The Mill and the Mountain – a movie based on the Highway of Tears murders – already has nearly 500 fans, and it hasn’t even been made yet.
Grade Nine, a dark comedy about high-school nerds obsessed with Dungeons and Dragons in 1989, has more than 1,100 followers. It’s also not much more than a trailer.
The two titles are among the six Vancouver feature film proposals in a group of 15 Canadian projects vying for $1 million in financing through a new film accelerator called CineCoup Media Inc., which itself got its start through high-tech accelerator GrowLab.
The brainchild of J. Joly, whose background in the music and film industries includes “a little bit of everything,” CineCoup brings a Silicon Valley approach to Hollywood North.
It treats feature film projects like high-tech startups, and helps “de-risk” investment by providing a platform that builds a fan base before the movie even gets made, providing detailed analytics of page views and fan activity on social media and guaranteeing screen time in Cineplex Inc. (TSX:CGX) theatres for finished projects.
“What investors hate is that film is a high-risk waterfall model, which means lots of upfront risk capital with no guarantee of performance,” Joly said. “We wanted to de-risk new franchises.”
Although his background is in film and music, more recently Joly has been focused on high-tech. He founded dimeRocker, which uses gamification and social media to create fan and audience engagement apps for film, TV and high-tech companies.
He kept in touch with Vancouver filmmakers, and could not understand why they kept complaining the industry was in the toilet.
“There’s never been a better time to be an independent filmmaker,” he said.
Technology allows for slick-looking films to be made for a fraction of what they once cost.
“What I realized is there’s only two kinds of movies that make money: big Hollywood (blockbusters) or sub-five-million-dollar independents. These are high ROI, low-budget projects.”
One of the biggest challenges for indie filmmakers is getting their films shown in mainstream movie theatres, so Joly struck a deal with Cineplex to have the completed film projects shown in Cineplex theatres.
“[Cineplex] likes it because we’ve already proven that this film has an audience,” Joly said.
That’s another part of the de-risking: building an audience before the film is even made.
Participants make trailers and then have more than a dozen weekly filming missions to complete. They also must create social media pages and use them build their fan bases. Fans can follow the film’s progress as additional episodes get made.
“What they wanted us to do is connect with fans even before we make our movie,” said Sean Holor, co-founder of Steamy Window Productions, one of six Vancouver projects in the current CineCoup cohort.
“You can’t beat the exposure,” said Jay Rathore, writer-director of Grade Nine. “They’re aggregating all of these teams’ fans on one website, so we’re getting a couple of thousand views whereas before we might get a couple of hundred views. It’s funnelling film fans to one place [cinecoup.com].”
CineCoup’s first cohort started with more than 90 film proposals, which have since been whittled down to 15. Ten will be optioned and taken to the Cannes Film Festival this month, and a final five will be taken to the Banff World Media Festival in June.
