The value of knowing your audience when self distributing

Flatland is a niche animated film which successfully used a highly targeted campaign when self-distributing. By mainstream standards, the animation would be considered a hard sell: it’s half an hour long, and it’s about mathematics. I discussed the distribution strategy behind it with Flatland creator, Seth Caplan.

Flatland: The Movie trailer from Collection Agency Films on Vimeo.

Flatland was adapted from a copyright-expired book. It has been self distributed on both DVD and digital download, with the option of either a Home Use or Educational license. The educational version came with worksheets and a copy of the book, the Home Use DVD had additional interview extras with the actors. There is also a soundtrack available for download.

Please explain your distribution strategy, why you decided to sell Flatland yourself.
Before we'd even finished the script we set up a website where we offered $5 off of the DVD in exchange for a user giving us their name and email. At this point we didn't even know how much we were going to charge for the DVD's!

The theory was, if they won't give us their email, then we know they won't pay for the movie. At first it was very slow getting email addresses (1 per day at best). But as time went on and word spread the email addresses on our site increased in frequency. By the time we finished making the movie, 18 months after we launched the page, we had over 5000 email addresses. The email addresses confirmed to us that our key audience would be math teachers. This gave us the confidence we could sell the movie directly and not sell to a distributor. This was key to our success!

How did you connect with your target audience and build buzz?
The #1 way we connected with our audience was going to math conferences and showing early scenes of the film. It wasn't glamorous and required a lot more work, travel, and cost than social media but it made a big difference. Identifying our audience (math teachers) and presenting the movie to them in their environment helped us make a better movie for our audience and made our audience more loyal to our movie.

What sort of returns have you had (ratio of DVD to download)?
Download is our highest selling product. We sell more download versions of the movie than all the DVD's combined. Revenue is a different story, we actually make more total profit off of the DVD's.

Have you considered selling additional merchandise for fans?
Our biggest move in this area was to work with Princeton University Press to publish a Movie version of the book. We sell the book from our site and Princeton Press distributes it worldwide. We also put our composers soundtrack on our site. As for t-shirts, posters and other merchandise we have considered it, but I'm not sure teachers would or could spend school money on additional merchandise.

Any tips for other indie filmmakers?
I'd recommend to pick your goals for a project first. If you're goal is to make a profit, then identify your audience and get them involved early. Show the script, scenes, trailers...constantly listen to their feedback and pay attention to what gets them excited. That audience is your customers and they are king. If you have other goals above profit (exposure of a story or cause, professional reputation or promotion, self-expression) then you don't need to worry about audience as much.

Anything you wish you'd done differently?
Made the movie faster. I think we spent a lot of time working on elements of the movie that cost time and money but have had no positive effect on sales.

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Seth has also done distribution the traditional way on other projects. In Search Of A Midnight Kiss is a live action drama  film that had a great festival run, they hired sales agents for domestic and international rights, and sold the movie to distribution companies. However, the returns for it were “minimal”. While Midnight Kill may have grossed way more than Flatland, it was Flatland that reaped a profit for the filmmaker.

“Midnight Kiss has experienced great exposure and we have met some amazing distributors who have been a joy to work with. However, financially it's not a viable model.”

When I asked Seth if there’s anything he wished he’d done differently with In Search of A Midnight Kiss, he replied “Held more rights back. We are now in the process of trying to recoup as many of the digital rights as we can. We will soon sell the movie online to territories where we can.”

Seth’s next project is called Purim, and, like Flatland, it is a niche animation - this time aimed at Jewish schools, scholars, and synagogs. With the success of Flatland's strategy, for Purim they are similarly sticking to a tightly defined niche audience, and creating lesson plans and study guides to encourage purchase of the more expensive Educational license.They are crowdfunding the budget using Kickstarter.

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The key things that impress me about all this:

- Building a relationship with the audience right from the very beginning, before the script was even finished, and keeping them involved. With 18 months lead time, an indie film actually stands a chance to build awareness cheaply.

- Gaining the data they needed to double check they'd identified the right target audience, not making any assumptions.

- Innovative way to  harvest their audience's email addresses with a no-risk "$5 off" offer. This is brilliant!

And these points can be applied to any project, regardless of how niche or microbudget.

What could be improved:

Having an easy to access blogger/media kit on the website, so people who want to write stories can quickly and easily find usable photos, trailer, logline, etc. There is a gallery and trailer on the website, but embedded within flash in a way I couldn't use ( I had to google for the image and trailer I've got here).