Offline promotion is essential, too. Three effective ways to promote your film are:
- Screenings
- Speaking engagements
- Film festivals
Documentary filmmakers have been screening their films for small, niche audiences for years as a way to get their films out into the community. Matt has already had one such screening. By contacting people in his existing communities—documentary filmmaking, followers of Dorothy Fadiman (she is his cameraman), hiking, and University of Santa Cruz filmmakers—he managed to get 300 people to show up at a screening of Lucky Joe Goes to Canada at Cubberley Center in Palo Alto.
If you hold a screening, have DVDs for sale in the back of the room. Charge a nominal fee, perhaps $5. The objective is to get your film seen and discussed, not to pay your expenses. The $5 is only to keep people from tossing the DVD in the trash the next day. If you give people something for free, they tend to think it has no value.
Collect email addresses of everyone who shows up at your screenings. One way to do this is to pass around a clipboard with sheets of lined paper on it, and ask people to enter their names and email addresses.
The history of speaking to groups as a way to promote your art goes back at least 100 years. Mark Twain and Charles Dickens toured and spoke to groups. They would just read a chapter of their book and then talk to people in the audience afterwards. Their books were for sale in the back of the room.
To set up your own speaking tour, reach out to your existing communities. Contact them and offer to speak at events and possibly to screen clips of your movie.
Matt could speak to his hiking communities about his experiences during the hike, about hiking techniques, or about the condition of the trails. He might talk about ways to preserve the trails for the future.
He could speak to his filmmaking communities about ways to shoot a hand-held feature film with a pocket camera, on zero budget.
At each event, he should collect email addresses. And, again, it is OK to sell signed copies of the DVD in the back of the room.
Film festivals have become a de-facto distribution system and a way to get your film in front of film-friendly audiences, and possibly in front of a distributor. However, film festivals can be dangerous. You need a strategy for entering them or they will waste your time, drain your bank account and break your heart.
Paul Osborne, the director of the film Official Rejection, wrote a funny, useful article about how to prepare for and attend film festivals, Film Festival Do’s and Don’ts for MovieMaker magazine.
