Admidst all the flurry and furore that surrounds making a film, not only have we been thinking a lot about marketing and development but Rachel and I also managed to escape from London for a few days to attend the Edinburgh Film Festival. Whilst Rachel was watching obscure Korean films and meeting with loads of Regional Screen Agencies to source new and upcoming talent (and hopefully find THE NEXT BIG THING!) I attended an industry training programme run by the Script Factory called SCENE Insiders.

Briefly, through a combination of workshops, masterclasses and seminars, we discussed …well we discussed lots of things but the real question was - how do you get to a great script so you can make a great film?  And sure, since some Greek geezer started talking about character and action, the technicals are something that writers (and developers) obsess over. But everyone was talking about the same thing - being Storytellers …

I capitalise for a reason; if filmmaking is really just the modern version of sitting round a camp fire and telling tales, then what makes for a good Storyteller and whose voice are we talking about? I’ve attached a clip - it’s from one of Malcolm X’s final speeches, setting his politics aside, the man was a great orator, a storyteller, he had a rhythm and diction in his voice that makes it pretty impossible not to listen to him speak. The content of his speeches, the words and sentences themselves are in disarray; they simply aren’t written well, largely unsophisticated and poorly articulated for the most part …but as you listen, it’s a wholly different experience. So that’s my question, is it words alone? And as they come of the page into the hands of a Director, Editor, Costume Designer, DoP…whose story is it anyway?

sorry for radio silence on this channel. all too busy over at the sugarhouse these past few days. day 5 of shoot and all seems well….

But activity going on back here at Ealing also. A lot of thinking in past few days on our development process. For even as we shoot this film, we are thinking forward to the next ones.

By common wisdom, develompent in movies is hell. A never ending process that would make Sisyphus weep. But does it have to be?

We at slingshot believe not, and will shortly be unveiling our development and training programme for the next year, which has been awarded a major grant in recognition of its innovative take on this tired space.
Before we tell you more, though, we’d be interested in your views and experience of film development in the UK or elsewhere. Do you, like my late great friend Douglas Adams find that development is a process akin to ““trying to grill a steak by having a succession of people coming into the room and breathing on it” or has your experience been more positive and tasteful?

Comments and stories please.

oh yes. it begins. SUGARHOUSE LANE, slingshot’s very first film starts shooting this Sunday. After a year of tears and fears the moment appears. Clearly we are just giddy from the excitement and can’t help but write in rhyme.

And the excellent news is that you can be a fly on the wall for all the latest on-set intrigue and high jinks. Watch Andy Serkis in tatoos, see Ashley Walters with fake teeth, behold a production crew second to none over at the sugarblog

(but don’t forget us back here, where normal service will continue more or less uninterrupted)

This commentry by the appropriately named Andrea Learned who writes for the generally excellent Marketing Profs Daily Fix blog, about the marketing of The Devil Wears Prada makes one of those points which seems like it should be self-evident, but which is so often ignored:

The… movie (based on a book) was written and marketed based on what resonates with a summer audience of male and female movie-goers, and how they may choose to see a movie - rather than being developed and marketed according to what the studio imagines or hopes the audience will get excited about for one minute on a specific Friday night. Hmmm.
Mark Cuban and any one who regards marketing problems as something that can be solved indendently of the core creative problem of connecting a story with an audience, should contemplate that thought closely.

So Mark Cuban has posted an aggregated response to the 1000+ people who responded to his “Movie Marketing Challenge”

4. The other response was along the ideas of what i call “personal tagging or networking”. In other words, i have something Im going to give you, and you in turn can use it and pass it on and we shall cherish our communal experience. We can write about it. Talk about it. Meet about it in any digital or real location. Call it theatrical marketing 2.0.

I dont think I have all the elements in place to make this work yet, but it will certainly be considered.

This clearly accords very closely to what we are proposing here at slingshot, but I find Mark’s objections to it a bit baffling.

Firstly: yes, it will only work with a property that at least some people [and the magic number of how many are needed to achieve a tipping point is, of course, context dependent] are passionate about. But surely, that’s a reasonable starting point? A kind of marketing that could persuade tens of millions of punters to go see bad films that nobody cared in the first place at low cost, would’nt be marketing, it would be voodoo.

Secondly: whilst there is yet to be an online destination that is to film what MySpace has become for music (though of course, MySpace itself is trying with its film-maker forums, and our cousin company LoveFilm is rapidly becoming such an aggregator in the UK), why does Mark feel the need to own or build such a destination himself (other that that Mr. Cuban is a man who seems to enjoy owning things)? Why not work with existing aggregators of movie fans? Well one reason is that they are all acutely aware of the value they add and are selling access to their users at an increasing premium to the studios already - the owners of social media destinations are starting to act like the gate keepers of old media.

But there is another route worth exploring, which is to realise that the core audience for any one particularly movie may not aggregate under the banner ‘movie fans’ but instead by other socio-psychological groupings. MySpace didn’t start as a place to push music. It started as a place for young people to get together. It just happens that young people use music as a proxy for personality and tribe.

So where might these people group? The short answer, surely, is that it is going to vary film to film. And that’s what makes this a non-trivial challenge.