Raising Film Investment – How Much
Raising Film Investment have you got it all covered. Most filmmakers can figure out how much it will make to make a film. But they often forget to recover their development costs, trailer, and investment materials, legal and accounting fees the cost to sell and promote the film, don’t leave it all up to the sales agents and distributors and not least the commissions to be aid to raise the money. All of these items must be included in your Investment ask.
Raising Film Investment – How much will my film cost to make and sell
Your investment ask must cover all the stages of making a film. This will form the basis of your film budget and the investment ask.
After you subtract grants and subsidies, Post and pres-sales deals from your full film budget, you are left with an shortfall amount. That is how much you have to ask your investors for and forms the basis of your Offer to Investors.
Note grant and subsidies are usually paid only after the film has been produced. But it is possible to obtain bridging loans so they can contribute to the reduction of production and post costs and correspondingly reduce your investment ask to investors.
As an independent film maker you need to involve many third party subject matter experts at every stage. Some will take deferred payments but many will want payment on delivery and none are free.
- Development
- Financing & pre-sales
- International Distribution
- Production: Shoot & Post
- International Sales and Licensing
- Exhibition & Exploitation
- Consumption
For details of who and what is involved in each stage check out the The Independent film Project Value Chain
Don’t make the mistake of thinking it’s just about shooting a film, doing post and the rest will take care of itself. If you are serious about making a commercially viable film, you will need to be raising investment money to make and promote it. That means you will have investors who want their money back with interest. And that means you have to manage the recoupment stages from the outset.
Raising Investment – How to budget the shoot.
You need to turn your script into a schedule, that will tell you who has to be where for how many days and what resources you need to shoot them.
There is an excellent analysis of ‘The full costs and income of a £1million indie film’ here. It’s by Stephen Follows who has an excellent website full of useful information about the film industry.
Recent Comments