May 2008

The first session this week completed our sessions on Post-Production, focusing largely on the legals side and the issues surrounding obtaining correct licences for not only music, but anything in the film that has previous intellectual copyright, including artwork, brand names on any products, archive footage etc. as well as chasing up location releases, crew agreements, extras agreements and everything else that is required to complete the chain of title for a film. It made me realise just how much paperwork there is to complete post-production on a film and that post is not just about the technical and creative side of readying the film for exhibition. Helen was very explicit in making sure we were all aware just how important this paperwork is in making sure there are no problems with distribution and exhibition further down the line. It was an immensely useful session and opened my eyes to another dimension of the producing process.

Session Two:

This second session was an introduction to the monster that is film financing! We begun by looking at what it is that you are actually selling to the financiers, ie. the rights. The package that has been developed around it including director, cast, production team, script etc. all adds value, but the actual physical product is the rights. We then discussed all the rights that you may own that you can then sell - from TV, Film and DVD to internet, audio, novelisations, soundtracks etc. the central focus of this session was then to discuss all the different possible types of film production finance, of which there are 4 key areas: Debt, Equity, Pre-sales and Subsidies. Neil’s fantastic powerpoint slides took us through all the characteristics of these different types of finance and what they mean in terms of cash-flow and recoupment as well as talking about the different offshoots within each category and briefly about specific companies and schemes offering film finance across the four main types. This was a dynamic and information packed session which left my brain aching – definitely one to revise the notes from!

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Christos Constantakopoulos

(From Story to Screen In Eight Weeks) is currently producing his first feature film, directed by and starring award-winning Greek actor Nikos Kalogeropoulos.