A short film first, then the world
Luke Doolan and Drew Bailey are the director/producer team behind the Oscar-nominated short Miracle Fish. They are currently in post-production for Cryo, a science fiction short that will complement the story – and hopefully help finance – their first feature, Cargo.
LUKE: Miracle Fish opened up a lot of doors, especially with the funding bodies in Australia and generating interest from agents and studios overseas. It thrust us into a world we knew in theory, and suddenly we were taking pretty significant meetings. I’ve got several things happening at once and they’re not all going to happen at the same time, so I’m keeping my finger in quite a few pies.
We’ve spent all of this year trying to figure out our options and what to pursue, because by January next year, when the Oscar nominations are announced, nobody is going to care anymore. There’s definitely a short life span [of notoriety] that has to be exploited, and we’re trying to ride it for everything it’s worth.
The short is still blazing along, having a great life, which was greatly unexpected. We shot it with money we sourced from overseas (from MTV Italy and its defunct QOOB channel), so we actually just got it in the can and sent a rough cut to Sundance, and they accepted it. Then Screen Australia came in and gave us post-production funding to help us finish it in a limited amount of time.
Next thing we knew, we were sitting at the screening in Utah, not having even seen the final version. We’ve just shot another short called Cryo, a parallel story to what happens in our feature Cargo; it’s
set on board a spaceship and it’s about having to make a decision whether you sacrifice yourself for the greater good in very extreme circumstances. The hardest part is to come up with a self-contained short that won’t feel like trailer for a bigger one; one that works on its own merits.
The plan is to get Cryo into festivals and then return to the US and any other financiers here and try to sell it – and Cargo – off the back of our Oscar reputation.
My advice to other filmmakers? Make sure your idea and execution are in perfect harmony with your budget and resources. Work out the strategy for its release, monitor how it’s going and reassess constantly.
DREW: Most shorts are created as a stepping stone to bigger things. No one really wants to spend their entire life making shorts, and that would be a very difficult business model to sustain. To that end most short films want to be seen at a bunch of festivals, hopefully win some awards, and perhaps be noticed by the people that will fund your bigger projects.
There are now so many avenues for shorts that it can be tempting to just jump on the first and easiest one. However, often if you can wait a little and generate some interest, this will really help. If you’re planning on holding out a year to submit to Cannes, perhaps you need to rethink your strategy. Similarly, you need to be careful about when you put your short film online. If you plan on trying to get into some traditional film festivals, many of them won’t accept a film that has been online.
Making a profit from a short film is such a difficult thing. If the film is very successful you can make money back (but probably not go into profit) from winning awards at festivals, getting a distributor who will then try to sell the film to television stations around the world (difficult, even for successful films), selling the film online (either through on-demand services, or through DVD sales online) and, finally, trying to sell DVDs or merchandise directly.
None of the above are easy! However, I would say the best thing to do is to try and minimise the amount of money you spend entering the festivals. I spoke to someone the other day who had paid to get good DVDs with covers printed to send to festivals. That is such a waste. The festivals usually don’t pay any attention to that stuff. Try to get a really cheap way to make your DVDs. If you have a printer at home and can burn them yourself, that really helps. Just print the film logo and all of the films details on the disc itself – don’t worry about a cover – clear plastic covers work fine. If you can send the
film online through withoutabox.com do that. It’s cheaper than burning DVDs (or even worse – paying someone to create DVDs for you) and then posting them.
The main advantage of creating a short that is based on – or has some connection to – your feature is that you get to showcase to potential investors that you can do the job. Hopefully they won’t be as worried about giving you millions of dollars to make it if they can see that you have already done something similar. This is already pretty common in Hollywood (and increasingly so here), whether
it’s cutting storyboarded sequences to music with voices, or creating mood trailers for films; unless you’re a well established director, it can be difficult to convince people to believe in you. The disadvantage is the opposite. If you screw up the short, no-one is going to be knocking your door down to give you money.
Your Cargo film idea is similar to a Sci fi film out of Switzerland.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0381940/
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