The IFP Market [since this article first appeared, renamed Independent Film Week] is one of the major events for independent documentary filmmakers to get attention from industry executives while there films are still works in progress. Held every September in New York, two of our Docs In Progress® alumni, Tom Dziedzic (Redemption Stone: the Life and Times of Tom Lewis/Screened January 2007) and Carolyn Projansky (The Fast Lane/Screened May 2005) attended tthe 2007 Market. Dziedzic was there with a revamped version of Redemption Stone, one of only six shorts accepted to the Market. Projansky was there with Breaking the Rules, a feature length documentary she is co-producing with another DC-based filmmaker, Susan Barocas. We asked the filmmakers to tell us more about their experiences at IFP.
Tom Dziedzic
I submitted to the IFP because they are committed to nurturing independent films. However, the IFP Market only takes about 15 to 20% of submissions so I thought I had a very slim chance to be accepted. I was very pleased when my film was selected, one of only six shorts that were screened this year at the Market. It gives you a bit of validation that your work is good.
My project is a 30-minute documentary short entitled Redemption Stone – The Life and Times of Tom Lewis. The film is an African-American journey through the eyes of Tom Lewis, a compelling storyteller of quiet power. Tom brings an extraordinary spirit to his work with disadvantaged children at a place he created called The Fishing School.
It was a rush to get ready for the Market since the selections are announced on July 20 and you have eight weeks to get everything ready. That includes a trailer, DVDs for the library, and your screening tape, all of which must be shipped before the Market.
Then you have to get all your print materials ready to take with you. I created press kits, custom postcards, special business cards and a poster. I sent out personal invitations to select Industry reps that were interested in shorts and who would be attending the Market. I did contact four other filmmakers who had previously attended the IFP Market and their advice was very helpful. The IFP Market staff were all great, very helpful and attentive to any needs, questions or concerns.
The Market experience itself was exciting, fun and tiring. It was spread out between three downtown New York City locations only blocks apart. So it was easy to get around by foot. The screenings, all at the Angelika Film Center, were first class with good projection and audio. Redemption Stone was screened twice and the audience was a mix of industry people and other filmmakers. There were several festival programmers interested in my short and one film distributor did make a firm offer for educational distribution. It was also great attending other screenings to see what your peers where producing. I saw many excellent shorts, features and works-in-progress.
I made all kinds of contacts including distributors, cable TV reps, funding organizations, festival programmers as well as other filmmakers and film related people like composers, editors, scriptwriters and even entertainment lawyers. The mix of people was wonderful. IFP was very supportive. I learned a whole lot about the indie film market and what people are looking for. It got me thinking about which future projects to develop and which ones to put on the back burner. And I became friends with other filmmakers whose work was inspiring.
In terms of the specific challenges of going to IFP with a short, it was mixed bag. Cable TV reps were way more interested in features. One cable programmer told me “we don’t want anything past tense” so historical docs were off the radar with some reps. Some festival programmers only wanted “short shorts” so they could program those before a feature. But then other festival programmers liked longer shorts so they could program two or three in a block of 60 or 90 minutes.
One especially fun experience: On Monday night all the filmmakers were invited to the USA premiere of a new film Honeydripper directed by John Sayles who introduced the film. While waiting in line to get in, we met Dee Rees, a director who had recently worked with Wendell Pierce, the actor who plays “Bunk” on HBO’s The Wire. We indicated how much we admired Mr. Pierce’s acting in show. Then Dee says, “Well you’re about to meet ‘Bunk’ in person” as he was just walking down the street. When Wendell saw Dee he came over and chatted with us for a while. Yes, we got his autograph. Only in New York!
I’d definitely recommend other filmmakers try IFP. Present your best work and a good pitch. IFP has a “works-in-progress” category for features that I would recommend if you have something in production but need assistance with funding or distribution.
Carolyn Projansky and Susan Barocas
We knew about IFP for several years before applying with our film, Breaking the Rules, a 90-minute feature documentary that explores an important untold story from South Africa – the story of the whites who opposed and fought against apartheid as allies in the struggle for racial justice. We already had attended other documentary markets and industry events with this film, including MIP-TV, Real Screen, the World Congress of History Producers, Sithengi (in South Africa) and, of course, Silverdocs. We have found markets to be very helpful for their opportunities to encounter key decision makers face to face, particularly in informal social settings. IFP is a prestigious market and very competitive, which makes acceptance to IFP a valuable achievement in the quest for film financing. There’s no other market that we’re familiar with in the United States that pre-selects projects for inclusion. All others are open to whoever chooses to pay for entry.
We applied to the Works in Progress section of what they call “Spotlight on Documentaries.” The application process takes only a moderate amount of time, but it is very precise, requiring you to have a tightly worded 25-word logline, 60-word synopsis and other short descriptions for your film which, as we all know, are the hardest descriptions to write.
There are numerous deadlines to meet throughout the process, and they start to come up rather quickly once you’re notified of acceptance. These include submitting a two-minute teaser/trailer, final catalog copy, head shots, copies of your work for the video library and a screening copy of the work you’re showing. In addition, there are printed materials that are crucial to maximizing the experience.
The first video clip you send them, a two minute teaser or ‘trailer” and the written catalog copy (essentially your application text), informs the industry reps’ decisions on which filmmakers they’d like to meet with at the market. You also need a longer video clip for screening in a theatre (ours was 12-minutes) and DVDs of the same video for buyers to screen in a library screening room. In addition, IFP strongly recommends that you bring press kits, postcards and other marketing materials, which we did. In retrospect, our most valuable marketing component was the lobby card, a postcard or similar sized, very visual “flyer.” We put them on tables everywhere and handed them out to people we met along the way.
In the weeks leading up to IFP, we found ourselves rather uncertain about “what works” at IFP and what aspects of the process were most important to focus on. We spent many days cutting and re-cutting our “work in progress” video clip and did not regret the effort we invested. With the help of Docs in Progress, we called a producer who had previously attended IFP and she provided us with many helpful hints, such as, “Don’t worry about how big an audience you have for your screening. The screening is not that important.”
To create a press kit, we worked with a graphic designer and also did some design work in-house to create a two-sided, color one sheet and lobby card as part of a multi-page press kit. In deciding what to print, we adapted the suggestions in the IFP Filmmakers Guide to our project and budget. In one respect, we felt we were a bit “ahead of the game” because we had already printed a one-sheet for MIP-TV in April. We revised and adapted that for IFP.
The last two weeks leading up to the Market were particularly grueling. Nearly every day we received new missives from IFP. Among them was a notification that we were semi-finalists for a cash prize we hadn’t heard about before, for socially-conscious documentary. The notice asked us to submit a detailed educational outreach plan within a few days and we spent a frenzied 48 hours pulling that together (we didn’t win).
Ten days before IFP started (and the day before Rosh Hashanah!) we received the most important email of all — our meeting list. This is THE list of buyers who had requested meetings with us. We were initially disappointed by the number, seven meetings. However, as we discovered at IFP, that number was rather typical. Our calendar for the week also seemed unbalanced — we had been given four meetings the first day PLUS our screening! The other three meetings were scattered over the remaining three days. IFP doesn’t attempt to negotiate meeting times with buyers unless there is a direct scheduling conflict.
At the same time, we were notified that the industry buyers list was on the IFP website and were urged to “make use of it,” although it wasn’t at all clear what that meant. We did not know whether anyone who did not request a meeting with us would reconsider if we contacted them. We came up with a list of 25 and we prepared a pitch to fax them. We were unable to find fax numbers for six of our target companies and there is no way to know who specifically from the company will be attending.
The Filmmaker’s Guide we received from IFP right after our initial acceptance was supposed to provide us with a step-by-step roadmap to the process. It was reasonably helpful, but we found numerous aspects that were definitely not at all clear to a “first-timer.” We found ourselves either calling or emailing IFP staff many times before the market to ask for clarifications. Before the market started, when we had questions or needed guidance, the response varied quite a bit from patient and helpful to giving off a sense that the person on the other end of the phone (or email) was too busy to deal with this even if it was stated as being their job. Understandably, they seemed overworked and a bit stressed before the market.
The market was energizing and exhausting, exciting and a bit exasperating. It was fairly easy to navigate, but there were two main drawbacks that were related — having to navigate between three different sites, each a few New York City blocks away (but great for getting exercise!) and the lack of opportunities to meet and mix with industry people. Filmmakers were mainly “kept” in one building that housed the Filmmakers’ Conference (discussion sessions), a filmmakers’ lounge and our mailboxes. The site for the industry meetings was a few blocks away. IDs were checked and you were pretty much allowed entry to that building only if you were on the list of meetings scheduled over the next couple of hours with industry reps. Few industry people showed up at the opening film and reception or in the daily filmmaker lounge gatherings each evening. So there were lots of filmmakers talking to other filmmakers – a wonderful and enriching experience but not the purpose of our being at the market. In our experience, one of the primary benefits to being at a film market is the opportunity to meet industry reps in both formal and informal settings. At IFP, the informal settings were all but absent.
Our screening was scheduled for noon on the first full day of IFP. So we had very little time to invite people to the screening who were not already planning to attend. To boost our screening audience, we did what we had time for – we spent Sunday afternoon during and after the orientation session preparing and then stuffing large envelopes with a one sheet and personal note to each our top picks. We gave the envelopes to IFP staff to stuff into industry mailboxes because filmmakers don’t have access to those mailboxes, a real drawback from our point of view. There is no way for us to know whether that happened, but later in the week we met industry reps who had never even opened their mailboxes. We do think the faxing and stuffing mailboxes helped generate a bit more interest, but it’s so hard to measure because, as we all know, this a long-term effort with payoff often way down the road.
If there were something we wish we had done differently, we wish we had printed business cards with the name of the film, rather than using our company business cards. We would also consider producing some sort of promotional item, such as a catchy button or T-shirt to help create a buzz. There were a few filmmakers with these items and they were very noticeable. In our case, Breaking the Rules would look great on a button and we probably would have seen people wearing them. There were buttons that simply said Unattached which was the name of another project and people definitely picked them up and wore them. We would definitely recommend that anyone attending IFP spend significant time and effort creating an effective “lobby card” or handout that promoted the day and time of your screening at Angelika. Being one of the first films shown, it was difficult for us to promote the screening, but having a sticker on our lobby card would have been helpful.
The screening itself is a 25-minute time slot which is meant to include (1) introducing yourselves and your film, (2) showing a clip of any length and, (3) a Q&A. The filmmaker can decide how much time to allot for each of those elements, so if you prefer to screen a 20-minute clip and not have a Q&A, you are free do so. But the time is strictly monitored. IFP’s screening staff, in particular, was great. Our screening went smoothly and when there was a glitch, they immediately offered a second screening free. Attendance at our screening was sparse, but typical of others we attended. It included several fellow filmmakers, reps from a couple of large production companies, two film festivals and a distributor. In the end, mostly filmmakers attend the in-theater screenings because industry people can go to the video library or on-line to screen projects on their own schedule. We befriended the video library staff which resulted in our getting information as soon as it was available and several times earlier than we would have otherwise.
It is also valuable, particularly at an early stage in the making of a film, to see a clip “on the big screen” in a theater and get feedback from an audience. As we all know (and the strength of Docs in Progress is), feedback from an audience is absolutely invaluable to help a filmmaker objectively evaluate technical aspects as well as your story, characters, emotional draw of the film and all those intangibles that you must have, in the end, to make a good film.
We had some great meetings at IFP. For example, we met with a key decision maker at PBS who was already enthusiastic about our project before we sat down. She has written a strong letter of support that we were able to include in a funding proposal. Other good meetings included the Sundance Institute and a large production/post production house in New York that provides in-kind services (in return for some ownership of rights, presumably.) There were several individuals who attended our screening and/or viewed our DVD in the screening library that we will try to contact as follow-up. Relative to other markets where we leave with many, many casually-met contact names, after IFP there are relatively few. The difference is that most contacts made at IFP are high quality because there is already interest from the potential buyer. In the end, the meeting we had with PBS was worth all the effort and may never have happened without our attending IFP.
One of the best aspects of IFP is that it is a vetted process — your project is screened, evaluated and chosen for participation. That adds very valuable credibility to the work you’re doing and puts the filmmaker in a different power dynamic than at other markets. You’re not begging for meetings, but rather you are selected for meetings by industry reps who have seen your trailer and/or read about your project in the catalog. Whatever the outcome, it’s a nice feeling, a confidence builder and a source of great feedback to know that decision-makers chose to meet with you.
It is important for independent filmmakers to remember that every film market is different and serves a different function. Some people exclusively attend IFP every year and no others. We feel that is not a smart approach because every market/conference has something different to offer. Large markets are different from small ones. Markets that are mainly conferences and workshops are different from ones that primarily offer exhibitor booths for doing business (e.g., MIP-TV). Some markets emphasize their pitching forum (IDFA). Others focus on screening films. There are film markets all over the world and they offer a wide variety of options for the filmmaker. You should sample a few and see what you like. But rest assured, all of them have great parties. Enjoy!
To see the full list of films which screened at this year’s IFP Market, click here. To attend next year, stay tuned to the IFP Website. Submission deadlines are generally in late spring/early summer.
