Ted Hope has 16 Recommendations For Filmmakers To Discover Best Practices For A Sustainable Creative Life.
I highly recommend a close reading. In the meantime, here are the bullets:
- Focus on developing Entrepreneurial Skills as well as the creative.
- The great challenge is no longer how to get your film made or funded, but how to get people to watch it.
- Aggregate audience.
- Start figuring out how your audience uses your work.
- Transition your passive audience to an active engaged participatory community.
- Platforms are for the many.
- Be more prolific and ubiquitous.
- You need others to be authentically incentivized to share and promote your work.
- Shift our focus from a single product business to one of an ongoing relationship.
- The film biz lacks a way for the passionate fan to demonstrate their appreciation of a work.
- [With] the end of feature film dominance… we can create an infinite variety of storyworld extensions, discovery nodes, and engagement forums.
- Learn to strategize, schedule, budget, and predict revenues for the entire life cycle of your film.
- Embrace rapid prototyping with multiple iterations.
- Fail twice as much. Experiment.
- Gather & share data. Embrace transparency and an “Open Source” attitude to all you do.
- The work you create moves us closer to the world you aspire to.
This is deep stuff and makes the filmmaker’s job so much harder. Making a movie is hard enough with pre-production, production and post-production but now consider all the other aspects Ted mentions. Choose your projects wisely, as they now demand much more from you!
My take: I can’t help but think of Franchises and how well they do on Ted’s paradigm. See what I mean at The Numbers.