You’ve heard filmmakers say it time and time again—making a movie is like giving birth. If that’s the case, then for producers, selling a film is like giving that baby up for adoption. After you’ve spent years nurturing and creating your film, you then (if you’re lucky) turn your baby over to a distributor. While this is a glorious accomplishment, you now have a fleet of people, many you’ve never met, who take ownership of your film and believe they know what’s best for it. While you have successfully shepherded the film to this point and have envisioned its future, you now have limited access and input to the strategy in which your film will be presented to the world. Producers have a strong emotional attachment to their work and the only way to get through the separation anxiety caused by handing it over to its new parents is to move on to another project. If only you could! Once the fanfare of selling your film is over, (i.e. the premiere at a major festival and press announcement), producers are then sent what is known as a deliverables list, which is an itemized list of elements, both technical and paperwork, that you need to turn over to your distributor before it can release the film. Let’s not be coy: it’s a long list. Items range from the final master DCPs of your movie to the chain of title, down to the location agreements from your production and everything in between. With independent films, you often don’t “finish” your movie before a festival premiere because of the costs associated with a fully polished and deliverable film. Items like music, clearances and even final VFX and your sound mix are left to complete after you know someone wants to buy the film. The problem with this is that once you sell your film, producers are not only met with a laundry list of deliverables to turn over, but they also have to actually finish the movie. Raise your hand if you’ve had a director want to slash things out of the production budget because they “want everything to go on screen”—a noble, if not idealistic, approach. However, because of this, many of the items needed to finish and deliver the movie are taken out of the production budget. Here’s the dirty truth: everything that goes into making a movie goes “on the screen.” It’s not like producers all got together one day and decided, you know what would be fun? Let’s add some arbitrary line items to the budget. The budget and all its pieces exist for a reason. It’s like making dinner without seasonings and expecting it to taste amazing. So without any people or money to fulfill these requirements, how do you deliver? When you find yourself obligated to a distributor, you as the producer are going to have to take on all these tasks and complete them yourself, because you took them out of the budget and didn’t have them handled when they should have been. While your filmmaker is traveling the world promoting the film and his next project, you will be stuck at home, filling the many positions on your film that you eliminated from the budget. I rue the day I ever allowed these production cuts. I shake my angry fist at the sky, biting into the bitter turnip of lessons learned the hard way. Five Things I will Never Take Out of a Budget Again (and Neither Should You):
Post Supervisor: The post workflow is constantly changing and no person should be asked or required to have this knowledge as a producer. Not having a post supervisor can slow down the post schedule and contribute to major technical mistakes that can cost money you don’t have to fix.
Clearance Coordinator: From music cues to stock footage to product clearances, you will have things you didn’t think about that will require clearances.
Post-Production Accountant: Just because you’re done shooting does not mean you stop spending money. If anything, accounting becomes more complicated in post-production, as you’re now dealing with tax filings. Unless your production accountant worked in Excel, which no one does, you won’t even be able to access the cost report, let alone keep it updated.
Assistant Editor: Many filmmakers promise that their editors will handle this part of the process, but don’t actually run this by the editor. In addition to the amount of work it takes to turn over a movie to color and sound, it’s a technical skill all its own that not every editor is familiar with. Without an assistant or a post supervisor, you’re in a tough spot.
VFX: Even for a film that you think has no VFX, you will realize in the post process that you have some cleanup to do, e.g., C-Stand in a shot, reflection in someone’s sunglasses, or adding smoke to a scene where someone is smoking fake pot. Finding someone to do VFX on no budget is next to impossible.
Two Reasons Why You Should Probably at Least Consider What I’ve Said First, you know what all of this ends up taking? An unfettered constitution and balls of steel? No! The answer is time. If you don’t plan accordingly from the get-go, you will extend the post/delivery process tremendously. You will spend several more months working on your film rather than pitching your next project. You will miss career opportunities. You won’t be able to take the work you need to pay the bills. I know because I’ve been there. Second, for better or worse, as a producer, you are contractually responsible for delivering the movie. The bottom line is you’ve already been paid for the work you’ve agreed to do. Cutting the post jobs or not including them in the first place leaves you screwed and you have no one to blame but yourself. Rebecca Green / Guest Blogger / Film Independent Fellow Edited by Stephanie Ariganello Rebecca Green is the co-founder of the newly formed production company TWO FLINTS, whose debut film, It Follows, premiered in Critics’ Week at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival and will be distributed by RADiUS-TWC.
