I think I'll buy one of those DVDs, but more than the commentaries and whatnot, I'm interested in the long version of the indie distribution process as you've experienced it, Chad.  Something in a tutorial to save others from part of that learning curve, because you know, I've got a friend looking for indie distribution hints.

edit 6 days later:
WooHoo! It's here!

Last edited by drewjmore (2012-01-23 20:46:41)

Southern Asia... Not quite yet.  Right now I'm wondering what will happen first: a torrent, or a foreign distro deal.  My money is on a torrent, because the sales agency I'm signed with has no idea what to do with the movie.  If we don't sell any rights at the Cannes market this year, I'll be sure to get the rights back and release the movie overseas myself.  More on that as it comes.

As far as the process for self-distribution is concerned... here's a copy and paste of something I wrote on another site:

Since I wasn't terribly in LOVE with my first feature, and because I made a film that was geared toward "cult" audiences, the film festival route proved to be the wrong one entirely. Traditional sales agents have had no real idea what to do or how to sell Apocalypse, CA because it's a cross-genre film with dramatic fantasy elements. That's not to say movies like this don't do well all the time (Being John Malkovich), but the more accessible and "normal" your film is, the better luck you'll have with the old-timer sales agents that aren't creative enough to sell a new story. I hadn't spent too much on making the movie ($65k total), and so I figured this would be the best and only real chance to try out the new world of VOD distributing.

This might be the greatest time for the micro-budget film producer ever. Audiences can be reached without producing a single DVD or physical product. Entire budgets ($15k to $100k) can be raised through indiegogo or kickstarter, practically guaranteeing distribution to your investors via iTunes, Netflix, etc, etc, etc.

This might also be the worst time ever for movies with a budget of $2million-ish. Blockbuster is dying. Hollywood video is gone. Redbox & VOD are HUGE, and at prices lower than ever. DVDs are worthless. Blu-rays are in low demand and already at generally low prices (plus they cost an assload to license and produce).

Right now I've got my feature film up on iTunes (as of two friday's ago). It cost me $1000 to get it there, after hiring one of Apple's preferred aggregate companies:

See: http://www.apple.com/itunes/content-pro … e-faq.html

Most of these aggregate companies offer the ability to deliver your content to more than one "store," like netflix streaming, amazon VOD, playstation network, hulu, etc, etc, etc, but be careful because some of these companies don't have contracts with those "stores," meaning you have to do all the dirty work to get the film accepted first before the aggregate can deliver.

A slightly-more expensive, but easier method that I've found recently, is indiegogo's new distribber.com company. They offer all the majors (iTunes, Netflix, Amazon, Hulu) in an all-encompassing delivery. The more stores you choose, the more you save. Distribber is more expensive in some areas (nearly $2k for iTunes HD & SD, compared to the $1k I spent through my aggregate company... but my aggregate doesn't deliver to Netflix, Hulu, or anything else for that matter).

It's been over a month now since Apocalypse, CA starting shipping (DVDs, personally sent out by me through my site), and via iTunes - and there's still no torrent of the movie online that I can find. Even if there were, I'm not sure if it would help or hurt the movie. In the case of a mutual friend's movie, Ink, they embraced the fact that their movie was pirated and promoted it as such. They shot up to #4 on the movie meter of imdb and, thusly, the mass promotion of their film spread word like wildfire and they were able to recoup their budget of around $200k (or something like that). Plus they got an agent out of it. And Ink was a weird fucking movie.

A major detractor to self-distributing your own movie is that hardly anyone will take you seriously. People want to discover movies on their own - they don't want the filmmaker telling them to watch it. My original plan was to go to imdb's news partner page - and email EVERY imdb-news-supplying partner a copy of the press release for Apocalypse, CA. Of the 200+ I emailed, maybe 8 responded, and 5 posted news about the film's trailer. From there, the trailer didn't do much (maybe 5,000 views), until io9.com stumbled across it and posted the trailer in their news feed (because it looked like a weird movie). The trailer views skyrocketed over the week to 50,000 and that was pretty much as much press as I could muster out of 200+ emails. A decent amount, but not enough to really keep word-of-mouth going for a B-movie w/o a single movie star. Point being, not everyone can be friends with Peter Sciretta of slashfilm or Ebert, but if your are - YOU ARE HALF WAY THERE.   Press is everything, and as long as your film doesn't have a theatrical release: the press generally doesn't give a shit about our little movies.

I could go on, but for the time being I'm still playing the game with Apocalypse, CA and have yet to see the first month's sales report from iTunes. Once that happens, I'll let you know how it looks.

In the mean time, here's the article on the Polish Brothers' For Lovers Only that inspired me to release on iTunes:

http://www.thewrap.com/movies/column-po … 9?page=0,0

Put in a DVD order through the store ( http://www.apocalypseca.com ) for foreign orders, and I'll ship.  Even though our rights are represented by a sales agent, I still OWN the rights, technically.  I just don't want to advertise that the dvd is available overseas, because we'd hurt our chances at selling rights overseas.  Keep in mind the DVDs are NTSC Region 1, though.

Last edited by Chad Peter (2012-01-30 01:16:34)