Chapter.... Two

    To anyone who understands the reference in the title of this blog post: I love you. And to those who don't, maybe you need to lock in on Seinfeld, and don't worry I will still love you, but I will be weary. Anyway, today we are going to be yapping about the CCR. Ah yes, I can hear the cheers from the crowd. 

    To be more specific, question two of the CCR, centering around target audience and distribution tactics. Alright, simple enough.

Target Audience

    As you all know, our film is a science fiction/drama, which means that the target audience can get pretty wide. But we can narrow that down a whole lot. 

    The baseline targwt audience for science fiction is really all compassing with no real preference for who can watch it. Drama is a bit more relegated to an older audience, and by that I mostly mean teenagers. With that in mind, we must consider the the content of my film. It follows a young adult woman who goes to therapy. Ding, ding, ding. This is what is going to shrink our audience.

    Not saying that men are not going to want to watch this movie, but the fact that is is a young female protagonist does make our once wide audience much more narrow. This will bring in a lot more women, especially those in the same age range as the protagonist, that being 18-24 year olds. But I do not want to really limit myself to women, so I say that men will still come to see the film, especially those within that same range, but those older people become obsolete. 

    Some other sci-fi/drama films that fall into this target audience are Palm Springs (2020), Dune (2022), and The Day After Tomorrow (2004) are all sci-fi dramas that are all geared towards a younger audience of science fiction enjoyers. 

    One thing that all of these films have in common is a young(ish) protagonist that is going through young people problems. Well, not exactly young people problems but they have the equivalent reaction to their situations as young people would: brash and stupid. 

    Take for instance Paul Atreides from Dune.

    You see this guy? Would you guess by looking at him that he is the Muad'dib, AKA the flipping Messiah. Never. 

    Or maybe you would, but at least I wouldn't. But at the start of the movie, this little guy is nothing but a daddy's boy who really cannot make a single thought for himself. But by the end of the movie, he is super cool guy who can fight bad guys. 

    The pipeline from weak barely adult to cool, brave still barely adult is real, and that is the same pipeline that Alice has in our film. 

    In our film opening, we do our darnedest to make Alice seem like that depressing young adult who has some serious trauma, but throughout the film the audience will get to experience that pipeline of her being sad and depressing to less sad and more cool. 

    This right here is what really reels in that target audience and what we really went off of when creating the film and its opening. Also, I am just really glad to bring Paul Atreides into the conversation

Distribution Techniques

    Since we are not a big budget studio will bajillions of lackeys, we do not have to luxury of all their resources, but that does not make distribution an impossible task.

    I guess we would be considered an indie production, so you know what that means: film festivals. Ah yes, we've got Cannes or TIFF or Sundance. Sure, these are long shots, but it is worth a try. It is actually super easy to submit a film to these festivals, but getting chosen might be a whole other battle. 

    For Cannes Film Festival in france, these are basically all the requirements to submit a feature film, and the rest can be read here. There are proabbly even easier (and less pretentious) film festivals to submit to that are in the US. Sundance Film Festival is based in the United States and seems pretty simple to follow it regulations that can be found on its website. 

    I think I am seeing why a lot of indie films are submitted to film festivals, as they allow for people who are deep in the business to see all of these unknown filmmakers.

    Another way that we could get our film out to audiences is very simple: YouTube. A lot of indie filmmakers resort to putting their first feature films on YouTube as an easy and quick way to get people to watch it. Of course this must be paired with some serious marketing to get people to actually see it, but for a distribution technique it is pretty solid. 

    As an option that probably won't really get us anywhere but might be worth a shot is to pitch it to some studios, and maybe (but probably not) they could distribute it on their streaming platform. This is probably a terrible idea, but can't hurt to put it out there. 

    Okay, did I have fun researching all of this stuff? I would never admit it. But I must say, looking at all the film festival stuff was kind of fun. Anyway, I think all of this information could be good to include in CCR for the second question. Maybe not all of it, as I would be yapping for way too long, but I think we got some good work done. 

And now for the movie quote of the day...

"[talking about Paddington 2] I cried through the entire thing. It made me want to be a better man." - Javier Gutierrez, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (2022)