www.lawrencegray.net

Jason Brubaker's Film Themes for Wordpress

Jason offers advice on optimizing your Wordpress site for showing off your movie.

How successful at selling movies a web site is, is a moot point. This site of mine gets a few thousand hits a day and yet sells zilch. I am of course a horrible salesman but when I look at the sites that are full of short paragraphs and upper case headings that go on and on about the various advantages of purchasing their... well usually I've forgotten what it is they are selling. And I'm thinking that if there is this much tedious  hype, it must be crap.

However, that seems standard practice and maybe it is because it sells. It does not sell to me. But maybe it sells to you. Though I cannot help feeling that if you are a film maker and these sort of tele-marketing techniques grab your attention, you've way too much time on your hands and you cannot be making movies. 

So I like to think that my web site attracts busy people who are actually making movies, writing great intelligent books, and are engaged with the world at level far removed from the confines of a keyboard.  Which is no doubt why you don't sit around hitting the advertisements here and paying for the upkeep of the site.

Which does beg the question of why I keep a web site going? And that is a very good question. The fact is that one is constantly told that one has to build and prepare one's audience and that the web is the only way to do it when you cannot afford to use mass media campaigns. How true any of this is, is a moot point. If you do not do it, when you are complaining about being ignored someone will tell you that you have to get on the Internet and promote yourself. And if you do it and it fails to make the slightest difference, someone will point out these sites with huge hits and tell you to do it their way. And then you look at their way and think, it stinks! It's boring! And are those hits real? 

One can actually hire people to guarantee thousands of hits a day for you, especially youtube hits. You can have people twittering away to thousands of people for  minuscule amounts of money. You can pay people to go into forums and talk you up. You can pay people to hunt down negative comments and post positive things about you. It costs very little, and it creates the illusion of an audience.

But does it actually create a real audience, one that pays, one that watches, reads, is entertained, and returns? On the Internet you get one click, half a second of a glance, and then people are moving onto something else. Nearly every click you count is from someone who does not care what you have written or shown and is not hanging around to examine it or consume it. 

You have to have web sites nowadays but I shouldn't spend too much time bothering with it, or hyping anything, because if your market as a writer or film maker is not on-line, then whatever you do for the Internet Audience is irrelevant. The same people go to the cinema or buy books for very different reasons to those they have for browsing the internet. And they behave differently, think differently, and as a rule are just flipping through pages for no reason and barely register what they see.

Of course, if I was a better salesman, and used lots of positive statements, threw in BIG CAPITALS to grab attention, ask people whether they want success or failure, and tell them that they have to use the products on this site or they will be losers... I guess maybe some people swayed. If you don't try, then it will never happen. My eyes are glazing over at the mere thought of this which makes me think hype is over-hyped. The results are not what they are cracked up to be. How can they be when the methods send one to sleep and all look alike? 

But who am I to buck the trend? Go for it I say. Especially if someone else does the work and it costs little. And anything hyped on these pages are at least handing out useful information.

Jason Brubacker gives some excellent advice on how write, finance and distribute low budget movies. 

Writing and Financing Low Budget Movies 

Here's another book on how to make independent films with very little money. It will no doubt tell you to keep locations to a minimum and blag as much free kit from people as possible! There is an awful lot of common sense that perhaps requires repeating but in the end, as most film makers will discover, to get into the professional market place you need to spend money. So start here. Make a few low budget movies for the education. Then your strategy has to change. You need ways of finding investors and projects with commercial value.

Make Independent Films