Marketing and Distribution

The seismic shifts that the internet is bringing about in the entertainment and media industry continued to concentrate minds on the second day of VIFF Industry.

The themes that speakers came back to were familiar ones: the old guard is rapidly slipping away. Business models are by necessity being re-invented. New stars are rising. Audiences fragmenting and exploding. For those nimble enough, opportunities abound. For producers and media companies trying to follow the traditional path, it will only get tougher.

How do you get your content “discovered”? This was the big question of the first day of VIFF Industry the 4-day adjunct event that runs alongside Western Canada’s main film festival, the Vancouver International Film Festival.

The second panel at this year’s VIFF Industry, the adjunct industry event of the Vancouver International Film Festival, focussed on distribution - both digital and theatrical.

Many of the themes tackled in the earlier Crowdfunding panel were echoed here by a fresh set of panelists - in particular, the importance of using internet technologies to discover, engage, and maintain one’s audience.

A few nights ago I went with a couple of friends to see the new Narnia film in 3D. I found the film a bit disappointing, but overall it’s a pleasant enough way to pass a couple of hours. It’s better than the last effort, but is essentially undemanding entertainment with the dots joined up in predictable fashion and it has a couple of decent scenes.

Walt Disney created a vast empire around his brand of wholesome animation. But, says Brian Pendreigh, Disney is having to reinvent itself to survive in the modern marketplace.

For almost half a century Walt Disney has been turning movies into rides... and toys, and lunchboxes, and latterly big-budget stage musicals, computer games and just about anything on which they can stick a picture of a cartoon character, short of nuclear warheads. 

The Blair Witch Project showed that you can shoot a blockbuster on an old video camera. And it can be done again.

Independent filmmakers are discovering that you don't need to be a lottery winner or even win lottery funding to get that film onto celluloid. Advances in technology mean that you can now shoot a feature film on a consumer mini-DV camera, edit it on a PC or Mac G3 and, for the price of a new car, transfer the final edit to 35mm film.