| Don't Be Afraid to Self-Finance |
|
|
|
|
Page 2 of 2 Surround yourself with recognized professionalsMeanwhile, she had sent the script to award-winning actor Michael Riley, who liked it and agreed to sign on. This represented another pair of lessons that she thinks new filmmakers should know.surround yourself with as many recognized professionals as you can The first is to surround yourself with as many recognized professionals as you can, because they give the project credibility when approaching Telefilm, broadcasters and other potential funding sources. The second is to make sure that very early on – preferably your first cold call – you reach someone who will say yes. “It’s like you need that ‘yes’ for the sake of your own bravery,” she says. “You need some positive feedback right at the beginning in order to buoy your spirits to move forward.” Ord would need it. She realizes now that the development stage was radically short (from concept to shooting in slightly more than two months). New Brunswick Film was to provide a percentage of the funding on the first day of principal photography, but Ord and her crew were on location with the actors – in addition to Riley they included veteran actor Ted Dykstra and his wife, East Coast singer Melanie Doane – before the contracts were even signed. Marketing and promotion Theatrical Poster, Murder in HopevilleWith the help of friends, Ord managed to get a rough version of the film edited in time for the Atlantic Film Festival. Which brings us to one of Ord’s formidable talents: marketing and promotion. For the festival, she put black swan feathers in every invitation and threw a splashy party attended by Telefilm representatives and other notables. (She bought 100 tickets to the screening herself so it would be the first to sell out.) When someone told her that she could sell a pre-license to The Movie Network (TMN) and Superchannel (now Movie Central, owned by Corus Entertainment), she did so, but as her debts mounted and Telefilm told her she needed more financing, Ord decided to ask the pay-TV services for more. She sent a TMN executive a bottle of wine along with a request to watch the film and consider increasing the license fee. Remembering that she and a female executive at Superchannel had once joked that opening a donut franchise might make more sense than being in the film business, she couriered the woman a box of Timbits. When she followed up with a phone call, she said: “Hi, remember me? I’m the girl who wants to start a donut franchise with you. But what I really need is for you to double my license fee.” Both companies came through. Word of the hot event spreadBy March 2002, a desperate Ord still didn’t have a distributor. So, despite her debts, she staged a splashy screening at the Bloor Cinema and sent out press kits that included Chinese food takeout boxes containing fortune cookies. (Sample fortune: “Buy Black Swan and you’ll make a million dollars.”) For the party afterwards, Ord had hand-pasted Black Swan labels on the wine bottles.A thousand people came to the event, which was thick with industry figures, but Ord was devastated when not one distributor attended. However, word of the hot event spread and soon several distributors were bidding for the rights. (Her distributors ended up being Lions Gate in Canada and PorchLight Entertainment in the U.S.) “What I would tell filmmakers is to think outside the box and do different things to create a buzz around your film,” says Ord. “And don’t be afraid to have a personality. In fact, the real message is, don’t be afraid of anything.”  |
