Hire your weakness
The concept of writer, producer and director while sounding very nice usually doesn’t work unless you are Orson Wells or Stanley Kubrick.
A wise man, John C Maxwell said “A self made man hasn’t made much at all”
So hire, or find, your weakness. If you’re good at directing, or think you are, then get someone on board who is good at producing. If you can’t write, then don’t! Get someone who can. You get the idea.
By hiring your weakness, you will create a strong team.
Get a mentor.
Why?, because most people who are making films in Australia are doing so for the first time. Get a mentor, someone who has done it before, someone whose advice you trust.
One thing I have found is that I don’t know everything. That there is always someone else who has done it before. The success of IBM wasn’t that they invented great machines, it was that they copied good ideas and could sell them.
Do the same, learn from other peoples mistakes.
My advice is to any one in business, including the film business, is not get emotionally attached. Be prepared to walk away if you have to.
Was surfing the net and found an interesting article at the following link
So time to retreat and think again.
The basics are very simple but if you are going to raise money for a project you need to develop the business case first. I know for some this would fly in the face of the “creative effort”, but unless you are using your own money, you have to have a film finance plan.
The plan should address all issue concerning the production and marketing of the film but the most important thing that must be addressed and addressed in some detail is who you are going to sell the film and how you are going to repay the investors.
Obviously the “saleablity” of the project revolves around two things, the talent to be used and the basic pitch of the film’s story.
You don’t necessarily need a “bankable” star, but you do need a good idea and a decent script. On the project I was trying to promote I commissioned five drafts of the script and it would probably been revised yet again if the project had gone ahead.
But if you want to have people lining up to invest in your second and subsequent projects you need to return the investment in your first project + some.
I hit the wall with the tax ruling because in the parlance of the tax office what I was proposing was “novel”, in other words, it was a completly new approach. I suspect it that the tax office didn’t have an opinion on it. In they end they employed delaying tactics in the hope that I would go away.
I didn’t give up, the window of opportunity closed, then the whole situation changed due to even more changes in the Corporations Law.
My name is Stephen, I am a chartered accountant by profession (you know a bean counter) but at the moment I am a group general manager of a fairly large Australian company. I am married with one son. I am not quite as old as Gandalf, but I been around. Being a bean counter I have an underlying interest in making money. I like the business of business.
I also have a fascination for film and television. I use to hang around the back of the Channel Seven studios in Sydney. They use to have tip out the back where they would dump all sorts of interesting things like old sets, off cuts from the editing room (no tape just film back then).
I made my first “film” on super 8 and then at uni I used to produce a TV show on the closed circuit system.
Once I left uni, I got sucked down the black hole of work ten years later after seeing bad Aussie film after bad Aussie film I decided to have a go myself.
I did a lot of research and found that a lot of bad films had been made because of the “hot” money chasing the big tax concessions under the original 10BA schemes. The side effect of all this was not only did the Government loose more than it planned but there was a lot of unhappy investors around who had lost money.
I also discovery that a great many film makers had the wrong attitude to their investors, see them as “donors” and not as investors. By that I mean, the film makers, didn’t put the interests of their investors first.
I also conducted some marketing research and found out that people interested in investing in film didn’t care about the tax concession etc, but they did care about getting their money back.
So all this research lead me to the conclusion that I could raise money for feature films on the basis that the films would be commercial and the investors would earn their money back plus a reasonable return.
I set up my own company, got the necessary licences from ASIC, did the prospectus. Although I had a battle with ASIC as they had missed the whole area of intellectual property when they revised the Corporations Law. So I had to educated them on the ins and outs of film financing.
And then came the tax office. Ever tried to get a public ruling for a film scheme? Ten months after lodging my application nothing, they lost it, they had it out with some other government department, they sat on it, then they asked a swag of questions and then it was too late.
I’ll tell you more later.