Tim Ritter's long-winded first blog post

Intro

This will likely differ from my classmates, as we are in a slightly different place in our projects. The plan for Testament/Last Words/Working Title is to start building our audience in earnest very soon. Our first attempts in Andrew Gay’s Entrepreneurship class were fitful, so we’ve taken aspects of that approach and blended it with new elements. We, in this case, are me as writer/director, Steven Holland as producer and then Laura Boman and Andrew Lee as our marketing team. Boman, my wife, and Lee, her former boss, are taking me on as a test run for potential future marketing ventures, including my debut feature Moment of Truth as well as this follow-up. Lee and Holland so far have been more responsible for big-picture-type ideas as to how we market the film and fundraise, while Boman is helping with more direct implementation, such as building a prototype for the film’s new website. Meanwhile, I’m involved in all aspects, from helping develop the overall vision to feeding content to Boman to fill out the website with some interesting details about the alternate world the story will take place in.

Who we're targeting and how

In Gay’s class, we identified the top niche who would be interested in this film as progressive Christians, or the Christian left. Positively, this is an ignored and underserved segment of the massive Christian population of this country. Negatively, they’re also less organized and less proactive in seeking out content than the much more vocal and prominent Christian Right.

In targeting this group, we want to start with my adding commentary to popular Christian Left landing pages in social media, to drive people first to me and then to my project. We have already laid down the beginnings of our appeal to this demographic with the design of my Facebook page for the film, which combines updates and behind-the-scenes info about the film with the kind of news updates and analysis on current events and politics from various media sources that would add value for readers from this niche. The Facebook site met with little success in the spring, in part because it was only advertised through direct paid Facebook advertising, for which the general effectiveness has not really been proven for projects of this scale.

I’ll have to find additional ways to spread the word about this website and the film to this niche. Currently, we're examining all the popular social media forms — Facebook, Youtube, Vine, Twitter, etc. — and trying to figure out specific approaches for each one. Another tactic will be more direct communication with the potential fan base — getting in touch with the more progressive churches in the area, such as Northland Distributed Church, and we’ll see then what other avenues are open to us upon further discussion as far as bringing the progressive Christian community together behind this film.

Upon further discussion with Boman and Lee, we also have not abandoned interest in the Christian Right. Later in the process, we might tailor some content to them, and if the ideas in the film don’t appeal to them (as we suspect they might not), they can be just as good of a publicity source as enemies as they would as friends of the film.

In addition to this segment, Lee has suggested the creation of regularly appearing, insider-type insight videos on how I approach making films on the super-cheap to generate interest among the filmmaker/independent-film-fan block. This series of videos would ideally create an audience for me in the filmmaking world who could then be driven to the content I’m creating. This audience would then potentially be with me for every project.

How much this will cost and how we'll get it

On the front end, this means we will not be calling upon much as far as paying for marketing before the film — though some money may be required to build a first-class website in the beginning. During the film, I will likely try to set up a behind-the-scenes crew to generate consistent updates on the film, maybe tying in with the how-to videos, to drive more people to the website and continue to create interest in the film. These filmmakers would likely be drawn from within the ranks of the undergrads at UCF, and paid little to nothing.

After the film is complete, a festival rollout is a likely approach. For that, we’ll need money to cover festival entry fees. It might be worth trying to put aside as much as $500-$1,000 or more for this as well as DVD copies, posters and other marketing materials. The traditional approach is to target the biggest festivals, and follow tier-by-tier through each level of festival, from Sundance all the way down to my own Fort Myers. If it does not catch on at the higher tiers, then the next alternative is self-distribution. If we generate enough of an audience, we could sell downloads of the film through our own site, or through a growing number of intermediaries, from Amazon to the new Fandor or Juntobox.

Funds for marketing and any form of self-distribution or festival fees, as well as for production costs, will come from two simultaneous fundraising campaigns. One will be a hopefully high-profile crowdfunding campaign, likely throughindiegogo.com. That campaign will seek to tap into my social network for a large number of small contributions. The second, which we suspect might provide a larger amount of the overall capital, will come through a lower-profile and more personalized targeting of well-off individuals who are friends or family of me, Boman and Lee. The idea is if we can raise 10 $1,000 contributions and five $2,000 contributions, we’ll be in very good shape. We’ve had some preliminary discussions about potential targets for this campaign. We have not discussed yet whether these contributions would involve equity in the project or how much equity they would be for.