Film Distribution: Guerilla Filmmaking Case Study

1. Start simple. Arin Crumley and Susan Buice shot their film from a one-page outline, a crude storyboard, and with small cameras and a small crew.

2. Tell the story behind your story. When they couldn't find a distributor for their film, they decided to do daily video blogs to reinforce their creative talents and build an audience. A result was that people started to feel like they knew the filmmakers firsthand; that, in turn, fueled curiosity about them and their work, and eventually put people in theaters.

3. Involve your audience, part A. The filmmakers actively sought out feedback from their fans via platforms like YouTube and MySpace, and took the advice seriously. It impacted new episodes of the podcasts and the film itself, which they were still editing. In other words, the audience actually shaped the final product.

4. Involve your audience, part B. When determining where to distribute their film, the couple went to regions where they knew they already had fans, thanks to emails and zip codes they had collected from their podcast and other marketing activities. They also created a "heart map" so that people could see the requests for the film to play in their town grow and who was going -- a social network of sorts.

5. Network in the real world, too. Film festivals used to be about getting a film acquired by a distributor or a short into the hands of a talent agent. But Crumley and Buice went to hundreds of festivals around the world and thought strategically about whom they encountered. When they met the guys at Spout, they realized that Spout needed publicity and users. 4EM had those two things, but needed money. It turned out to be a fruitful (and fateful) match.

In this video, the filmmakers behind "Four Eyed Monsters" reveal how they used YouTube, community and the web to erase their credit card debt and get their labor of love into theaters. If you don't have time to watch the whole video (it's 29 minutes long), here are some of the key takeaways:

My Hard Life as a Online Filmmaker

Life as a filmmaker is tough. I'm not talking about conventional filmmaking, but as a video creator that makes content specifically for the internet. I mean, the amount of hits you need to make even a minimum wage type of scale requires a video creator to get tons of hits. For example...across 20 different user-generated websites i acquired 150,000 hits last month. Of those, only one of the sites will generate some tangible revenue that could pay a bill or two; that being YouTube. Metacafe is no longer paying out the producer reward program, Redgage gets so little hits that my accrued money is less than $7 dollars, Revver also gets so little hits that I have accrued $14 in one year. Videojug is no longer paying out and break.com only pays if you make the front page which is no easy task. The other sites don't even have a pay share model. Sites like yahoo, myspace, vimeo, etc.

I made $150 and some change in April and I got to ask myself, why do I keep doing this? I guess because i love it. Luckily i don't have all my eggs in this online basket or I would be out on Tennyson boulevard holding a cardboard box with a sign that says "will shoot for food".

I still can't help but think things will get better. As the internet continues to evolve better technologies, bandwidth gets cheaper to push, advertisers jump on the band wagon, and the ubiquity of my videos spreads across the globe I hope to find some real revenue.

Ok..so this posting was more like a bitch fest, but I feel better now. Thanks for reading, and remember, keep that camera rollin!