Half a year ago I have started developing a concept for an online platform (the working title is filmbooster.com, which is just that at this stage – a working title), which will help filmmakers (independents, but also studios and film funding agencies) find the appropriate online marketing and distribution channels for their specific film. It will be fully automated – you tell us what kind of film you have and what you want to do with it, and we tell you which online channels to use to achieve those goals. We will also take into account the “old” marketing and distribution channels (like e.g. film festivals) that may have restrictions on how eligible you are for their festival in case you want to screen your film online in its entirety.

Basically, we will provide comprehensive and the most up-to-date online marketing and distribution data for the film industry. How and where to reach your audience, how to achieve your marketing goals for your film, how to raise your filmmaker profile, how to raise awareness for a specific project,… you name it. And the best thing is: this will be affordable to a large number of people. Working as the Wellington Fringe Film Festival Co-ordinator, and on countless short films in my life in New Zealand film I know that money is often tight – and filmmakers usually just want to get their film finished, but have no money left to get it out there.  We will be able to help you promote and distribute your work on a very limited budget.

But wait, there’s more: my dear friend Marian Adolf pointed me towards a funding agency based in Vienna called departure, who had a funding round for projects incorporating Web 2.0 into their business model in October. I pitched filmbooster to them, and received a grant of € 200 000 to complete and promote the platform within the next couple of years. This is so great – without this grant it would have been doable, but not as comprehensively as planned. And certainly not as fast. I am very grateful and honored. And I am excited and inspired about the fact that we will help filmmakers as well as take part in this paradigm shift by building a tool that will assist filmmakers, producers, studios, etc. in making the best use of the web for their specific agenda and leveraging the Long Tail.

Work on the project has started already (I have obviously been working on it for a while now, as have my colleagues Ursula Seethaler, Andreas Hafenscher, Matthew Kerr and Hans Lamprecht; currently I am recruiting more people into my team), and in the next little while I will approach more and more filmmakers to be part of our experts that will help us get the right info together, in exchange for lifetime free membership on our platform. If you’re a filmmaker who has promoted and/or distributed a film online – flick me an email. We want you!  The big kick-off will be mid-March, which coincides with my move back to Europe. Loudhail will be based in Vienna, but not to worry: I will of course keep working globally as a consultant, not only to the film industry!

There have been some reports in the Austrian press and online about the funding round and the funded projects: departure had about € 1 Million to spend, and 7 projects got funded. Read more here and here (in German only).

Thanks so much to all the people who have contributed to this so far and who are making this happen. Watch this space!