Hope for a sustainable filmmaking future

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:

  1. Focus on developing Entrepreneurial Skills as well as the creative.
  2. The great challenge is no longer how to get your film made or funded, but how to get people to watch it.
  3. Aggregate audience.
  4. Start figuring out how your audience uses your work.
  5. Transition your passive audience to an active engaged participatory community.
  6. Platforms are for the many.
  7. Be more prolific and ubiquitous.
  8. You need others to be authentically incentivized to share and promote your work.
  9. Shift our focus from a single product business to one of an ongoing relationship.
  10. The film biz lacks a way for the passionate fan to demonstrate their appreciation of a work.
  11. [With] the end of feature film dominance… we can create an infinite variety of storyworld extensions, discovery nodes, and engagement forums.
  12. Learn to strategize, schedule, budget, and predict revenues for the entire life cycle of your film.
  13. Embrace rapid prototyping with multiple iterations.
  14. Fail twice as much. Experiment.
  15. Gather & share data.  Embrace transparency and an “Open Source” attitude to all you do.
  16. 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.