Close Captioning Your Indie Film for $1/Minute

Close Captioning Your Indie Film for $1/Minute As any filmmaker who has ever delivered a film or video to distribution knows Close Captioning is a big and expensive pain in the butt. The process is convoluted, confusing and most of all  PRICEY. The cost to have close captioning created for your movie, television series, web series or…

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Filmtrepreneur Breakdown: Before the Dark – $15k Budget

Filmtrepreneur Breakdown: Before the Dark The journey of our feature film “Before The Dark” begins with a phone call from my good friend Benny Oliveri, Benny and I met at Film School and had stayed in touch ever since. A few years after Film School we both found ourselves living in sunny Los Angeles, my…

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Filmtrepreneur Breakdown: Killer Christmas – $50k Budget

Filmtrepreneur Breakdown: Killer Christmas Making a film is difficult, but it doesn’t have to be expensive. We are two amateur filmmaking brothers from New Jersey who made an 80-plus minute feature film from scratch in well under a year. It’s called Killer Christmas and is the story of a group of friends who sneak into…

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How Remakes and Reboots will Destroy the Hollywood Studios

How Remakes and Reboots will Destroy the Hollywood Studios Show of hands: Who asked for Men in Black: International? Anyone? Bueller… Bueller? Show of hands: Who wanted to see The Lone Ranger? Bueller? Bueller? Charlie’s Angels? Anybody? Anybody? Solo: A Star Wars Story? Ghostbusters 3? Come on, people… really? The dizzying number of remakes, reboots,…

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Film Festivals: Guide to Screening Formats & Technical Specs

Film Festivals: Screening Formats & Technical Specs Film Festival Hacks is the podcast that explores the festival circuit “from both sides of the badge.” Alex Ferrari is an award-winning filmmaker with nearly 600 international film festivals under his belt. He’s joined by Chris Holland, author of Film Festival Secrets: A Handbook for Independent Filmmakers who…

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Networking Like a Pro at Film Festivals

Networking Like a Pro at Film Festivals Film Festival Hacks is the podcast that explores the festival circuit “from both sides of the badge.” Alex Ferrari is an award-winning filmmaker with nearly 600 international film festivals under his belt. He’s joined by Chris Holland, author of Film Festival Secrets: A Handbook for Independent Filmmakers who…

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The Power of Humor in Festival Submissions

The Power of Humor in Festival Submissions In this episode, we discuss the power of humor not only in the film itself but in the film festival submission process as well. Filmmaker really under estimate the power of humor. You have to remember that people enjoy laughing, in the movie theater or during the submission…

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Best Film Festival Submission Practices

Best Film Festival Submission Practices Our third episode is the second part of our discussion of Withoutabox and FilmFreeway, the two most commonly used film festival submissions platforms. We talk about some of the best practices for using both platforms, including the importance of strong still images from your film, the dark art of writing…

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Decoding Film Freeway

Film Festival Hacks Podcast: Decoding WithoutaBox & Film Freeway In this second episode, we explore the essential tools of submitting to film festivals. Withoutabox and FilmFreeway are the two most prominent festival submissions platforms online. Although there are a number of prominent festivals that do not accept submissions on these submissions engines, together the sites…

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Secrets on How to Submit to Film Festivals

Secrets on How to Submit to Film Festivals This is it! The inaugural episode of Film Festival Hacks, the podcast that explores the festival circuit “from both sides of the badge.” Alex Ferrari is an award-winning filmmaker with nearly 600 international film festivals under his belt. He’s joined by Chris Holland, author of Film Festival…

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How to Find Distribution for Your Genre Indie Film

How to Find Distribution for Your Genre Indie Film You need names and the “right” genre to sell a movie.  Those are the rules.  You may think it’d be as simple as that, but it’s not.  Dramas and comedies are too broad to be considered genres: they don’t sell.   Leaving the porn industry out of…

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