The Film Label

The Film Label is a collaboration between Director Tom Paton, Producer George Burt and successful Record Label Founder Nick Sadler, created to reshape the indie-film market. More accurately, it’s how does an independent filmmaker actually make any money from their film? The current system works fantastically well if you are lucky enough to have signed your movie to Disney, but for the rest of the

community it's pretty flawed. A filmmaker might write, direct and fully finance their own movie using their own savings. The film is great, everyone loves it but the sales agents won’t touch them because it has no named actors, which means that it is highly unlikely they will get any form of traditional distribution. So you enter film festival after film festival until finally, after praying to every deity you can think of, the film eventually gets picked up by someone. This is the part no one likes to tell you so allow us: Everyone else will make money from your creation but you will likely not! Your only hope is to get picked up by an agent and start getting higher paid directorial work, which very well might not happen. Of cause there are those that the stars will allign for and they will make it into the studio system, and who are we kidding, that's what we all want. But sadly it is not as easy to achieve as it seems. The other option is to self distribute your movie. You will get to keep all of the profits from your creation but it is likely you will struggle to build an audience at all because your speciallity is in telling great stories visually and not marketing. Generating awareness and buzz about your film is difficult because you don’t see the film as a product that needs to be sold; it is your baby, and rightly so. But ultimately you stand to loose the money you sank into making the film in the first place. The music industry had this exact problem around ten years ago. The major labels often totally left the artists with crumbs from the table whilst they kept bucket loads of cash from the music being sold. Then YouTube arrived and opened the playing field up. People placing their music on online were getting huge hits but were failing to convert those fan bases in financial gain. That’s where the Digital Record Labels came in. These small record labels were run by business minded, passionate music fans that knew how to build an audience and make money. They were using online platforms like Beatport to sell music so there was no physical product to cost in and the business overheads were small. This meant they could split the profits with the artists making sure they all made money. The likes of Calvin Harris and Skrillex were born from this new industry. Now the film industry has found itself in the exact same boat as the music industry did just a decade ago and The Film Label is the first of a new kind of business to appear. We aren’t reinventing the wheel, simply co-opting a model that is proven to work and switching out the product. The Film Label signs talented new directors with or without a feature film. If they have a great script we fund it and distribute it. If they have a completed film but are stuck in limbo, we sign it, market it and distribute it splitting the profits 50/50. You read that right...50/50. Because you will have worked just as hard to make your film as we did to sell it. We believe in a fairer industry where you as the filmmaker won't need the day job anymore. That is why after we have taken you and your film to a hungry audience, we won't suddenly close the door in your face, leaving you to start all over again. The Film Label also acts as a management company, set up so that the filmmaker is guided to their next feature without finding themselves back at square one. We are signing low budget films with big ideas and making them profitable for the artists behind the movies. We primarily sell films signed to the label through Vimeo-On-Demand, which we believe is the indie-film version of Beatport. All of the movies we sign are partnered with a future hit song that will have a music video cut from footage from the movie, essentially acting as a trailer. These music videos are then released through highly subscribed, popular YouTube channels, with a direct link to buy the movie below it. Combined with traditional digital marketing techniques like Facebook and YouTube advertising to garner a viewership and Pop-Up cinema events to host the film’s premiere at cool and creative venues, we believe we have the know how to get people talking about your movie. We are want to support the film making community and it’s really important to us that they support us back, as it’s ultimately an industry-disrupting concept we are introducing here that could benefit many of them. Other film labels will spring up in our wake, just as they did in the music industry ten years ago, and more filmmakers will find a new way to get noticed and get paid for it. We believe that we are the change that the indie-film sector needs. We want to show the world what you can do and we want to help make the Disney's of the world notice you. This isn't about sticking a middle finger up to the big dogs of industry, but rather creating a new doorway to them, which the next generation of filmmakers can walk through.