Features

Navigating The Pirates

All independent filmmakers dream of seeing their film on the big screen. Seeing it appear on a pirate site first can mean financial death. However, becoming a ‘Filmmaker2.0’ will arm a director or producer against pirates, to turn a torrent into a revenue stream. Colin Delaney reports.

It’s the 21 Century filmmaker’s worst nightmare. Online piracy is costing the global industry billions of dollars. According to a recent report the Australian screen industry is worth $6.1B and supports 48,667 jobs. While this number is up by 5.1% since 2006-07, a study on behalf of the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT) showed that $1.37B in revenue was lost across the entire Australian economy due to movie and TV piracy while 6,100 jobs were forgone in 2010.

Filmmakers these days are well aware of the importance of protecting themselves against piracy before their film’s life has run its course but it only takes one pair of unscrupulous hands and a screener is online.

So what life does a film have if it’s been uploaded to the internet before its release? And how can a filmmaker best monetise their pirated film and utilise the data it generates?

Adam Blaiklock, director of new film Caught Inside says, “We’ve been unbelievably careful with our screeners, and what’s written over them. You hear horror stories of films being seen by the audience they have, before the films get released and they get dropped like a hot potato.”

Between finishing the film to the time of its release, Blaiklock and partner Paul Friedmann produced an anti-piracy campaign for the Intellectual Property Awareness Foundation (IPAF). “We made that while we were in the throes of negotiating distributors and sales agents for our film,” says Friedmann.

Around the same time, says Friedmann “we logged on and did a search for the film’s name on a torrent site and they’d linked all their sites to ours and to our trailers. We served them legal notice to remove any references to our film, but it just popped up on another one, and it looked like the same company with multiple sites.”

Fortunately for Friedmann and Blaiklock however, their film hadn’t been leaked. The motive from the bit torrent sites, says Friedmann, is to create interest in the film. “We were terrified for a moment but what they’d done was gone on and stolen parts of the trailer.”

Neil Peplow, Director of Screen Content at AFTRS and producer of Waking Ned and Bright Young Things wasn’t so lucky, when he discovered his film FAQ About Time Travel online. Due to studio movements beyond Peplow’s control, the film failed to see a release in the US after HBO Films and subsequent other specialised distribution arms of Warner collapsed. In the UK the film was released through Lionsgate but was pulled after two weeks to make room for the next big blockbuster. After the release of the DVD, the numbers of votes on IMDB were greater than the ticket sales at the box office or DVD sales. That’s when Peplow did some investigating.

“We notice that Torrent Freak (a torrent news blog) had a chart and we appeared three weeks in a row. That piqued my interest,” says Peplow. Further investigation found FAQ About Time Travel was across 65 sites. On one site, a comment was written “if you’re going to upload it, upload it properly, the last ten minutes are out of sync.” “So I wrote to the Torrent Freak blogger,” says Peplow, “and I said ‘I’m an independent producer. I’d like to know how many times my film was downloaded and if there were any legs in a sequel.’ He said ‘It has been downloaded 1.2 million times. If you want more information you have to pay for it!’”

Ahmed Salama, with partner Val Petrenko of the multidisciplinary digital agency DLSHS were executive producers on The Tunnel. They turned the traditional distribution model on its head, initially releasing the film on BitTorrent. “Word of mouth is always going to improve the chances of a film’s success,” says Salama. While he acknowledges it’s an illegal act, he says “It’s no surprise the top ten downloaded films are the top ten earning films. [Pirates] are the audience that is talking. For every one of those downloads, twenty of their friends will hear about it. Word of mouth is so important for any film.” Through word of mouth The Tunnel was the number one Australian film on IMDB and the film’s website is number one on a Google search for the word ‘tunnel’ and to date, has had 2 million downloads.

Thomas Mai host of Youtube TV show Audience Republic, has 15 years experience in international film sales, having worked at Lars Von Trier’s Zentropa Entertainment and sold hundreds of films. He now specialises in what he’s calling film distribution strategies 2.0 and argues that a film’s financial life isn’t lost after it’s been uploaded. “Peer-to-peer is a way to advertise and piracy is sometimes sampling the film. The old method of cutting the best parts together for a trailer and saying ‘here’s a minute – it’s great, go see it…’ No one cares.” He cites Star Wreck, the first film by the team behind Finnish/German/Australian co-production Iron Sky. Since being uploaded to a peer-to-peer site for free, Star Wreck has had 3.5-4million downloads and yet still sold 60,000 DVDs. On the back of this many eyeballs, crowdfunding for Iron Sky, is half way to their target of 1m euros.

“Once I calmed down,” says Peplow after his communication with the hypocritical TorrentFreak, “I engaged in the message board and was having conversations with people who had downloaded my film. They were asking questions about where they could buy a DVD version [in the States]. There wasn’t any DVD interest by HBO, so the pirates suggested I go to Amazon for a bespoke DVD service. It was the first time I had the audience suggesting a way to distribute it and it opened my eyes on how to engage with the audience. If I managed to persuade half of the illegal downloaders to buy a $2 DVD that was well synced, I’d have made $1.2m – a substantial chunk of change would have come back. Lionsgate had bigger films to promote, this model was not any interest to them. As a producer though, that is your business. You’re wanting to get the money back any way you can.”

“The way forward for the ‘filmmaker2.0’ to survive in modern landscape,” says Mai, “is to maintain exclusive rights and make non-exclusive rights with others. Apple, Netflix, Amazon all can be done non-exclusively and now the person who made the film ends up owning the film and it’s a more fair way, and democratic way.”

Mai says filmmakers (and distributors) must use the download numbers as leverage for distribution. If Caught Inside, while having no distributor, had ended up online, its download numbers could prove its popularity. “Why not take them to the theatres and say ‘look at that’. They’d have a campaign to show a theatre or distributor.”

On the same day that The Tunnel began its online campaign, the film was released on DVD by Paramount and premiered on the Showtime channel. On the back of the film’s success, The Tunnel then approached a theatrical campaign – It has screened in Australia, Canada and soon the United States. Owning exclusive rights to the film they’ve also placed it on ABC’s iView and Sydney Morning Herald’s video platform. Salama assures the film has made its money back.

A social media campaign is a must for the filmmaker2.0 and Mai explains the concept of being an ‘independent’ filmmaker is over. “You are ‘fan-dependent’. Now with social media you have a two-way conversation with your fans. [And] You can build on that database from film to film.” Iron Sky currently has 71,500 fans on Facebook and its trailers have been viewed over 7 million times on Youtube.

As Peplow says, “You can build an audience but you still need to earn a fee. Using the Iron Sky audience, the producers asked ‘where do you want us to screen it?’ and they would use a map of the concentration of their fanbase to show to traditional distributors. It’s about gathering that data and mining it to potential financiers for that creditable funding.

“In the future,” says Salama, who used crowdfunding as partial finance for The Tunnel, “you will see legislation change where people can opt to pay for a film after the fact of downloading it. If you download a film and you get a guilt trip you can pay a dollar. It’s about leveraging that audience. Many people were paying more than they’d pay for a DVD on The Tunnel website. If you made payment optional, people would feel compelled to pay their dues.”

“My overall thing is it’s not over,” says Mai. “It’s just a new beginning. It’s exciting and the cost of distribution is so cheap to reach a million people – look I have a TV show now! I couldn’t have that before.”

Caught Inside is out October 6 through Umbrella Entertainment

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