This popular recorded workshop and link-filled slide set gives up-and-coming producers a solid fundamental understanding of their role, rights, responsibilities, and risks when they undertake to produce a feature film.
You learn about the different stages involved in bringing a film to market, what each stage involves, when operations are usually undertaken, and how producers manage both risks and costs.
Whether you are producing a micro-budget feature, a $50K film or a $5M film, taking on the role of producer comes with a significant set of risks, rewards, and obligations. If you don’t know what they are, this is the workshop for you.
Topics addressed in this workshop:
- Producers, Executive Producers, Line Producers, Associate Producers, and Co-Producers: As the cost of a production goes up, a producer ends up hiring other producers to help them. You’ll learn what different types of producers do, and when it makes sense to bring a new producer on board.
- Development: What it is and why it’s critical to ensuring your film isn’t a dangerous waste of time and money for you as a producer. How the right development processes unlocks funding from banks, investors, state/national rebate programs swiftly. How to work with film analytics companies and other industry pros to choose the script, director, key cast, key crew, that make your project cost-effective to produce, easy to fund, and most likely to be quite profitable.
- Funding: How films at different levels are funded, why some are crowdfunded, others are supported by grants, and others require support from banks and investors. We discuss why some projects are easy to fund, and why others are almost imposslble to fun.
- Attaching the Right Cast & Crew: A film is produced by a team, and a producer acquires, hires, and pays that team. We discuss the risks producer take on when they builds a team, how to minimize those risks, and how to ensure the content created by the team is owned by the producer’s production company.
- Accounting, Legal Support, Insurance, Unions: Producing a film requires working with tax accountants, payroll companies, production accountants, and insurance companies. If you want to use SAG Actors, WGA Writers, or DGA directors you’ll also be working with unions.
- Distribution: You learn the fundamentals of distributing your film, including how to get distribution pre-sales during development, how to find and work with sales agents, and how to find and use the new rights-sale platforms that let you sell your film worldwide. There have never been more places to sell your movies, or more buyers eager to have them, but it’s quite possible to make decisions that basically give your film away for free if you aren’t careful.
- Rewards: How does a producer get paid? When do they get paid? How long do they get paid for? Understanding how producers profit from a film is key to understanding when, why, and how to make them.
Profitably producing a feature film requires undertaking all these tasks. Even an ultra-low budget project made over two days involves many of these operations, they are just really easy to undertake.
If you aspire to create more expensive projects, then each of these operations may take weeks or months, and if you do them in entirely the wrong order or without the right preparation, your film may well never be made and/or you may well find yourself involve in debt and with a lot of legal hassles you didn’t expect.
This video will help you understand what’s involved in producing a feature film, the order of operations that significantly reduces your risk of failure, and how to make sure that the project you want to make actually has what it takes to go forward profitably.
Since 2015 Nancy Fulton has been running workshops for media creators. 60,000+ follow her on meetup, and she runs several live online and face to face meetups every month. You can find hundreds of testimonials at www.NancyFultonMeetups.com.