Attention Foreign Friends: Our Film The Diary of Preston Plummer Is Now Available Outside the U.S. via IndieReign.com

Poster for The Diary of Preston Plummer

Finding a means for distributing your film to the foreign markets outside of the United States is never easy, especially for small dramatic films.

Trevor Morgan as Preston Plummer

Foreign sales agents want films that have actors who already have worldwide fans. This usually means films with actors who have starred in huge tentpole films like Batman, Spiderman, Transformers, X-Men, Harry Potter, etc etc. I don't make these kind of films so it stands to reason that the films I do make would need a different delivery method - one that allows us to reach our audience direct.

Rumer Willis as Kate

So how do independent filmmakers get their small, dramatic films to a foreign audience? To date, we have had to find foreign sales agents willing to take a chance on our film and then we have watched as our revenue was eaten up by their expenses. This is a practice that doesn't work. We need a better way to get our films to our foreign audience.

Christopher Cousins as Walter & Erin Dilly as Emily

In the end, you may have sold your small indie title worldwide, but did you see substantial income from it or any at all? We as filmmakers have to remind ourselves that we are in a business and it's bad business to not see revenue from your product. End of story. We need to become smart about our business and create a sustainable method of getting our films to our audience.

On set with Rumer and Trevor and director Sean Ackerman

Too often, filmmakers feel like they have no other choice but to sigh and say, well at least it has reached a wider audience as they watch all of the earnings for their hard work go to everyone else but them.

Robert Loggia as John

THIS MUST STOP! We need to take control of our titles and work together to build viable distribution platforms for our titles whereby content creators are earning the lion's share of the revenue.

With this intention in mind, we have decided to work with IndieReign.com in launching our film The Diary of Preston Plummer into most foreign territories. If you live outside of the United States and Canada and you are not in the Benelux region (as we sold the film in that region to a different distributor), you can watch The Diary of Preston Plummer on IndieReign.

Rumer Willis as Kate & Trevor Morgan as Preston Plummer

I really hope you do watch it. This was a film that was the result of a lot of hard work by independent filmmakers and talent who believed in its creation. We had an awesome creative team and great actors: Trevor Morgan, Rumer Willis and Robert Loggia and a wonderful director Sean Ackerman. This film deserves to be seen and we hope you agree.

Sean Ackerman, director

On set with Rumer Willis, Me (producer), Trevor Morgan

Please help us make this film a success and establish a viable means for sharing our small indie films with a foreign audience. Thanks everyone!

Watch The Diary of Preston Plummer on IndieReign here:

Our Other Film Not Since You Is Now on Hulu!

What a week! Both of our films The Diary of Preston Plummer and Not Since You are now on Hulu!

This has been a long time coming. It always takes longer to launch films than you expect. But they're both up now and we're excited that these films will reach an even larger audience. We hope you check them out!

You can watch Not Since You here:

 


And watch The Diary of Preston Plummer here:

 

In Your Eyes, written by Joss Whedon and directed by Brin Hill

We need to watch Brin Hill and Joss Whedon's new film In Your Eyes on the online video Web site Vimeo. This film was produced by Kai Cole and Michael Roiff.

I love the mission behind Joss and Kai's company Bellwether Pictures. Their purpose is to bring micro-budget films directly to an audience, bypassing "the classic studio structure." I've been wanting to do this for years and sometimes I'm able to do it, but not as successfully as I'd like. So the attention Bellwether is bringing to indie film distribution is a huge step in the right direction.

Renting this film on Vimeo will help all indie filmmakers take control of their own distribution. I can't stress how important it is for us to find a viable distribution path to our audiences whereby we actually see the revenue from our hard work. 

Building a direct path to our audience is what we need to do. So let's support the filmmakers behind In Your Eyes because their success if our success. And no, I do not know anyone personally on the filmmaking team behind this film. I would like to know them - I will have to reach out. I am highlighting their work because their efforts to self-distribute will help us all. We need to support them. And hopefully they will support us too. 

The more audiences are familiar with these other platforms for watching movies, the more indie filmmakers will actually have a means for making money on the films they make. It's only five bucks to rent which means lots left over for some popcorn and Whoppers! 

Here's the link to the film: http://inyoureyesmovie.com/

And here is a teaser:


In Your Eyes - Trailer from Bellwether Pictures on Vimeo.

Our Film The Diary of Preston Plummer Is Now on Hulu!

We are super excited to announce that our film The Diary of Preston Plummer is now on Hulu! The film is now on Netflix and Hulu as well as other Internet sites like Amazon and iTunes.

The great thing about Hulu is that it's free for you to watch the film on that platform. We hope you check it out. We had such a great time making this film.

Here's a little bit about the film:

On the day of his college graduation, Preston Plummer cannot think of a single thing he really loves. Adrift, Preston follows a beautiful but troubled young woman to a small island town where he begins to fall for her, but it all threatens to fall apart when he uncovers her family's dark past.

And here are just a few of the awesome comments from our audience:

"The Diary of Preston Plummer - it was beautiful I cried"
"The Diary Of Preston Plummer is hands down one of my new favorite movies"
"Just watched The Diary of Preston Plummer on Netflix. Wow, just wow. So many feels."
"The Diary of Preston Plummer was just so absolutely perfect in every way."

We hope you feel the same. You can watch it here:

The Road to Tribeca 2014: App (a short), directed by Alexander Berman

APP follows Paul, a shy engineer who desperately needs venture capital for his virtual wingwoman app and sets out to prove that his app works. The film was the recipient of the 2013 Alfred P. Sloan Production Grant and is the AFI thesis film from Harvard University graduate, Alexander Berman.

What made you decide to become a filmmaker?

My father is a novelist and playwright so I grew up surrounded by his stories. When my family moved from Russia, my father wrote to preserve the life and identity he left behind for another country, but I was too young to feel Russian and too foreign to feel American. I started filmmaking at a very young age as a way to make sense of my environment – to insert myself in proxy into a place I didn’t belong.

Tell us about your film (include title of film and category your film will play at Tribeca). What inspired you to make it?

My film, “App” (in shorts competition at Tribeca), was inspired by an ugly breakup experience as so many films are! My girlfriend and I had one of those mutual/amiable/bullshit breakups that leave you with a nagging feeling that there is an untold story. Out of jealous curiosity, I used her passwords to search through her email, Facebook, twitter, instagram – the entire contents of her digital mind – to see if she had every cheated on me. When I told her about it later, she laughed and said she had done the same too me. The real data apocalypse isn’t NSA spying or high frequency trading…it’s when we confront our fear of rejection by destroying the uncertainty that is fundamental to love.

What do you love about your film?

I love its prescience. While I was developing the film a year ago, Tinder, LuLu, Zoosk, and other location based relationship startups were slides on an investment deck and not the multimillion-dollar companies they are today. The film is a comedy if you think, “This is so ridiculous and impossible!” It’s a horror film when you realize the future is now.

How long did it take you to make your film?

My producer, Edouard de Lachomette, and I started developing the idea for the film in January 2012. The American Film Institute has a long development process, so we started shooting in November, wrapped reshoots in January 2013, and delivered in June 2013: a total of 1.5 years.

What was the most challenging part of the filmmaking process and how did you overcome it?

My favorite films are the sci-fi movies that feel like they can happen the day after tomorrow. Trouble is…you start developing a film a year before you shoot it so you run the risk that whatever technology you are satirizing feels too stale or too unbelievable by the time you finish. We went through a ton of drafts of augmented reality, computer implants, etc… until we settled on “Sexy Siri”. My animator on the film, Benjamin Berman, is an app developer himself and really helped me conceptualize what the dating apps of 2014 will feel like back in 2012.

Tell us about your experience getting into Tribeca.

It’s actually a funny story: I get an email from Sharon (lead shorts programmer) that says, paraphrased, “What is the premiere status of your film? But don’t take this question to mean we are programming you or anything else dot dot dot.” After a nail-biting week of anticipation, I get a call from Ben Thompson confirming that the film was accepted. At the American Film Institute, our entire crew is fellow students so it was an awesome feeling sharing the news with them because we are all starting our careers together.

If you had to make the film all over again, would you do anything different?

If I made the film today, it would be completely different because the technology is so different. I’m very interested in augmented reality (like the Oculus Rift and Google Glass) and have a number of projects on the question of what immersive VR does to our emotional experience of the people we love.

What’s next for your film? Do you have distribution? If so, when and how can people see it and if not, what are your hopes for the film?

Our film has some other exciting festival announcements to make after Tribeca and some distributors have approached us. At the same time, I want our film to be seen by largest audience possible while it’s still relevant so we’ve also been exploring a general Internet release. I hope the success of the short film enables me to make my feature project. Stay tuned!

Can you provide any advice to other filmmakers who dream of getting their films made?

Working in movies a lot of times can feel like a crapshoot. After suffering your first failures, it’s easy to believe the advice that talent and handwork is not enough – that you need to “know” the right people or have a lot of “luck”. That’s bullshit. I truly believe the people who are my role models were the people who had the highest capacity for pain, rejection, and failure. They kept making when others told them it was time to quit. It’s a war for talent out there. But it’s a war won through attrition.

Screening Times: 

New York, New York - Tribeca Film Festival

4.18, 5:30pm @ AMC Loews Village 7, 66 Third Avenue

4.22, 5:30pm @ Bow Tie Cinemas Chelsea 9, 260 West 23rd Street

4.24, 12:00pm @ AMC Loews Village 7, 66 Third Avenue

4.27, 7:00pm @ Tribeca Cinemas, 54 Varick Street

Website: http://www.appthemovie.com/

Trailer: https://vimeo.com/66196560