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MPAA Rating Cost?


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Good to hear from you David. A lot has happened since I was last here. The film we are in pre-production for is "The Secret". Written by Jason Alex-Smith, it tells the story of a young girl who is kidnapped from her room, and forced to live in terror with her captor for 6 months. The story has a very good ending, and I can't wait for people to see it.

 

We are releasing it under a new company I started, "Firestorm Features". Starting next spring, we will be releasing 36-48 films per year on DVD, and also facilitating some foreign sales and possible small theatrical runs. I was able to get several investors on the project, and right now we have a total capital of $800,000 to both produce the film and get the distribution company started.

 

The MPAA rating is not needed yet, although I was curious of the cost difference between the MPAA and the Film Advisory Board rating. Turns out, both are about the same price for a film with a negative cost under $500,000.

 

Budget for this film is $180,000.

Edited by Landon D. Parks
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We are releasing it under a new company I started, "Firestorm Features". Starting next spring, we will be releasing 36-48 films per year on DVD, and also facilitating some foreign sales and possible small theatrical runs. I was able to get several investors on the project, and right now we have a total capital of $800,000 to both produce the film and get the distribution company started.

 

Hi Landon,

 

Hosting you website on myspace gives me the impression that nothing has changed with your international empire.

 

Best,

 

Stephen

 

EDIT from DVX User

 

About Landon D Parks

Biography

I'm a soon to be feature film director, and a C#, C++ and Visual Basic programmer. Currently, I'm a tour guide at Bluespring Caverns. I am also programming a software title to be released soon.

 

I do lead a very busy life... and I have very little time for friends or even sleep.

Location

Bloomington, Indiana

Interests

Filmmaking, Caving, Programming

Occupation

Tour Guide - Bluespring Caverns Park (www.bluespringcaverns.com)

Signature

Landon D. Parks,

Chief Executive Officer,

Firestorm Features Ltd.

http://www.firestormfeatures.com

lparks@firestormfeatures.com

 

 

BTW the www.firestormfeatures.com site is down however your site http://www.landon-parks.8k.com/ works but has not been updated for 5 years.

 

EDIT 2

 

I nearly chocked on my coffee when I found the following thread:-

http://www.communitytheater.org/forum/foru...D=3115&PN=3

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Nice find Stephen... You'd made a good P.I.

That old websites of mine is 5 years old because I have not updated it in 5 years. It's obsolete. As to "hosting my website on myspace".... That's my website, not the company website. Since when is it illegal for someone to have a personal myspace page?

 

The website for Firestorm Features should be up within the next few weeks. We currently have a company working on it to make it as user friendly as possible. Web address will be http://www.firestormfeatures.com.

 

However,

this is no joke. :rolleyes:

 

I'm not going to spend much time on the subject, as it's not the topic of this post. However, I will say that I'm not telling a fib. In fact, we are currently negotiating contracts with Rentrak, Itunes and Cinemanow to make our movies available to those respective services.

 

We will start acquiring films in about a months time, and should have the first release out by early spring 2010. The first festival we will be attending is the Dark Carnival Film Fest in October, and then from there work our way around to some of the bigger festivals.

 

As for filmmakers, if you would like to submit a completed film to us for review, it needs to meet these requirements:

 

A ) Be at least 70 minutes in length

B ) We generally do not accept film which would receive an NC-17 rating.

C ) We are mainly looking for films in which ALL worldwide rights are available.

D ) All screener's must be in DVD, Bluray or HD-DVD format, and should not contain anything other than the film itself. No "Special Features" or flashy menu's please.

 

If you want to send me a private message here, I will then alert you when you can send in your screener to us. We will start looking at screener's as soon as we have some infrastructure in place to do so.

Edited by Landon D. Parks
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I nearly chocked on my coffee when I found the following thread:-

http://www.communitytheater.org/forum/foru...D=3115&PN=3

 

You nearly "Chocked"? Was that like a Cappuccino Sprinkle or something?

 

2009 will be remembered as a strange year.

First, once again proving the old adage that just when you think reality TV couldn't POSSIBLY get any worse, it does: we have Dance Your Ass Off

Then we had Phil Rhodes publicly declaring that something shot on the RED didn't look too bad,

And now this...

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Starting next spring, we will be releasing 36-48 films per year on DVD, and also facilitating some foreign sales and possible small theatrical runs. I was able to get several investors on the project, and right now we have a total capital of $800,000 to both produce the film and get the distribution company started.

 

Budget for this film is $180,000.

Do you really think $800,000 is enough to release 40 films a year? Even for small direct-to-DVD projects, I'd think you'd need somewhere in the range of $10-$15 million at least. And if you want to produce them too you need at least 30% more.

How many films do the studios release every year on DVD? 10? 15? I'm sure they'd release more if they could make a profit doing it.

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Brad,

I don't want to get into a lot of detail on this... but in general:

I don't expect $800,000 to release that many films, no. While it is perfectly possible to do so, that would not leave much budget for each film advertising.

 

For most films, which will make a DVD premiere, our initial print run of disc's will be 5,000. This should cost us around $4,800.00 in replication. MPAA Rating will run an additional $2,500 to $3,000 per title (except for unrated titles).

 

Above this, we have only advertising. This will depend on the type of film we have, and what channels we get it distributed through. If we take on a film that we think has major selling potential, then our budget will go up. However, the average DVD premiere advertising budget will be $10,000 - $15,000.

 

For films which we think have great potential, and limited theatrical run would be in order. BY limited, I mean 5 or less markets, generally L.A, N.Y, Austin, Seattle and Indianapolis through Landmark theaters. We don't look to do many of these types of releases, maybe only one or two per year.

 

We will also shop some films around to the Television market, selling either the Broadcast rights or the Original Movie rights. Foreign sales will be something we would like to implement within the next few years, but currently that is not on our initial agenda.

 

Of course, we will start rather small. 56 - 48 films is an eventual goal, and probably not a starting goal. In order to keep our titles stocked in Rentrak, which will makes them available to video retailers across the nation, we must maintain a monthly release of at least 2 titles on DVD.

 

Some additional news: I just talked to Itunes today, and our application to become a video supplier was approved. They said we have some more paperwork to do, but we could start submitting films in the next 2 months or so.

 

On the advertising edge, we are going to be relying heavily on the Internet. Full page ad's, video ad's, Youtube, Myspace, etc will be our primary advertising targets. National TV campaigns and the like are unlikely to start, although I have had some discussion with National Cinemedia to get trailers on the NCM firstlook that plays before movies in Theaters. That, however, is very pricey for any kind of wide reach.

 

That was more detail then I had wanted to divulge, but that gives you an idea of how it should work. Keep in mind that our primary market will probably be the horror niche, with DVD's released under the "Dark Vision Features" label.

 

In addition, we are looking taking on documentaries under a separate label. However, this not planned for the start of the company and may take place at a later date.

 

To add to this: Large movie studios release more than 10-15 DVD's per year. In fact, a simple look at Ontrak catalog from Rentrak will show that for a single month, the average release of a large studio is between 6 and 10 titles. Smaller DVD premiere companies general have between 3 and 6 releases per month (Firstlook, MTI, York, etc).

Edited by Landon D. Parks
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