On Naming Your Film

Movie titles are fascinating – and sometimes the most artistically fulfilling or narrative-appropriate title for your film isn’t the right choice.  It’s important to find the sweet spot between what makes sense for your movie and what will make people actually want to see it.

When trying to elaborate on this principle, I often go back to the title “Minority Report.” Literarily, it’s a solid title:  this elaborate sci-fi mystery hinges on the fact that every now and then a pre-crime prophecy is known to be reported inaccurately from a minority of prediction sources. So, yeah, the title makes technical sense, sounds like a sci-fi short story, and the moment in-film when the viewer comes to realize the title’s importance is effective because of the “ah-ha!” factor.

But outside the context of this being a Philip K. Dick story being retold by Stephen Spielberg starring Tom Cruise, it’s actually a crap title! I mean, what the hell is a “Minority Report” and why should I care!? If I do decide to see the film, I’m going to expect some sort of exposé on prejudice, or underage student essay. This is a movie about a police force that can see the future… Sure, titles like “Prophet Cops” or “Future Crime” don’t have quite the same ring of profundity to them, but you can bet they’d get more butts in seats than “Minority Report” if the film didn’t have well-respected names already attached. Note how Cruise's name is as prominent as the title on the poster to the right.

So if you’re an independent filmmaker trying to establish a presence, hooking an audience with your title alone can be an important step in the right marketing direction. To this day, we still scratch our heads over what would have been the best title for our first film, Flashback. It’s a crazy time-travel comedy about a movie studio of the future… The in-film studio is named “Flashback Films,” so the title Flashback worked well with both that brand and the time travel aspects in the story – but on its own, Flashback is an entirely too-vague title. To us – while writing, shooting, and editing the movie – this was never clear. The title made good sense for the story and that was enough. 

In retrospect, we may have attracted the curiosity of far more potential viewers with a title that better conveyed the unique aspects of the story. Some of our outside marketers clearly agreed. In the UK, Flashback was released on DVD under the name Timelord – a clear Dr. Who cash-in attempt, but a title that has zero connection to the film’s plot. In Hungary, Flashback aired on Cinemax under the title The Future of Cinema – a rather clunky title, but one that shouts out the film’s content far better than our own title. 

Our experience thus far in marketing our second film, Bubba the Redneck Werewolf, has put the ambiguity of Flashback’s title in even clearer perspective. For Bubba, we partnered with author Mitch Hyman (executive producer) who writes the comic book series on which the film is based. So this time we inherited the title – and its simple brilliance is a large part of what attracted us to the project.  Whereas a movie titled Flashback could literally be about anything – you know exactly what you’re getting into when you decide to watch Bubba the Redneck Werewolf: a goofy southern-infused monster flick that makes you laugh. It’s ALL there in the title. Perfect. Any tagline or plot description is gravy.

Now, moving into pre-production on our third feature film, we’ve experienced both extremes of title-marketing. So what do we name our new movie about a group of friends who go on a crusade to end Daylight Saving Time only to end up in a heap of supernatural trouble? We considered Saving Daylight – still perhaps the most literary title – but it could also indicate a movie about most anything (and also this happened in the midst of our brainstorming). We still like titles such as Daylight Slayers or Daylight Slaying Time – but the former could easily belong to something vampire-based and doesn’t indicate DST, and the latter lacks a sense of immediacy or mission-based imperative – and neither says comedy quite as much as our working title: Daylight Savings Must Die. With this title, you know the movie’s about DST; you know someone’s on a mission to stop DST; you know the film has a sense of humor; and just maybe the word ‘die’ has foreshadowed that some carnage is on its way. Here’s hoping we’ve chosen wisely!

For fun, try re-titling some aptly titled movies Minority Report-style!

Examples:
Star Wars into Station Plans
Jurassic Park into Fences Out
Ghostbusters into The Advent of Gozer

Or The Other Way ‘Round:
The Bourne Identity into Amnesia Spy
The Hunger Games into Teen Death Competition
Independence Day into White House Go Boom

On Perfecting Your Poster

If you intend to sell your film, your artwork is possibly the single most important creative decision you'll make. Sure, there are plenty of other crucial creative decisions to be made -- particularly if you're trying to make a good movie! -- but the simple truth is that people DO judge a book by its cover. And several rounds of people are going to have to judge yours before journey's end. 

Before the movie's production has even begun, media sources will be far more likely to pick up your story if they dig your artwork. Similarly, distributors you hope to court may pass on your film or put it in their 'has potential' pile based solely on the first thing they see: your cover image. And, of course, each and every would-be audience member could dismiss you outright if they perceive your poster to be uninteresting, vague, off-putting, or amateur.

So with that in mind: Behold(!) the journey of a grassroots movie's poster art from wishful thinking to distributed DVD cover -- and beyond!

  

Flashback is a sci-fi adventure comedy made by three guys in a garage, and filmed entirely on blue screens with an all-digital world. Much like the film itself, the story of Flashback's poster art is over a decade in the making. These early pre-2005 designs aimed to be sleek, but were equally plain, and dependent solely on the title/logo.

Note the early, clunky (but admittedly more colorful) title Lights...Camera...Time Travel -- which matched the original short-film screenplay draft. Also worth nothing: the very optimistic "Summer 2005" release date since Flashback as we know it would start filming that very summer.

It's clear from these initial designs that we wanted to be Jurassic Park. You can get away with nothing but a title logo on black if your Steven Spielberg, Michael Crichton, and a Tyrannosaurs Rex skeleton -- but if you're unknowns wanting to get known, it's probably not a good idea to keep things vague and mysterious.

Flashback's similarity with Jurassic Park though is that both movies are named after a brand that exists within the framework of the story itself. Much like Jurassic Park logos adorn merchandise, vehicles, and clothing throughout the movie's theme park setting; Flashback logos adorn buildings, fake movie posters, and more throughout the in-movie Flashback Films studio back lot. So the desire to create a similar brand identity was clear, if misguided.

These weren't a total loss, however -- the logo featured on the third version above is still used in a lot Flashback imagery today!

The next evolution in poster design occurred during production, and prominently featured the cast (who were also the crew) on each and every mock-up. 

These designs aren't too pretty, but when you're an indie production and want your team to stick together over the course of four summer filming sessions, printing something like this out at 27x40'' and letting it loom over the proceedings like a finish line can be very motivational.

The first of the above designs was the final made for a pre-2005 attempt at putting the movie together. After a year's hiatus of pre-production, script-revising, and cast-rebuilding, Flashback began filming in May 2005 with a similar poster (above, center) and an updated but still laughably optimistic release date of "Summer 2006." The third design was by far the cleanest cast montage yet, and wisely changed the release date to "Coming Soon," but our lead actor, Andrew Ramos, was wise to point out that it made us all look like a deck of fanned-out cards.

As things progressed, Flashback producer and poster-designer (and much else) John Mondelli grew greatly as a Photoshop artist. And as post-production got underway, the world of the Flashback studio back lot finally began to come together. We began to take the poster design a lot more seriously, and our dream poster had always been something like this:

We knew we had invented a crazy world full of kooky characters, vehicles, hijinx, explosions, et cetera -- and our hero was the lone human janitor that had to clean up the best. What better way to showcase our wild digital world and the enormity of our hero's task than to have him standing at the Flashback Films studio gates, back to the viewer, looking out over the madness he must tame?

We put a LOT of effort into this design. A closer look will reveal incredible detail with characters and antics piled upon other characters and other antics. We've got the time machine, a car chase, janitor robots, the studio gates, our panicked villain along with the angry board of executives who hound him, our hero's hobo sidekick trapped in a dumpster, our studio's starlet Tiffany Sloane featured on a billboard, our evil soda company Nicofeine featured on another billboard, the studio water tower, parody movie posters, tons of PAs, a man on fire, a velociraptor -- it's exhausting. Probably too exhausting. And what's smack dab in the center of the poster? Our hero is just below center, so just above him is, yes, you guessed it: nothing. 

There's much we still love about this teaser poster, especially when blown up nice and big -- but it loses a lot when shrunk down, and is hard to decipher at any size if you aren't already familiar with Flashback and its world. 

But it's probably a good idea we didn't go in this direction. Flashback's years in post-production were 2008-2011 -- years in which movie posters looked something like this:

 

Can I get an LOL?

While this was going on, we were swayed by another kind of design, sported by a very retro poster:

 

On the left we have the poster for Captain America, on the right we have John Mondelli's parody of that poster featuring the Flashback characters. This was done as a joke (similar to Hobo with a Lightsaber) -- but it quickly excited us. Perhaps it was vanity that made us thrilled to see our cast featured front and center once more, but no longer resembling a losing hand at Poker. We decided to see what we could do with this style, but made it more our own, giving added prominence to marketable features like our time machine, car chase, and dinosaur:

We loved this. Still do. It became the poster for Flashback's private premiere screening, and was slick enough to aid us in finding distribution. But while we're proud of the design, and we think it's particularly engaging for fans of the film who know the characters - it still lacks a central focus enticing enough to attract an "off-the-street" viewer. Our distribution company knew this and pushed us to develop the design further - focusing on and amping-up the action/sci-fi nature of the film. After all, if a film doesn't have any known stars, it has to rely most heavily on its genre for public attention.

 

Our first instinct in pushing the design was to go back to our "hero vs. the world" teaser design, but amp up the sci-fi nature of the film by making the time machine prominent and center; while amping up the action-packed side of the film by rotating the image 15 degrees counter-clockwise. This design (left) never saw the light of day anywhere but after digging it out for the first time in years -- we actually quite like it. But it's also easy to see how "man looks up at some sort of thing" isn't exactly a captivating pitch. 

We were told to amp up the explosions, make it clear the time machine was a vehicle, and increase the amount of flying cars. For the near-final design (right) we kept the tilted angle, but moved the time machine to face front-center with our characters in clear view behind the controls. By putting it above the studio in a traffic lane, we were able to add in dozens of flying cars above a clearly futuristic skyline. 

We liked it, but it needed something extra -- and in large part that was to kill our darling title treatment. The 'little logo that could' finally had to be let go:

By removing the pristine brand-like logo and setting the title in a simplified, in-action position that matched the angle of the time machine -- now the whole thing felt complete: futuristic, sci-fi, action-packed, and (dare we say?) fun! 

And as an added bonus, by embellishing the explosions and lightening effects we also heightened the saturation of the artwork's blues and oranges. 

Which may or may not be a Hollywood poster thing:

So was that the end of our poster-crafting journey? Almost. 

The above design became our calling-card -- the U.S. DVD cover, the image on Amazon Prime, and iTunes, our website, and many more -- but the team who marketed Flashback in the U.K. had other ideas when they got hold of our artwork files: 

 

And you thought OUR final version was blue and orange! So the British marketing team removed the actual studio backlot and added some very normal looking skyscrapers; played a ton with the lightning and fire; added more starship-like flying cars (top, center) that definitely aren't in the movie; and darkened the time machine's viewscreen to obscure the image of our non-name cast. 

Oh, yeah: and they changed the name of the whole movie! No, we don't know who the Time Lord in Flashback is, but at least now British grandmothers will accidentally purchase our movie for their soon-to-be-disappointed Whovian grandchildren!

And that's how a simple logo set on black evolved into a blue-orange Hollywood-style explosion-centric extravaganza. It was an education in balancing artistic impulses with marketability, and the UK end coda perhaps even took marketing too far. But learning to walk this tight-rope is a crucial part of trying to be an independent filmmaker who has films distributors believe they can sell.

As an epilogue, we'll leave you with an image of the poster we currently use when touring Flashback around sci-fi/fantasy/comic/geek conventions -- a marriage of the character spread with the final U.S. DVD cover design:

Thanks for reading; thanks for watching!

On Finding An Audience

'And You Films'  promoting and screening Flashback at
Magic City Comic Con in Miami, FL (January, 2016)

So you've made a movie! Or you've made ten! Or you're sitting around thinking about writing the catchy tagline to a rough-draft outline that may one day become a screenplay that may sometime eventually be turned into a movie!

Any which way, possibly the most important thing you're going to need (in addition to everything else that's of immense importance) is an audience. See, here's the thing: you could have made the best movie of all time, but if no one knows (or worse: if no one cares) then it simply won't matter. It won't win you applause or accolades; it won't gain you attention or fame; it won't make you money, and it might not even bring you satisfaction - because, like most things in this world, what's the damn point if you don't have anyone to share it with?

So how do you find an audience? There's no simple answer - but there are some frames of reference to help get you on the right track.

The Built-In Audience
Ever wonder why Robert Downey Jr. and Johnny Depp make like a bazillion dollars* for each film they do? (*totally accurate data) It's because if one of them is in your movie, then you instantly have a built-in audience. A star of that magnitude is so in demand that you could literally film them sitting in a lawn chair watching grass grow, name it The Lawnening, give it the tagline "Look Who's Watching Now," and it will make money. And to a proportional degree, this is true of any A or B-list star. The upside of this for audiences is that Hollywood gives them more of what they've been proven to love. The downside of this for audiences is that Hollywood is frightened to give them anything else.

If you don't have and/or can't afford a star, another way to build an audience right into the very foundation of your film is to work within the parameters of a simple, popular genre. This is why there are so many low budget, independent horror films. It's an easily-defined genre with an avid fanbase. Does your movie have a psycho running around slashing people? Good news! There's somebody out there RIGHT NOW who wants to watch it! And the more bad-ass and/or hot your psycho is, the more of an audience you already have! We probably don't need to elaborate too much on other popular tropes and genres, but suffice to say researching what sells is an important factor in determining if the audience for your film is already out there waiting for it. You'll just have to walk the balance of doing a project you want to do that lets you flex your artistic muscles... while staying within some proven, safe parameters.

The Hard-Fought Audience
So even if you have some degree of audience built into your film, you'll still have to let people know it exists. Now if you have Robert or Johnny, chances are the media will find out about your project and latch on to it no matter what. But you'll have a lot more work on your hands if you have less of a built-in audience, or *shudder* no built-in audience (I'm looking at you, R-rated drama with no names and a generic single-word title).

Getting the word out about your film will involve seeking media attention (good artwork and a solid press kit is key here), setting up screenings (whether through film festivals, conventions, schools, theatrical distribution, etc.), and exploiting the heck out of social media (pretty much every social media outlet possible).

You will figuratively be trying to pull people out of their daily lives and into your film. It's not always pretty, and it's rarely easy, but depending on how well-built into your film your audience already is, and how willing you are to put yourself and your film 'out there,' success can and will be found. It's only (a very important) matter of degree. And whether you're after exposure or profit, the more of an audience you can wrangle the better.

'And You Films' seeking distribution for Flashback at the
Cannes Film Festival's Marche Du Film (May, 2012)

For our first film, Flashback, finding an audience has been a many-year struggle that's still on-going. Flashback has no names and a generic single-word title -- but it was made over the course of seven years by three guys in their garage, just out of college... so what do you expect? You expect a better title? Fair enough -- our bad. We just hadn't learned our lesson about balancing artistic integrity with marketability yet. But, that said, what Flashback does have going for it is decent genre appeal (sci-fi time travel adventure) and an overload of surprisingly effective special effects for just how low budget it is. Those boons were enough to get us a distribution deal that's worked out decently on the exposure side of things (Flashback is available on DVD and many streaming services, both in the U.S. and abroad, and has even aired on HBO across Eastern Europe), even if it hasn't topped the box office.

But distribution doesn't equal an audience, no matter how much you'd like to hope it would. Whether you're looking to earn back the film's budget, jumpstart your career, or fund your way to the next project -- chances are your film has to perform much better in order to meet your own goals than it does to meet your distributor's needs. Even once distributed, audience-wrangling is of the utmost importance -- as is prepping the audience for what kind of experience your film will be. Flashback has played well consistently for audiences at film festivals and conventions (garnering 'audience favorite' and 'best comedy feature awards') -- but without that indie circuit context, you're side-by-side with the best Hollywood has to offer, and the very 'sci-fi time travel adventure' label that won you distribution may color expectations.

So if you can't expect help with marketing or shaping audience expectations from your distributor -- well then it's up to you! For Flashback, we've dabbled extensively in viral marketing, started touring the convention circuit to engage our audience on a personal level, and have honestly only begun opening the Pandora's box that is social media to the necessary extent. All of this in an effort to give Flashback its due while -- much more importantly -- paving the way for media/fan attention for our second film Bubba the Redneck Werewolf (title-marketability lesson learned via Bubba comic-creator and executive producer Mitch Hyman) -- and even more importantly laying the super-early groundwork for a whole new kind of audience for our third film, Daylight Savings Must Die, currently in pre-production.

The Actively Engaged Audience
That whole new kind of audience, is an audience not only waiting for your movie -- and aware they're doing so -- but an audience following your progress, enjoying content you provide along the filmmaking journey, and interacting with you as you provide it. This audience may even be so engaged that (dare you dream!?) they could be willing to contribute funds to your efforts via a crowd-funding program like Kickstarter or Indiegogo! But rather than just assume that the
audience is there simply because your movie's got some built-in appeal or because you're awesome (you know you are!) -- now you're firing on all cylinders to reach out and shape the audience your film needs.

This actively engaged audience is not an entirely different breed of audience than the previous two, but rather the next-level hybrid, forged from the combination of built-in appeal and hard-fought attention. It may not even be possible to garner such an audience on your first film -- it may take more practice than such a feat would allow or it might even require a multi-film pedigree moving forward. Or maybe it just takes the right amount of prep-work, media smarts, and active social media engagement. None of this would hurt.

So, confession time: as you may have deduced, we're only just now dipping our toe into the waters of creating an actively engaged audience. Sometimes we wish we could go back and re-release Flashback knowing what we know now, but then we've always been a bit too focused on the work of the moment -- heads buried in cameras and editing software -- to see the audience of the future. Fortunately, that's changed. As we gear up for the distribution of Bubba the Redneck Werewolf and production of Daylight Savings Must Die, we're attempting to put our work and its process in public view as we never have before. We're working the convention circuit; we're documenting our progress; and our fingers are more actively on the pulse of social media. We even finally figured out what the dickens Instragram is! (But, seriously, what is it?)

Some Flashback filmmaking you didn't read about when it
happened because this blog didn't exist yet (July, 2007)

And, yes, we've started this blog. Could this post get any more meta? This blog and this introductory post are literally an example of an early step in crafting an actively engaged audience. It's something we should have started a decade ago when we began filming Flashback. It could have documented epic-scale filmmaking on no budget in real-time. It could have told the story of a group of young artists who transitioned their craft into functional day jobs. It could have followed their journey into filming their second feature while holding down said day jobs. It could have been inspirational. It might have been educational. It may have even been entertaining. It wasn't any of this -- because it simply wasn't at all -- but hopefully it will be! And it's about damn time.

Thank you for joining us.