Greetings, I'm David Basulto, founder and dean of Film School on Demand and Podcast host at filmmakingcentral.com. This is the reality of indie film financing or what they don’t teach you in film school.
You see in the good old days you take your project to a finance entity or to the studio. They had it read by their development team, they love it because it was amazing project and then they cash flow at your movie and then everything was great and it was a perfect world. But the reality now the good old days are no longer here. You must have elements and package your film. For example, you must have name cast or tax free base et cetera and we’ll talk about that in a second.
There are a very few entities now that exist that would just write your check. As you can see in the trades or newspapers once in a while there are studios that actually do deals together to make a film because they don’t know one person really wants to be left caught holding the bill. It’s best to spread the risk around and its trickle down to the independent filmmaker.
So as an independent film maker what can you do? Well, you can package your project. First thing I would do is get a name actor involved and you will do this by hiring a casting director. Look for a good one, one that works with independent film makers and you probably spend around $5000.00 to $10,000.00 but you will get someone who knows the agencies and someone that and those the managers, someone that can get you directly your script in the hands of an actor that may want to do a movie. And how in the named actor someone who’ve named value for example, on the high end there's Tom Cruise, there is Nicole Kidman those types are very high end you know, Hue Jackman those are alias doctors. But there are also smaller actors to then ago is the name actor, I mean there's other actor out there that are worth money, so higher casting director to start packaging your project.
Next stop the hardest part of the process is finding equity. Equity investors can come in to your project and put up a portion only a portion of your film finance budget. So, let say you have a million dollar budget you may only need $300,000.00 or so to put up to make the whole budget happen. Why? Because now a days there are soft money and soft money is awesome. Soft money comes in the forms of tax incentive and tax rebates that come from different states or from different countries. For example, we have a film that were putting together the screen is possibly shoot up in Canada one of the regions and this particular region is offering a 55% tax credit. What is that mean? Well, if I have a million dollar budget bill put up 55% of that budget so now, I'm only short 45% or $450,000.00. You see, and now I have $300,000.00 in cash I'm really only short $150,000.00 and that’s easy to get, so soft money is something very, very important. You should look around at the different incentives filmmakeressential.com I usually post a bunch of information about that as well.
Find product placement. Product placement is a great way to add value through your film and by product placement I mean companies that will put products in your movie. For example, you probably seeing James Bond movies Austin Martins or BMW’s Jaguars whatever been list those are all product placement. They want that product in the film because they know it’s going to be seen by a lot of people. Then independent film maker you probably not going to get those types of bills but you can find other things like clothing lines, food, beverages, all these things can add up to taking dollars off your bottom line so take a look at what you could possibly put on your actors or in your film that would be a great for a company to have their brand in there.
Co-producer film with the post house or with the view effect out so you have a view effects have the film. And what I mean by that is you can take your film to some post houses and maybe if they like your project enough go get involve and deeper their compensation until later date when maybe when the film is sold and then you will give them their money back plus maybe a percentage of the profits. A lot of those have being deals with housing right now especially in this the state of the economy we’re in people want to keep working.
And lastly gets to know the film banks. There are a lot of banks out there in the world of course and a lot of them fail everyday but the film banks keep going on. What a film banks I mean big banks that have an independent or a feature film division and you're going to need them because you going to want gap financing, which means the part of the film, the equity and the free sales and everything and then there's a small part in the missing let say you have in the example we discussed you had your $550,000.00 in your tax credit and you had your $300,000.00 in your equity so your missing in of $150,000.00 now that little areas called the gap. Gap financing 99% at the time will come from a bank so using from bank that are film banks.
Co America has a film division, City National Bank has a film division, Union Bank I believe still does has a film division so you can check out and find which banks are friendly and get to know the bankers plus really nice they usually taking a lunch, okay.
So now, you’re armed with all this new information and you're ready to make a movie, well, probably not yet you should really look and think about all the other parts that are involve especially auction your screen play, delivering your screen play, delivering your movie, who deliver your requirements, free visualization, post production, making the deal with your investor if the list goes on and on.
I'll welcome you and invite you to take a look click on the link to your right and visit our sales page at filmschoolondemand.com you will learn a lot about what our courses about plus hear some great testimonials and some industry phrase from people such as come in gracious who is the writer, actor and producer of Underworld, the Underworld movies. Just take a look today’s the obligation or you can also go down with the down below here at the link filmschoolondemand.com/sp/joinfsod.html. Thank you, I'm David Basulto and have a great day. Keep on making films.
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