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Truly Free Film

A Quick Word On Exploring Your Film’s Essence Through a Financial Lens

Financing an independent film is no joke. For those of you who have gone through this process, you know just how grueling it is — taking meetings and phone calls with potential investors, entering your script into conferences and competitions — it gets overwhelming.

We’ve seen and experienced this firsthand with the films we’ve put together, and with clients as well. The process for our films and our colleague’s  films begin with a process of cutting, compromise, and parring the script down to the very essence of the story.

While attending this fall’s film festival circuit and working with writers across the globe in mentorship programs, we saw a lot of great stories get wrapped up $50m-$100m bows.

Coming from film finance and production backgrounds, we were able to help these writers par their screenplays down to reasonable budgets while keeping the essence of their story in tact, and conveying one simple truth — the essence of every story costs nothing.

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Truly Free Film

Buffalo 8: First Time Directors — Getting From “Who” to Tarantino

Bigger film budgets continue to dwindle. Smaller film sets continue to appear. Camera technology and film centric software continue to evolve. Through all the change, one aspect of film production that has remained the same— difficult directors. As a producer, I understand this. Filmmaker’s are passionate people by nature. Their work is the ultimate fruit of their labor, and they only want to make quality of the highest caliber they’re capable of. Of course, there are a few directors in our industry who have a license to demand their perfected vision — David Fincher and James Cameron have proven their artistic credibility, skill set, and commercial viability through consistent quality work and perseverance.  Yet, as an independent producer, I’m often presented low budget films helmed by first time directors with an unrealistic approach to execute their vision on a budget — most often due to lack of experience. This serves not to lessen ambition, but to provide guidance for amateur, working or budding professional directors.

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Truly Free Film

Buffalo 8: Balancing The Art of Filmmaking With The Economics of Filmmaking

In the past we’ve written extensively about the economics of low budget filmmaking from the fundraising stages through the sales delivery. We’ve focused heavily during the early stages of our producing careers (and the founding days of the company) to build a sustainable business model that would allow us to produce content with a return structure. Bottom line — our focus has been economical and that was never the intention when we first started in the film/entertainment business. Our real passion was (and still remains, although slightly altered over the years) great content & impressive artists that have mastered the difficult craft of visual storytelling.
Whether an actor like DeNiro enthralling us with a performance, or a director like David Lean dazzling us with both the scope and intimacy of his storytelling abilities or a producer Harvey Weinstein impressing the notion that great films can be made — we were hooked and drawn in, like the majority of the entertainment business, by the art itself.

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Truly Free Film

Buffalo 8: How To Cut Through the Noise in the Over-saturated International Markets

Market figures
 
Different sources provide different figures but the bottom line is the same — too many films are being made on an annual basis.
 
“Too many” seems like a very broad term – but it isn’t. A recently conducted study resulted in a finding that the international community of audiences (those able to attend theaters, view content remotely traditionally as well as on mobile) was able to absorb 1,000 film per year.
 
The problem — roughly 8,000 films we produced/released in 2013.
 
With the markets therefore over-saturated by 87.5% – the cliched adage once again applies: something’s got to give.

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Truly Free Film

BondIt: Expanding Cash-Flow Opportunities to the Sales Side of the Independent Film Business

UploadBegan as producers & recognized problem

Before launching BondIt – our speciality financing operations to cover union deposits for feature films and theater productions – our team at Buffalo 8 Productions produced over 30 feature films.

Ranging in budgets and sizes — we dealt with the development, pre-production and post-production process — and branched in to the sales side of the business out of the necessity to build a revenue stream capable of sustaining a functioning business model.

As we grew as producers the company grew as well — offering new projects, larger budgets and further opportunities for the model we had built to pivot, adjust and expand.

More than anything – we recognized that capital allocations had changed for many of our colleagues as producers and production companies – with tight operating budgets and even tighter margins of profitability.

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Truly Free Film

Buffalo 8: Building Your Film Library for Value, Longevity and Leverage

 By Matthew Helderman, & Luke Taylor
 
At Buffalo 8 – we began our careers in the film business working as Assistant Directors on smaller independent sets, bouncing from project to project in the lower indie space.
 
Not only did AD’ing offer great insight and experience in to the the filmmaking process — but it also enlightened the reality that the film business is heavily driven on contracted labor that constitutes/requires the laborer to be present to continually earn wages.
 
As we began working 14-16 hours days – the hype and glamor that often surrounds the entertainment business was nowhere to be found — and so began our true education into the world of film production. 

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Truly Free Film

Buffalo 8: The Realities of Raising Capital for a Feature Film

 By Matthew Helderman, & Luke Taylor

Introduction
The difficulty in raising capital for any venture is two fold: first off, the market is crowded with opportunities that are currently earning strong returns. The stock markets, the bond markets and the traditional high yield sectors of real-estate, speciality finance and lending all present solid outlooks financially.
Second off, speculation is the killer of many financial deals. Being pragmatic and logical – who wants to invest in an opportunity when the return not only is unlikely but the timeline is completely unknown?