way that they would stack and have compounding effects as the “snowball” grew larger and larger.
Using an aggregator like filmhub to go direct to TVOD platforms and get real-time payments was a very good choice.
We were persistent - we are two years into our release and still going at it! It takes a lot to cut through the noise.
Kurt’s Top 5 Things They Felt They Could Improve Upon/Mistakes They Made/Would Do Differently
Wouldn’t try to go to every single film festival we get into, it ultimately took a lot out of us energy-wise and we were down to our last gasp when release finally came around.
Would have done more asking around for what rights people are making the most money on… AVOD would have been nice to keep.
We tried to introduce the hashtag #ExposeTheBeavers but it didn’t really work. ‘
We would have sold our international rights much later in the process.
When we started the road show people were sharing hotel rooms, but then we realized we’re not 22 any more and it’s good that everyone has their own room, no matter how expensive.
Jon Reiss Substack Case Study Questionnaire
Below are Kurt’s responses to my case study rubric:
Your Name: Kurt Ravenwood
Your Film: Hundreds of Beavers
Goals
What was the primary goal with the release?
We wanted to pay back our investors so we could make our next movie, which we would budget modestly higher.
What was the secondary goal with the release?
To get the movie seen as widely as possible in movie theaters.
Did the goals change over the course of the release – if so how?
Nope!
Do you feel you met your goals? And why?
Yep! We can happily say that 5 months after release all of the investors
Film Background and Release Timeline:
When did you start filming? 2019
When did you start post? 2019 - continuous as we were shooting
When was the film finished? 2022
Distribution:
What was your overall distribution strategy?
Initially it was to talk to distributors we met through our network and hope they would give us a $300,000 minimum guarantee. Seriously. That’s what we thought would happen.
The highest MG we were offered was $30,000, and the plan with that distributor was to put the film in theaters for a week and then go straight to VOD.
So, we started slowly making a plan B of doing our own road show based on Q&A antics that were working at film fest Q&A’s.
After one final decline at Sitges, where we had multiple sold-out screenings and a lot of great fan reactions - we decided to move forward with hybrid self-distribution: plan B.
We split our rights up:
All worldwide rights outside of North America: Contracted to our Sales Reps Raven Banner releasing, who met at Fantasia.
SVOD, AVOD, Non-Theatrical: Sold to Fandor / Cineverse. Cineverse originally offered us $15k MG for all North American rights, but we “carved out” ones we wanted to keep, moving the MG down to $9k. We regret selling them AVOD, we didn’t realize at the time what a cash cow it could be, and thought we’d be able to build a digital funnel using TVOD (which, turns out, we were wrong, but more on that later).
TVOD, Physical, Theatrical: We kept these rights in North America because we felt we could handle the effort it took to exploit them and make our investors their money back.
The Plan:
Launch an attention-grabbing theatrical run in cities where we have a story and audience built-in: The Midwest. Pay for it with merchandise and ticket sales.
Use that attention to build a wider audience online. If available, use money from the theatrical and merch sales to fund social advertising.
Use attention and audience to justify premieres in NYC and LA (NOT four-walls), hoping to hit major press outlets and cultural influencers.
Once we have traction in culture, release the film exclusively on TVOD at the highest price possible to capture demand.
After two weeks of premium TVOD, Fandor releases the film on SVOD and AVOD.
When in the production/post process did you start developing this strategy?
Once it became clear - after our Fantasia audience award in July of 2023 - that no distributor of note was going to buy the film from us, we started earnestly making our plan B.
Did you budget for and raise money for distribution and marketing? When? How much?
We didn’t budget for it, but we raised an additional $20,000 to kickstart our campaign.
Overall cost of release?
Approximately $135,000
Road Show $30,000K Jan 26th-Feb 10th across Midwest - up to Toronto to cover travel, perdiems. Merch sales eclipsed ticket sales and both combined paid for the costs of the road show.
Theatrical booking: Total approx $25K
Publicity $30,000K this covered festivals, theatrical and VOD
Advertising $25,000 this covered theatrical and VOD
Influencer marketing $6,000
Large scale social media engagement was done by producers and SRH at no cost - this would have normally cost between $150K-$250K if they were paid for it.
Overall Revenue
To date (10/1/2024) We have grossed around $800,000 worldwide between theatrical, VOD, MG’s in international territories, and merchandise. We have yet to see reports for SVOD / AVOD / Non-Theatrical via Fandor / Cineverse.
Did you have any existing deals - such as broadcast or other that affected your strategy.
Fandor / Cineverse is the only partner we have outside of our international sales rep Raven Banner, and as stated above we worked closely with them to coordinate our windows.
Domestic Sales:
Did you have a domestic sales agent? We do not.
Events - Festivals
Note if festivals are not a part of your strategy we can touch on why and move on.
What was your festival strategy? Why? We originally wanted to premiere at TIFF or SXSW but were balancing completion of the film with timing of festivals. After rejections from some of the majors, we just went with the biggest one that accepted us: Fantastic Fest, which played us on a virtual slate.
Premiere festival? Date? Fantastic Fest - September 29, 2022
How many other festivals? We ended up playing around 55 film festivals around the world from September 2022 to December 2023.
When did your festival run finish? December 2023
Did you make money on your festivals? How much? After our buzzy screening at Fantasia, we started getting REQUESTS to play festivals, which was new for us, so we started charging around $250 for a screening. We probably made $3,500 from it overall but spent that and more to travel.
Who booked festivals? Ryland Tews, wearing his producer hat.
Comments/reflections/notables about your festival release:
It never really felt possible to “do a deal” at a festival. We’d meet people and maybe have a video meeting afterward, but wherever the rooms are where people “make deals,” we couldn’t find them.
We traveled to a LOT of festivals right away, thinking we were going to meet decision-makers from distribution companies, but that was rare. In the future, we probably won’t travel to as many festivals. But we do think it was important in laying the groundwork for our actual release.
That said, this graph is telling:
As far as interest in our movie measure by search volume goes, we didn’t start picking up until our theatrical release. There are little bumps for some of our bigger festivals appearances, but it’s not clear playing in a ton of festivals moved the needle for us from an awareness perspective.
Where we believe it WAS helpful, was when we started our wider theatrical release, many towns like Atlanta or Seattle had already screened us during a festival, and programmers there had fond memories of good screenings, meaning we could get a foot in the door to book a theatrical screening.
Theatrical
Did you do a theatrical release? Yes
Did you have a distributor/booker? If so who and how did that come about?
We handled distribution ourselves, but it would not have been possible had we not been introduced to Jessica Rosner, an independent theatrical booker who has a strong network built up over years of exhibition.
What was the strategy for the theatrical? See above.
Overall, we wanted to create a “run, don’t walk” vibe, by using eventized aspects and keeping screenings to one-night-only in most cities. We also chose to NOT screen in chain theaters, focusing instead on theaters that were good at marketing and building their own built-in audience.
How many cities? Initially we did live Q&A / Eventized aspects in 14 cities, then expanded to other theaters (not eventized) via Jessica’s network.
In LA and NYC, we decided to show up and do live shows because it was clearly working.
How much revenue? We’re around $500k domestically, $650k overall. This is gross revenue.
Comments/reflections/notables about the theatrical:
By far, the most important thing we did. The images of our theatrical run and the press it generated is what got the film on people’s radar so the word of mouth machine could get started.
It had to be “ must be seen to be believed” vibes.
This video used footage we gathered during the road show to create a digital ad for any market we played in during our theatrical run.
Windowing Events
How were the events above windowed in relationship to each other? (we can address this when we talk about all distribution as well.
VOD/Broadcast/Digital
What was your strategy around VOD/Broadcast/Digital
Try to capture as much momentum as possible with premium TVOD numbers. This actually ended up not working because Apple and Amazon immediately discounted the film without asking and we were told we couldn’t do anything about it.
Did you have a digital distributor or aggregator? Yes - Filmhub.
Direct to fan from your website or other platform? I wish. We want to do this in the future so we can control pricing and data.
Any PVOD or film drops or other prior to traditional TVOD? We tried but the platforms cut our pricing down.
What was the order of VOD in relationship to Events? See above
Total revenue to date from VOD? Around $200k from TVOD, we’re not sure on SVOD / AVOD yet.
Any Airlines/Cruise ship revenue? We know that Cineverse has sold some rights to airlines and other non-theatrical, but we have not received our producer’s report yet, so we don’t know where any of that is at.
Comments/reflections/notables about VOD/Broadcast/Digital?
Filmhub has been great to deal with.
I wish we had understood that there’s more money in AVOD these days than TVOD. No one told us that, and I wish we had kept our rights directly. That said, we are hoping that Fandor doesn’t “Hollywood Account” us too much and we see a nice chunk of revenue from them after the Tubi sale.
In general, it would be really nice to have a digital funnel - where you can see how much money you need to spend at the “top of the funnel” to get a sale at the “bottom of the funnel.” This is basics in ecommerce, but because Amazon and Apple are a black box, we don’t know our conversion rates… i.e. how many people land on the page vs how many people rent or buy.
What worked - what didn’t work (this can be expanded as needed - connected with marketing below).
Amazon optimized our prices down almost immediately, so we didn’t make as much money as we’d hoped… but there’s a chance that spurred demand and spiked sales.
We’d also like to understand if the movie’s been torrented a ton, not sure where to find that data.
Physical Merch
Did you create merch - including DVDs/BluRays?
Yes… our blu-ray, which launches at the end of this year, is hotly anticipated in the physical media community. We believe it will be the definitive version of the film and strove to make it a collectors item. I can’t give too many more details at this time.
Did you have a strategy around merch? If so what?
Yes - make a few key items like shirts, posters and hats:
https://hob.singleservemerch.com/
And then we did a few limited edition drops, especially of a raccoon baseball cap inspired by the film, and more recently, halloween masks. The caps were $45 and the masks were $90 and we sold out of each almost immediately since we limited the runs.
We also do fan art collaborations - when we see cool fan art online, we make a limited run of prints and share the profits with the artist 50/50.
Anything out of the ordinary? Books/Vinyl?
We want to do a vinyl but are having trouble making the numbers work. Most of the music in our film is library music so we have to license it.
We want to do a VHS down the road, and we also want to do a video game someday.
Comments/reflections/notables about Merch?
We are unique in that our film is very merchandisable, so merch has been a big revenue source for us. It also obviously works as advertising for the movie.
But the most important thing to us is that we make cool shit people actually want to wear.
What worked - what didn’t work (this can be expanded as needed - connected with marketing below).
We can’t figure out how to get it overseas in a way that makes sense. For our European fans, it’s frustrating because sometimes shipping costs are more expensive that the items themselves.
International
Did you have a foreign sales agent and/or direct sales? Yes, our agents are Raven Banner.
If foreign sales agent - what were the deal terms? 15 years, all WW rights. $15k “market costs” had to be recouped by RB before we started seeing income.
Revenue? So far, ten territories sold for a total of $60,000 in MG’s. We’ve been told not to expect residuals outside of that, but who knows… maybe someday.
Comments/reflections/notables about international sales?
We sold them too early in the process, they should have been the last thing we sold, but we didn’t know any better.
Raven Banner didn’t have success until AFTER the film became a hit in the United States. So we would have been in a better negotiating position if we’d waited until it got big in the USA, and then worked with a rep.
Overall though, we’re happy to have beavers taking the world by storm - it was designed to travel well, having no dialogue. It’s been a hit in the UK and Eastern Europe, and it will release in Japan, France, and Latin America soon.
Marketing
What was your overall marketing strategy?
I call it the “Chaotic Snowball” - just try to keep the thing rolling downhill and growing, understanding that it’s going to move slowly at first, but eventually it will go out of control.
When did you start audience engagement in the following areas and what was most successful in the marketing of the film?
We launched our digital presence in February of 2023 – website, social media, and merch store (Etsy at first).
I’ll give details below, but I want to be clear about one thing: the success of beavers was kicked off with its marketing, but the fact that the film is so finely crafted by Mike, Ryland & Crew, got rave reviews, and entertained the shit out of audiences, is why we were ultimately successful.
I knew that after someone SAW this film, they would tell people about it. How could you not?
Mike and Ryland also named it “hundreds of beavers” which is hard to forget.
And at the center of the film is a highly distinctive beaver outfit that’s funny in almost any situation.
So the film gave me a lot to work from.
Organic Social Media
What was your organic social media strategy?
ABSURD, UNEXPECTED, OFFBEAT
The tone of the movie should match the tone of the social. Our film had been described by critics as “anarchic” so our social media matched that vibe. We played with different styles, and didn’t worry about our Instagram feed being beautiful. There were always weird surprises.
DON’T ENGAGE THE HATERS
We never ever engaged haters or put out purposefully controversial opinions. Our film is meant to entertain, not have a message, so we just focused on entertaining.
GO FOR SHARES, NOT FOLLOWERS
You can literally just pay for followers on social, but our goal was to have a core group of engaged followers who would be evangelists for the movie. Even though we have only 5,000 followers on twitter, for example, our average tweet gets tens of thousands of views, and about four or five times a month we get enough retweets to receive hundreds of thousands of views.
GNAW YOUR WAY INTO THE CONVERSATION
We quickly jumped on (non-controversial, non-political) trends with opportunistic parody posters that were widely reshared.
LISTEN TO LETTERBOXD
I constantly monitored our Letterboxd reviews. I shared some of the funnier ones with our social audience, and looked at ways people were responding to the film to tweak our social content.
When did you start organic social?
February 2023
What was helpful in this process?
Being always on my phone, grabbing at every opportunity to amplify our impact.
What platforms did you focus on? Starting #s and Current #s?
Instagram and Twitter are our two main platforms. We do a lot of reposting of content on Tik-Tok but are not very active. Facebook simply mirrors Instagram.
Could you tell how it was affecting your overall campaign?
Hugely, especially twitter. We get a lot of awareness via organic social.
Any particular high points/ examples from the campaign?
Being able to retweet or reshare things celebrities say about us is my favorite part. Most recently David Cross gave us a shoutout on a podcast.
We did multiple Reddit AMA’s that were very funny and successful.
Comments/reflections/notables about social media?
So many - a lot of my job on this release was to be in the trenches of social media, interactive with our audience, building awareness brick by brick. It can get addicting but it’s very rewarding at the same time.
Initially we were just using a Wix site that I would update with theatrical screenings, but once our screenings got in the hundreds it became way to much work.
We had heard of this company called Powster who had a movie platform that scrapes all screenings and available VOD platforms. We worked with them to build our current site, which we’re quite happy with. $7500 for the website.
Anything special regarding short form content that you created for the promotion of the film?
We did short form content on Tik Tok, a series of videos of the beaver getting into trouble around Milwaukee. They were fun! They never really like, took off or anything, but I still think they are funny:
The second ad was especially effective, we designed it to be purposefully disruptive to a scrolling experience… hopefully in a funny tongue in cheek way that makes fun of our modern conspiracy theory culture.
When we went on VOD, I shifted most of our spend to display ads on Letterboxd and influencer spending.
How much did you spend in each campaign?
We spent about $25,000 total on paid digital ads.
Results from campaign? Did you feel it moved the needle?
Again, I’ll have to dig up official results but overall yes it very much moved the needle in concert with all of our other activities.
Any other comments about paid ads?
Nope!
Press/Earned Media
What was your earned media strategy?
Earn as much media as possible hahaha.
We knew that we had to create a story, and that story was different for two audiences:
Wisconsin / Midwest General Pop: “Local boys done good and made a movie”
National Film Lovers: “This DIY movie is getting a DIY release and bucking every trend in independent film”
When did you start engaging the earned media?
We first did PR for fantasia in July of 2023, based on the advice of a distributor who passed on the film.
Did you hire a publicist?
Yes! We hired Justin Cook, who had done PR on the guys’ previous film Lake Michigan Monster.
For which parts of your release?
Three: Major festival (Fantasia 2023), Theatrical / VOD release (January through May 2024), and we’re hiring him again now as we close our our release with the blu-ray launch.
Did you find it helpful? If so how?
Extremely - he coordinated interviews, managed many different publications, sent out press releases, coordinated our LA premiere, got our Rotten Tomatoes reviews on the site…
We will end up paying around $30,000 total dollars in publicity this year and it will have been well worth it. We have reviews in almost every major publication, and a lot of features in print.
Any other comments about earned media?
Earned media is great but you have to do two things:
Create a great story for reporters to cover, a story that is BIGGER than the film itself
Always recirculate every press hit on social media
Email/Newsletter
What was your email/newsletter strategy?
We promised early insights, news, updates and exclusive merch for signing up for our email newsletter.
When did you start collecting email addresses?
During our theatrical release, we started our mailchimp along with our new website.
How did you collect/capture these email addresses?
Mailchimp - signup on our website and our linktree.
How emails did you have at the beginning and now currently?
Zero at beginning, currently around 4,000
What was most helpful in obtaining email addresses?
Good question! I think just having a call to action on the bottom of our website, and occasionally doing merch drops only to email subscribers helped.
What were the main contributors to email sign ups? Screenings, Website prompt, Other?
Social media prompting.
How often do you email your list?
About once a month.
Any other comments about email signups/newsletter?
It’s great! We hope to keep building it without getting spammy. It’s important to give people real value for signing up. We’ll continue to think about exclusive offers we can give.
Partner/Sponsor Outreach
What was your outreach strategy?
We didn’t really do any sponsorships or organizational tie-ins, but we’d like to some day. Laird’s applejack would be first on our list. Just didn’t have time to add this to the pile.
We DID do some partner content with letterboxd that got a lot of views.
Mike did a VFX breakdown of the film for Letterbox
Influencers
What was your influencer strategy?
We knew influencers were going to be big - ESPECIALLY YouTube influencers. Your Movie Sucks, and Schafrillas are two big youtube channels that were fans of Lake Michigan Monster, and so from the get-go we knew they would be kind to our second film.
Beyond that, I just noted any time someone with a lot of followers would follow us, and was quick to DM and network, sometimes sending free merch.
So, the strategy was sort of organic - we didn’t get too precious about targeting or channel, whoever wanted to shout out the film, we supported.
We also spent about $6,000 sending out packages to influencers filled with merch and a funny “letter from Jean Kayak” with a “fur pelt” and a QR code to watch the movie. We did this with a company called Team Click out of LA. There was no guarantee that the influencers would post, but a majority of them did and we received around 1 million full views of their content, and 18.7 million impressions.
Did you have any individual influencers (not organizations) with large reach involved in the campaign?
Yes
If so, who were they and what was their reach?
I think our largest was “Just the Nobodys” with 9.5 million.
How many posts did they do for you and when?
41 did posts, and it was mostly in April to support our VOD campaign.
Can you talk about this process of working with them?
We didn’t work directly with them, just sent them care packages.
Did you pay any influencers? Micro-influencers?
Not directly, just with packages.
Did you use an agency?
Yep, Team Click.
How effective was your influencer strategy? Can you give specifics?
I think pretty damn good. We did SO much in April that it’s hard to tell which influencers were seeded with the intentional influencer strategy, and which were organic from having seen the film.
For example, Dan Povenmire, creator of Fineas and Ferb, did a RAVE about it on his social, but we didn’t set that up. It still got tons of views.
Any other comments about influencers?
So great because you get awareness and fan content you can reshare. Really good use of money in my opinion.
Other Marketing – Street teams, Key Art, Trailer, Sponsorships, Stunts?
Any other marketing that wasn’t covered above that was significant for your campaign/helped drive audience?
Key Art - We invested thousands in our poster which was hand-drawn and purposefully unlike anything in the contemporary key art space, which helped the movie stick out and cut through the noise.
Street teams: In New York we handed out flyers and in several cities we had the mascots walking around shaking hands ahead of screenings.
Podcasts: Podcasts were huge too, I suppose this is part of earned media but it often wasn’t our publicist who set them up. We would receive requests directly from people like Joe Dante or Chapo Trap House.
IDA Workshop this Thursday
I've done many workshops for IDA throughout the years and I'm excited to be doing another this Thursday night!
The film industry is changing rapidly, and it's more important than ever for independent filmmakers to understand how to navigate the new landscape. In this workshop, I'll share practical tips and strategies for reaching your audience and achieving your distribution goals.
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