Financing for Independents

“I began my career working on very very large projects – my first ever job in the business was Who Framed Roger Rabbit?. I spent about 10 years working in Los Angeles, working on projects with Disney and DreamWorks and Warner Bros and so on, and obviously, if you’re working on a $150 million feature film, your problems are quite limited actually – you just have to make a great film, because you have stacks of money to do it with.

“What I want to talk about very briefly here tonight is something I’ve been doing with Gravy Media. We’ve been working on a feature film project My Haunted House, which we took to Cartoon Movie in March this year. And until we started this, I didn’t know very much about the business of producing independent animated films and of course, the landscape in Europe is completely different – we don’t have $150 million dollar budgets – we have to work with much slimmer resources. So the question is: how, even in this era of the democratisation of technology, even though we all have now at home a pc, on which – in theory – you can make a movie – we could make a movie tonight – run some tape and in two hours you’ve got a movie. But nobody’s going to buy a ticket to see that movie, so the question is, how are you going to make a movie that people are going to pay £10 to see, over something like ‘Toy Story 4’? And I think that’s the challenging thing about the landscape for us in Britain and Europe, and working with co-productions and co-production financing.

“Obviously, if you’re going to get an independent animated film off the ground, you need money. For a small- to medium-sized company this is difficult, so there’s a lot of self-financing involved, and you need to come up with a bloody good idea. You’ve got to start with something that’s really strong. You need to begin with something fantastic – you need a great pitch. If you go and pitch to Disney or DreamWorks or Warner Bros, it’s a bit like taking coal to Newcastle. Halfway through your great idea, Mr. Katzenberg or one of his minions will turn to you and say: “That’s a great idea, but we’ve already got one of those.” 

    So, realistically, you’re working independently, you’re trying to get this stuff off the ground through an independent route. There are obviously a lot of small production companies in London, but small companies tend to have their own projects. So what we did at Gravy Media was take My Haunted House to Cartoon Movie in Lyon this year, which is a fantastic forum for developing independent animated film projects. And the great thing about Cartoon Movie is that you can go in concept. So in theory you can go with an idea on the back of a napkin, an idea that is at a very early stage, and it’s a bit like Dragon’s Den for animators. You get to pitch to an entire room full of your professional peers, co-producers, distributors and broadcasters, all kinds of people who can help you advance your project.

    “I actually submitted My Haunted House in 2010 and I didn’t get in. Of course, I was shocked and horrified and wondering, “how can my wonderful project not have got in to Cartoon Movie?” So I rang them up and asked why, and it turned out, that while in Hollywood the script is king – it’s really all about the script – for Cartoon Movie you need tons of development art. It’s a different focus; they’re looking for a presentation that really looks beautiful. So I went back to my drawing board, did lots and lots of development art, and this year we were in business. The next application for Cartoon Movie is due in November, and there’s another one – Cartoon Forum – for TV series, which takes place annually in Hungary.
 
“There are obviously other ways of funding. You could go through the EU MEDIA programme, you tend to need an established producer to work with, which in theory could raise up to 100,000 euros through the EU MEDIA programme. It’s very bureaucratic. Applying for these funds is an excellent discipline, because it forces you to focus on what your project is about, and forces you to get your act together. It’s an incredibly good way of polishing your material, and we have found that these various applications are very useful. Obviously you need a great pitch, a great pitch is like putting out a hook and trying to land a fish, and for Cartoon Movie certainly you need a terrific outline, ideally you need a great script, you certainly need great artwork, images of the environment you’d like to create.
 
“So you’ve got your pitch worked out, and now it’s incredibly important to figure out who your audience is. Lots of people, when they’re developing projects, will say “well, it’s for everyone,” but as Jerry Seinfeld said, there’s no such thing as entertainment for the whole family. You really need to figure out who your pitch is for – not just is it for children, but the exact demographic, the age group – you really need to figure out precisely who your audience is. It’s all very well to say you want it to be for the children and the parents, everyone wants that crossover audience, but you’ve got to target your primary audience, to figure out exactly who it is that you’re going for.

“There are a few other things. Scripts, for instance, have to be in a specific format: you should be in Courier 12 WB standard, and it should be 75-85 pages. That’s basically the format that you have to fit in to in order to get taken seriously.
 
“I think it’s incredibly important to have a kind of “what if?” summary for a film. You’ve got to be able to imagine the poster. The reason why The Iron Giant got greenlit was because the executives came in and said, “We can imagine the poster.” The ‘what if’ idea behind the film was, “What if a little kid has his very own, live iron giant? And I think a good pitch has this kind of ‘what if?’ element to it. “What if the toys came alive when the kid walked out of the room?” Pixar is incredibly good at these ‘what if’ things. For our film, My Haunted House, it's: “What if a kid grew up in a haunted house?”

“The poster needs a good tag line. The tagline for Antz was “Every ant has its day.” One of my favourites was the Scooby Doo movie – not a great movie but it had a wonderful tagline – which was, “Be afraid, be kind of afraid.” I think you need to see that, I think you need to have your poster imagined along with a great tagline. Our tagline for My Haunted House is: “And you thought your family was weird”.

“Moving into co-production, the challenge for us for producing in England is raising finance. The financing landscape in the UK is challenging because of a relative lack of government finance, so what we’re doing at Gravy Media is we’re partnering with Denmark and Germany, to have access to the co-production funds through the local regional governments in these countries. Most of this co-production finance comes with catches, it’s not free money, you don’t get to just spend it on whatever you want – you may have to carry out work in certain places, you may have to work with certain studios and not others.  Another difficulty with co-production is there are inefficiencies in the system, caused by having to combine work from different studios in different countries, and having to put together a production that would have been probably more efficiently done in one place. But it’s a way of raising enough money so that you can reach your final goal, which is getting your movie made. Which is of course what it’s all about.

“Pre-sales from distributors or sales agents will really help. We managed to get some pre-sales for My Haunted House, which is fantastic. Everyone says at the moment “You can’t get a pre-sale,” but our experience is that it is possible and there is a market there. Broadcasters are obviously incredibly important, a bit more difficult; we’ve been getting letters of interest, letters of commitment, from various different places, which really helps.

“And of course you need the all-important Trans-Media Marketing Strategy – last year it was a Cross-Media Marketing Strategy – you need to have in mind your TV series, your spin offs, your apps, your games. And of course, you need a budget. This was terrifying for me as I spent 20 years outside of this and suddenly I’m having to produce budgets. But to establish credibility, you must be in a position to point to some numbers that actually make sense. £5-6 million seems to be about the limit for a European co-production at the moment, about as much as we can get in order to make the film. So while DreamWorks and Disney spend $150 million, you’re talking about a totally different landscape here.
 
“Anyway, what I thought was interesting about embarking on this co-production journey was I found it very difficult to find any information about it. So I wanted to share a little bit with you this evening, about what I’ve learnt about how co-production works. If anyone can point me in the direction of a how-to guide of how to do it, I’d be delighted to see it!”

Alex was speaking at UK Trade and Investment and South West Screen's Networking Reception at MIFA 2011.