AMI VORA: "Building a system for the rest of us"

MARKET MONDAY #9

TRANSCRIPT:

We’re here to separate from a broken corporate film industry. This is actually only half of the title for today. So we all agree that everything’s broken. I think, and by the way, what a joy to be in a space like this and to marinate in all of these amazing and incredible, great ideas.

I’m increasingly in spaces like this and there’s a lot of incredible, incredible, talk. And, I think maybe my reality check is that I don’t know that our behavior is changing that much. I met a lot of filmmakers at Sundance and – maybe I’ll introduce myself first. I’m Ami, I head marketing for Kinema. Kinema is a platform that supports independent filmmakers with their distribution and specifically by enabling screenings in person, virtual on demand as well as streaming.

So I think about distribution a lot, and I meet filmmakers, and I ask the question, what are your distribution plans? And I’ve been getting generally one of three responses. These are them: bucket number one – no plans. I don’t mean to alarm anybody, but “no plans” is not good.

Bucket number two is I want to sell my film. And bucket number three is a kind of a conventional plan. I start with film festivals, I end on a streaming platform. Timeline is about a year, maybe eighteen months. And I call that last bucket “checklist distribution”. I call it checklist distribution, because that’s what it feels like to me. It feels like we’re checking a bunch of boxes, we’re following the rules.

We’re doing what every other film is doing and what we believe to be right. The problem with it is there’s all these stops and starts. There’s a lot of waiting. We’re waiting for premiere status. We’re waiting for a distributor conversation. We’re waiting for awards.

And all of that is great – kind of. Except this is the warm pond that Ted was talking about. This is the engine that serves the system that chooses one percent of films. Right? The other ninety-nine percent are going to end up on a streaming platform, and they will have had little time to actually build an audience.

I think the litmus test for me is if you end up on a streaming platform with little time to build an audience, are you going to be happy having chosen checklist distribution? The rest of my time, I want to talk about how to avoid checklist distribution. And it really starts with number one: knowing your goal, knowing your audience.

I know everything that I know about goal setting for films by reading Jon’s [Riess] Substack, so go to that post immediately. But I often find that people fall into checklist distribution because they didn’t do this work. And often you think you’ve done this work, but it is hard. It requires making trade offs. And so if you haven’t made any trade offs, you probably haven’t done this work.

Number two and number three – there are no standard windows anymore. We tend to think about that timeline that I have laid out, and “there are these three windows and it’s going to take this length of time. They need to happen in this order.” That’s just not true. Number three: think in a flywheel way, this is like listed like a checklist in itself. You want each of your windows to sort of serve the window that came before it.

You’re starting to build. I’ll talk a little bit more about that, and I want to show you some examples before I do that, I just want to share with you that there are more than those four windows. Right. I won’t go through every single one of these, but this slide is available on the interwebs. You can go to Kinema Substack and you can find it. But you can do most of this stuff. You can pursue most of these windows on your own. The exceptions are broadcast and SVOD, and then Kinema is here to support you with your community cinema window and with your POVD/ TVOD window.

Then the one other context setting thing that I want to say is that I think we often think about windows as being fixed or absolute. These are the windows film festivals with theatrical streaming, and they are not. It is a philosophy, windowing or the idea of how you release or sequence your windows. It’s a philosophy.

That philosophy is you are limiting the availability of your film and such that you are maximizing whatever it is that your goal is, whether it’s money or anything else. And you’re going to start with the people who are most excited about your film, and you’re going to move to the people that are least excited. But start with most films that snowball.

So I want to show you what this looks like. I may show you some films that I followed over different periods of time. This is a film that started with film festivals, and I tried to do that same layout. So again, windows time, so this is a film that started with film festivals.

But after every film festival, they were collecting email addresses. After they had grown an email list of about five-thousand, they knew where people were and they had some signal that they were ready to start hosting screenings outside of the film festival circuit, because the film festival locations were not necessarily addressing their target audience.

They started with a virtual screening event – and they were really advised not to do that. You know, there’s so many people that say, “don’t put your film online.” All online events are not the same thing, and so they started with one event that they treated kind of like its own film festival event, and they capped it at five-hundred people.

When they sold out that particular event, they opened a waitlist. They continued to grow their email list, and they did that kind of over and over again. By the end of six months, they had done a bunch of events. They had all this data. They had a growing email list.

They had a growing social media following, and they were able to take that to their meetings with distributors. They had – as I think Franklin had said earlier – they had leverage. They had all of this information, but they also importantly had knowledge. They knew what they were able to do themselves, and they also knew what they were able to, not what they were not able to do.

They made sure that the distributor that they partnered with was able to help them with those things. They did end up working with a distributor that came later. The data really helped them to secure that relationship. Then the other thing to know is that they were able to carve out their rights to do community screening events.

I think that’s sort of a really important thing to know – that you can carve out your rights to do the thing that probably the distributor is not going to do. So in this case, that was community screenings. Then the last thing that I want to point out about this particular case study is that, now they’ve been doing their own release for about two years, so they’ve started to do things at the same time.

There’s always this fear of cannibalization and actually they proved that the opposite was true, that word of mouth is king, and that the more people that are watching your film, the more word of mouth that creates, and the more that all boats rise, or all windows in this case, rise.

The second example I want to look at: this was a film they were advised – they picked a really strategic film festival to premiere, and they were advised to wait and to premiere at a different festival. They did not. Their focus was really on impact. They found a partner to host a series of partner screenings for them. Similarly, they had all this data, they had all this information, and they used that to actually close a few donors that were on the fence about contributing to campaigns related to the impact that they were making.

They also were able to use that to, to secure a PBS deal. They’re again, just a year into their release, so they’re very much interested in doing a TVOD or AVOD window. They’ll do that at some point, they’re thinking 2028. They’re on a very long timeline. They own the rights to their film. It’s not a race to stream in one year to eighteen months. You can take your time.

Third example very quickly: this is a film that got rejected from twenty festivals. They had to create their own premiere. They did. They built their own buzz, and in doing so, maybe like six months later, they ended up getting invited to film festivals.

That buzz sort of flipped the script for them, and they got invited to film festivals. They were paid to screen their films, so they didn’t have to continue to pay to submit to a bunch of film festivals. They built a flywheel.

The last thing I’ll say is that I started by asking the question, what are you doing for distribution? I think this word distribution really forces us to think about the checklist, and it forces sort of this linear thinking we should be thinking in flywheels. And so I invite you to ask a question. How will you grow your audience in stock?

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