Jennifer Warren on marketing a filmBusiness plans and marketing plans and strategic alliances, oh my!  Today we attended a workshop by Jennifer Warren who is a New York based film consultant for independent content producers and media companies.  The SC Film Commission has brought her on board to help us with marketing and distribution strategies for Saying Goodbye.  She came to class yesterday to speak with the students specifically about our film, and then today she gave a general presentation on marketing and strategy to filmmakers from around the state.

Jennifer’s talk was chock full information, such as: identifying goals for your film, researching your target audience, creating a business summery, and devising action plans for advertising and promotion.  And that was all before lunch!  The most daunting thing we learned?  All this should have been done before shooting the film.  Oops!  On the positive side, even though we hadn’t typed up formal reports, we had at least discussed most these things and had them in mind while filming. 

After lunch, Jennifer conducted three different Skype sessions with filmmakers: Sally Rubin and Jen Gilomen (Deep Down), Clay Liford (My Mom Smokes Weed), and Thomas Woodrow (Bass Ackwards).  They talked about their experiences making their films and getting them out there for people to see.  It was extremely helpful to see the similarities and differences between the three experiences and hear what had and hadn’t worked for them.  A big thank you to the filmmakers who answered audience questions and so generously shared what they learned the hard way.

Jennifer got our brains buzzing about all kinds of different things we can do to promote our film and different audiences we can target with various marketing spins.  And she was so fun and easygoing that we can’t wait to work with her more as we get ready to put some of these strategy and distribution plans into place.