Independent Film Distribution Strategies: Part 4

15. What were the biggest segments of the film that ate into your budget?

We did a jeep stunt that cost us a pretty penny, but we wanted some action and thought the scene would help drive the story forward. As I mentioned before, the most expensive two days on the film were the two days spent shooting in Los Angeles! Here’s an example of production value for not a lot of money. My fellow writer, Brian LaBelle, really wanted helicopter shots of the Darain jungle so he paid a helicopter pilot and $500.00 and then we went up in the air and shot a whole bunch of aerial footage for hardly any money but it really does give you great production value!

16. If you could start again, is there anything you may have done to save more money, or do you think you penny pinched the best of your abilities?

Boy, that’s a hard one. I think we did extremely well with penny pinching considering we shot in five countries and covered as many locations as we did and worked with the actors that we did. Most of the time it’s usually the opposite that kills me when I think to myself “If I only had $50,000 more we could have…” But I try not to do that so much!

17. Do you feel the film was sacrificed at all being shot on a relatively small budget? If so, where can you see these compromised in the film?

Sure you tend to sacrifice a bit when you do something at a lower budget, but then at the same time that’s how you keep total control of a film. In my head, I always planned on making the Conner Layne character go through a trilogy of films. I always knew that with “The Art of Travel” we would have to beg, borrow, scrape, and steal, to get the film financed and completed. Then the second and third films would have substantially higher budgets and even more action and adventure. Even just dealing with trying to explain to studio exec’s why people would enjoy a film like “The Art of Travel” was a tough sell. The kind of traveling that our main character explores is not what most people are used to when it comes to traveling. Many people travel the world with the smallest amounts of money to get them from point “A “ to point “B”. So in order to show film people that this film takes the audience to different places, the first film was going to have to been done on a small budget. Where you’d love to have more money and maybe where I felt we compromised a slight bit was being able to use music like Aerosmith in the actual film. But we were fortunate to have Steve Bartek to come in and compose the music for the film and he did an amazing job.

18. When you were shopping your film around for distribution what was the general feeling amongst other filmmakers you met who were trying to do the same thing?

When you’re trying to find distribution you’ll always find a producer friend with a distribution horror story- picture the scene in Jaws on the boat when Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfuss compares their scars and tell each other scary stories. While looking for distribution all filmmakers will ask the same questions, “Did you get this, or that? Do you trust the company? Do you know anyone else who has dealt with them before on a movie? And what do they think?” Actually, the number one question asked among filmmakers, is without a doubt, “Do they actually pay their filmmakers when checks are due?” Even better is when someone tells you what they did wrong and what you should try and avoid at all costs. In the end, there just comes a point in time where you just have to take a leap of faith and believe in your film and believe deep down In your heart that everything will turn out right.

19. You have Aerosmith music in the film. How did you pull that off on such a tight budget?

We used Aerosmith in the trailer because we knew that trailer was only going to be used for private viewing. The laws are still very loose when it comes to the internet, so we are able to show the trailer with Aerosmith if it only plays on the internet and we receive no financial gain from it. There is another trailer that you can watch on Netflix and will be put up on our site in the next few days that First Look made. Unfortunately, there is no Aerosmith on it!

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