David Mawson
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Posts posted by David Mawson
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15 hours ago, Michael LaVoie said:
There have been published case studies showing VOD revenue returns that eclipsed the budget many times over. To be clear though, there's a big difference between just anyone putting up their movie on Amazon and the actual features that Amazon buys and then puts on Prime. I was referring to the latter.
No, you weren't. You might have meant to, but what you wrote was
QuoteLow budget indies will always look bad when you crunch the numbers after release but typically titles will gain it back over time through streaming revenue. If a film is good, word of mouth will make sure eyeballs catch it on increasingly wide ranges of platforms and devices.
My bold. Typical indy titles don't get bought by Amazon - it's extremely rare.
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1 hour ago, Mark Dunn said:
I know that. It wasn't clear from your first post that you did.
..Actually, seeing you obviously don't understand the real implications, I should probably explain.
Someone comes to me with an idea that needs 100K. The upside is 200K, the downside is I lose the 100. I need odds of much better than 2 to 1 to justify the gamble.
Someone else wants 100K. But this time if we lose I get 80K back. So I'm risking 20K to make 100K profit. That's a gamble worth taking at any odds better than 5 to 1. This a huuuuge shift in the investor's favour.
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1 hour ago, Mark Dunn said:
I know that. It wasn't clear from your first post that you did.
It might not have been clear to you. In which case I shudder to think what else won't be....
And again, I still don't think you understand what tax relief like this means in financial engineering terms. I'd have killed for breaks for investors like this when raising money in the past.
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21 minutes ago, Michael LaVoie said:
Low budget indies will always look bad when you crunch the numbers after release but typically titles will gain it back over time through streaming revenue.
I see any reason why any sane person would believe that. Do you have data to support your case? Looking at the film I found figures for, the budget was 800K and VOD is 30K. Those are horrible figures. Most films will only get VOD through prime and under the new deal it will likely be 5c per streaming hour. Do you have evidence that the typical $1M indy is going to get 10M streaming views on Prime? Because I'd say numbers like that would be absolutely exceptional.
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4 minutes ago, Phil Rhodes said:
- Relying on tax breaks is hardly a reason to celebrate the success of film production as a going concern.
You're confusing "celebrating" with questioning. I didn't say "Yay!", I said "Why isn't this working?" One thought is that the tax breaks are so advantageous that, after some careful accounting, they don't require films to be serious attempts to succeed - that the financial engineering dominates over everything else. This was certainly the case with earlier attempts -
https://inews.co.uk/news/uk/hmrc-tax-avoidance-film-making-scheme-little-wing/
QuoteIt's commonly felt that the solution to the UK's complete lack of a film industry is to promote production. People tend to feel that's the solution because what they actually want to do is production. Unfortunately, that isn't a solution. The solution is to promote distribution, which will consequently create a demand for production
Honestly, I don't think it's a problem that needs solving. TV is much more important culturally than film now. To the extent that perhaps the best film of the century so far, There Will Be Blood, is arguably inferior to a couple of episodes of the most comparable TV show, Deadwood. I'm just surprised that with tax breaks that high something isn't coming out of the system.
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7 minutes ago, Mark Dunn said:
It's relief agaisnt tax on other income
Yes. This is what tax relief is. And, again, 78% is a staggering figure.
QuoteHardly the sole basis of an industry.
Nothing is "the sole basis" of any business. But 78% tax relief on your losses is off the charts. It means that if you make 10 films for 150K and eight are losers, one breaks even, and one makes a couple of mil then you end up with about 800K + 150K + 2000K => 3 mil. Troma or Corman would have gone crazy for a deal like that.
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2 hours ago, Phil Rhodes said:
It's not really an investment. They're not investors. It's not a business, and it never really has been in the UK.
But with tax breaks that huge, it's almost puzzling why it isn't. You get 78% of your investment back if you don't go in to profit: that's phenomenal.
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13 minutes ago, Max Hall said:
I’m sorry you were as unimpressed as you were
You were experimenting and knew it. Taking risks is a good thing as long as you're smart enough to look hard at the results afterwards.
I think the bottom line here is that for every image you put on screen you have to ask "Why do people want to see this? How does it make them feel? Why are they going to keep watching?" With "Hey Boy" the director immediately opens a question in the viewer's mind: what's the connection between the group in the foreground and the protagonist? And creates a sense of threat. That's two compelling narrative points in the first 8 seconds. Those carry you through until the huge WTF at 40 seconds, then empathy and the curiosity already created - plus three excellent performances shot close-up - carry you the rest of the way.
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This is very interesting. First there is a reasonably detailed breakdown of costs for a real 1M film - and for cinema and VOD revenue. (Both were tiny, but the producer believes that the film is a long term asset - which I think is crazy, but so it goes. The VOD was mostly Netflix.)
Secondly there is information on the tax breaks in the UK -
https://stephenfollows.com/full-costs-and-income-of-1m-independent-feature-film/
QuoteThe SEIS scheme is for films of up to £150,000 (or the first £150k of a larger film) and it gives investors 50% of their investment back almost straight away. Then, if they fail to see any profits after three years they can claim a further 28% of their loss back from the taxman. The EIS scheme can support projects up £15 million and give investors slightly less back.
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I thought you were talking about the Zacuto Z-Finder type gadgets that convert screens into EVFs?
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12 hours ago, Robin R Probyn said:
The c300 is a bit more of pain as it doesn't have a "real" EVF.. I think your better off having your eye /head up against the camera looking through an actual EVF, than a monitor shooting hand held in the rain.. maybe get a Zacuto EYE or something .
You can make an excellent Zacuto replacement using one or two close-up filters and something to hold them.
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14 hours ago, Phil Rhodes said:
That's not surprising.
It surprised me because with those odds I can't see why investors stay in the game.
Re. non-cinema release, for most films this will mean Amazon Prime. Amazon's new revenue rules would seem to work heavily against low budget productions - they actually pay less per hour if a film doesn't include name talent:
https://variety.com/2019/digital/news/amazon-prime-video-direct-cut-royalty-fees-1203163736/
...So call revenue 4-7c an hour - probably 10c for watching a whole film. So a million views in a year - which is doing amazingly well - is $100K. Perhaps we can be optimistic and assume that 0.5% of films are profitable after 5 years of Amazon Prime and the 25% tax credit are taken into account...
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12 hours ago, Max Hall said:
Yeah, that turned out to be a consequence of this effect. Do you think the zooming in helped to mitigate that? The hope was that, by the time the full 4 minutes are over, the viewer has had enough time to become familiar with what they’re seeing.
No. Because it was 1 minute 42 seconds before I noticed a zoom and I'd normally have given up after 20 seconds. Also the zoom seemed completely unmotivated, which itself is a bad thing. And to be honest, even if you'd started close and then pulled out, I don't think it would have helped. People don't want to squint at dancing ants. The point of a video is that something interesting happens on screen -
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Quote
https://stephenfollows.com/highest-grossing-uk-low-budget-films/
- Between January 2008 and August 2014, there were 1,419 films made in the UK budgeted under £1 million
- Only 7 of these grossed over £1 million in cinemas worldwide
- 0.17% of the 1,190 UK films made on under £500k grossed over £1 million worldwide.
Does anyone have similar figures for US low budget films?
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Try doing a patent search.
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On 3/4/2019 at 7:57 PM, Phil Connolly said:
Wooden Stands? Really? - Oh dear oh dear. That must be a "London" thing. Ooop north we hold our lights, with our bare hands. Of course it takes a 10 year apprenticeship with the lamp holders guild before a young pledge is allowed anything larger then a 2K. Gives time for the callouses to develop (gloves of course are frowned on).
This is something Japanese crews really did -
https://www.amazon.com/Japanese-Film-Art-Industry-Expanded/dp/0691007926
Page 337 -
https://books.google.co.uk/books?redir_esc=y&id=C2z3otM-y5kC&q=lights#v=snippet&q=lighting&f=false
...And instead of a boom, a grip was often dangled from the grid by a rope with a mic in his hands.
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On 2/28/2019 at 10:01 AM, Phil Connolly said:
They are so common on the Sussex coast, they wash up on the beach. We call them "Sea-Stands"
Female orphans often make a living collecting and selling them. Hence the famous job description "She sells sea-stands on the seashore."
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Buying (or renting?) one of the rain covers made for the C300 would seem to be the obvious answer -
https://www.camrade.com/products/wetsuits-rain-covers/camrade-wetsuit-eos-c300-500
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Completely doesn't work. If you look at the frame as a whole for then your brain just registers tiny figures doing stuff repetitively. If you try to look at any particular figure, it's too small. The impression is more of a screensaver than narrative content.
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It might be worth searching lensrentals.com. They're very good on that type of info. Otoh, this might put you off doing the shoot at all -
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On 6/23/2019 at 8:27 PM, Phil Connolly said:
yep laptops can get very hot. I once had a macbook and it warped the battery and bent the case. Probably had a luck escape with it being lithium on the fire risk front - I'd left it rendering and came back to find it wasn't sitting flat on the table.
The new Macbooks don't seem to get as hot or crank the fans as loud - so I suspect they are throttling the processor more.
Not necessarily. Different processor, better heatsinking.
That said, buying Apple for - well, anything makes less and less sense. A lot of techies favour Thinkpads, especially the X-series. Boring to look at, but super tough. Big companies buy them, run them three years, then cycle them out - and they still have a decade of wear left on them.
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On 6/23/2019 at 4:22 PM, Daniel D. Teoli Jr. said:
Wow! I read a still photog's computer took 15 minutes to process 1 photo.
That sounds very unlikely, at least for anything you'd want to do normally. I use a tiny years old fanless PC for writing - because it's convenient and silent. It has 1/10 the power of a current desktop. And it will still do typical stills processing - applying a curve, resizing, sharpening - in a few tens of seconds.
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On 6/19/2019 at 8:10 PM, Kevin Mastman said:
OP here. I'm an in house director/DP considering going freelance. I've had a lot of experience shooting with both Alexa's and cameras like C300ii. I have a reel that I think speaks for itself but at the moment, not a ton of prospects for freelance clients.
Then it sounds like a terrible time to buy an expensive camera. Have you thought of going waaay down in price and buying something a Fuji XT3 or GH5s, then renting for the jobs they won't cover? Those new 400Mbs hybrids are much more capable than the last generation -
and quite a few people are ranting about the shorter post-production times they say come from using Fuji HLG.
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On 6/20/2019 at 10:27 PM, Gregory Irwin said:
I’m working with Ron Howard currently and I must say that he is a refreshing breath of fresh air.
....So you could say that you're experiencing Happy Days???
Heeeeyyy!
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Disastrous figures for low budget UK films
in General Discussion
Posted · Edited by David Mawson
1. You're confusing your personal ignorance-based opinion with evidence. They're not the same thing
2. Quoting an example where a movie had stars and lost money doesn't actually prove that you need stars to make money. This is appalling logic - you're arguing that because A does not always equal B then Not A can never equal B. It's a logical fallacy so silly I don't think it even has a name.
Corman and Troma - and Hammer to some extent - ran on the no-stars model for years. Stars certainly increase revenue, but they have agents who negotiate aggressively to take that revenue. There is, in fact, no statistical correlation between star power and profit.