Film Courage: When a filmmaker is making their movie, what should they keep in mind while
making it and making sure they get a distribution deal? Are there things that they should target
making the film, changing certain scenes that they know distributors are going to want?
Let’s suppose they have their goldmine genre, they realize what they’re making and who
that audience might be, but in terms of securing a distribution deal, are there certain things
they should be aware of in making the film?
Scott Kirkpatrick, author: There are. A lot of them aren’t the obvious things in the
sense of filmmakers for the most part tend to focus on the movie, the movie, the movie,
and some of them (the more astute ones) will definitely put some time into trying to find
a name talent to put into the film.
But there’s a lot of paperwork and a lot of other details that go into the delivery
process of getting a movie to a distributor that become very important.
Having all your agreements in place with your talent, having all locations cleared, having
you know copyrights to everything but also having things like music, cue sheets, transcripts,
there’s a lot of these fine details that are in what are called material delivery lists
which are basically when you sign your movie over all the stuff you have to give to the
distributors so they can extrapolate and make any type of file spec any buyer might want,
you have to be able to give that to them so they are not incurring any costs on the back
end. That’s really your job as the producer.
The old vision is the old [Robert Rodriguez] EL MARIACHI, you know I can make a movie for
$7,000-$8,000 and sell it and while that’s true and that sort of happened, it was also
a long time ago and more importantly the company that bought it had to invest a lot of money
in finishing it and completing it and getting the audio fixed and getting the image fixed
and a lot of that stuff to make it market ready.
Companies aren’t ready to do that anymore because the model of supply and demand. There’s
a ton of supply and there’s focused demand. So maybe if you nail that demand, they’ll
help you out a bit but it’s not going to be much and so you have to be aware of what’s
your responsibility to cover. And there’s a lot of great resources on it if you just
Google around.
Film Courage: Music cue sheets and transcription. So with the transcription is someone just
transcribing it to English and then they’re taking that file and then it can be easily
done into any other language?
Scott Kirkpatrick: Correct. Like in addition to that, so it’s not the shooting script,
it’s actually the verbatim word-for-word, what is said but more importantly there’s
timecode on the page so you have a ballpark of what time in the movie it’s being said
and that’s for subtitling so that when they translate all the subtitles (all those cues)
they know about where it’s supposed to hit in the movie when they’re creating it.
There’s also things like when you’re doing the audio mix doing what they call M & E tracks
where you separate out, you have your stereo mixed tracks and then you have these other
two tracks that are all of the sounds and music of the movie but if you’re watching
it and you just have those two audio tracks playing, every single time somebody speaks
their mouth moves and no words come out that’s because we’ve wiped out all of the audio
and the reason is so when you dub it in a foreign language they only dub the audio,
the verbal, they don’t have to dub the whole movie and remix the whole movie they just
dump in the voice.
Film Courage: Interesting.
Scott Kirkpatrick: So you’ve got to make it ready for that kind of stuff, that kind
of thinking because that’s the way distributors think.
Film Courage: And then the music cue sheet? What would that be about?
Scott Kirkpatrick: The music cue sheet is a lot of broadcasters internationally every
single time a music piece is used that is affiliated with BMI, ASCAP, or one of the
unions (so to speak), the artist is given their fair share of the royalty because their
music is being used to sell a product.
So a lot of it is legal, a lot of it is documentation, a lot of it is just stuff that you just kind
of have to showcase…well you should have it to protect you and your making the movie,
but also to protect the distributor so that they know they can engage with your project
in the marketplace and they’re not going to have any issues later on.