These Lovers – Film Trailer from Imaginarium Studio on Vimeo.
Thunder Bay Director Piotr Skowronski Featured
THUNDER BAY – Local filmmakers are exploring new technologies to distribute their films in another step towards developing the local film production industry. Thunder Bay’s Imaginarium Studio has released a collection of short films from director Piotr Skowronski via Vimeo Video-on-Demand, a web based platform that enables both local and global audiences to rent or buy the films online, anytime, anywhere. The filmmakers aim to generate revenue to fund a significant festival run for their coming feature length film titled ‘These Lovers.”
“Our community has become quite good at making films. The next step is to enable audiences to rent or buy those films. These tools enable us to think about the long term sustainability of producing independent films locally in a financially viable way,” shares Milosz Skowronski.
A relatively recent development in the film distribution world, video-on-demand services break down traditional barriers to entry that have kept independent films hidden from the public eye. With the infrastructure to distribute their own work now a reality, filmmakers gain the capacity to monetize their films, develop revenue models and fund marketing efforts and future projects.
Audience’s benefit by gaining access to a greater variety of films and industry data shows tremendous growth in direct video-on-demand sales. This year, for the first time ever, the industry expectation is that more films will be rented and sold in a digital version then a hard copy disk.
“The release of this collection is a significant step for us as filmmakers. We want audiences to have access to our stories and to experience our best efforts both technically and creatively. We certainly invite everyone to watch them and hope that they enjoy the work. The new element for us is that now audiences will decide if they want to support our work financially by choosing to rent the films. We certainly hope they do,” continued Skowronski.
The next challenge for filmmakers is marketing. Hollywood films are backed by hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising and the largest Canadian films average eight hundred thousand dollars in marketing money per film. To compete, the strategy for Imaginarium Studio is to build a strong foundation for an audience through the festival circuit, to generate publicity, word of mouth and ultimately awareness about ‘These Lovers’. A strong festival run is critical for securing distribution and building an audience for a future video-on-demand release of the feature length film.
You can watch the short films at: http://vimeopro.com/imaginariumvideo/shortfilmcollection
Titles Include:
FREE PRESS – 10 MIN – DRAMA 2008
UNDERTOW – 30 MIN – DRAMA 2008
LOVE & HATE – 20 MIN – DRAMA 2012
