Lifeform Trailer is Here! (So is the official film site…)

It’s been a little bit, but here I am to announce the brand new trailer for Lifeform, as well as the official film website for our new horror film. Yay!

http://lifeform.strangewerksfilms.com/

Please, if you haven’t already, check out the site. You can also sign up in order to stay informed about where to view the film when we finally navigate the crazy world of film distribution and hopefully don’t get taken for all we own in the process of said navigation! (Have I said too much?) Thanks ahead of time for signing up!!!

At any rate, I think we’ll share with you while we make this journey, for your edification and our own.  To whit: for those who want to learn how to get their film distributed, read on…

The first thing we did was set up the official web site so that potential distributors would have a location they could check out to learn a little about the film, have the opportunity to see the trailer and learn how to contact our company so they could see a screener of the film. A screener is basically a copy of the film that is set up with some type of “copyright protection” on it so that they can watch it and see if they’d be interested in (hopefully) purchasing the film, or (probably) representing it to actual distributors in the U.S. and territories outside the U.S.  The copyright protection is basically the words “Property of Strangewerks Films” popping up on the screen every few minutes, so that if some lunkhead in Bangladesh manages to somehow download the film (it’s password protected) he’ll have the annoying words mucking it up. Used to be, you would send actual DVDS out all over the world to try and get people to look at it. Thank God I don’t have to do that anymore, was that a pain!

After this was done, I began the very long process of researching companies on the web to see who might be my target audience–companies that might like to distribute indie horror films–and who in that company, usually someone in “acquisitions”, would be my intended contact person.

You can do a search on “horror films,” terms like that and it may lead you to a blog where somebody has posted a list of horror film distributors. This has proved fruitful. So has iMDB Pro. It’s a great tool for getting email addresses and contact people. However, many times it’s not up to date. Don’t be afraid to extrapolate an address, based on the email info on iMDB. Try adding “acquisitions” @blah blah company.com–sometimes it will work.

I think it’s just a matter of emailing as many of these companies as you possibly can. Don’t be afraid to hit them all really. You never know who has a subdivision that does lower profile films. (They might not want to post them on iMDB Pro, only their big studio pictures–the cowards!)

You’ll definitely get acquisitions people contacting you for the link to your screener. I’ve received quite a number of requests so far and I’ll let you know how it goes. Later!