Get backers to follow the script

As a great niece of Walt Disney and granddaughter of Roy Disney, Abigail Disney came to film-making late in life, although as she tells the story, film-making came to her.

“I found this story in Liberia and nobody knew it was happening, and it just had to be told,” she says, referring to the story behind her first feature film Pray the Devil Back to Hell , produced and released in 2008. It is about a female-led peace movement in Liberia.

Unlike the fairytales for which her family are famous, the film wasn’t an immediate success. It was released to rave reviews at the Tribeca Documentary Film Festival and although Disney called upon her already extensive network of contacts, there simply aren’t enough film distributors willing to take on the risks involved with distributing documentary feature films and the film failed to entice a distributor.

“Five or six years ago, I could have gone to half a dozen documentary film distributors but now there is only one and the year we released Pray the Devil Back to Hell the only documentary film signed by the distributor was Man on Wire,” Disney says. “We needed to find other ways to get our film distributed.”

Disney considered the option of paying a film distributor for a limited release, in the hope that box office sales would cover the cost, but she opted instead to go to the grassroots. Through her film company Fork Films, she contacted small United States community organisations, offering them an affordable licence, combined with promotional material they could download online.

“There’s a million tiny community organisations around the country that could benefit from buying a public licence and then they could show the film as many times as they liked,” Disney says. “We have a really vigorous website with tonnes of interviews and material like discussion guides and we’ve been hammering away on Twitter and Facebook to get the attention of every influencer and blogger we can.”

Throughout 2008 and 2009, Disney and her team contacted all manner of community groups and were eventually successful in building up enough of an audience to get the attention of television broadcasters. She also started an organisation called Peace is Loud, to highlight other instances of peace initiatives using non-violent means. Pray the Devil screenings were a starting point for discussion about where women and girls have participated in non-violent anti-war movements around the world.

The project eventually caught the attention of the US-based PBS Wide Angle television documentary series, which offered to fund the production of a series on female-led peace initiatives around the world. The resulting five-part series Women, War & Peace is now screening to US television audiences but Disney says this kind of grassroots approach won’t work unless it’s applied to documentaries that cover deeply moving subject matter.

“Films don’t become viral unless people love them and want to step up and become evangelists for the ideas,” Disney says. “Sure, I can probably move 50,000 people just with an interesting story but to make a story ‘pop’ on television, it needs to be powerful enough to move a few million people.”

Disney will visit Australia in the last week of November as a guest speaker for a series of philanthropy masterclasses and gala dinners run by The Australian Women Donors Network (AWDN) and says some of the ideas she used to promote Pray the Devil can be applied to other philanthropic organisations.

“As a documentary film-maker, you want to take ideas to people and give them the opportunity to take those ideas further,” Disney says. “It’s impossible to manufacture a call to action but a great story will do that for you.”

Australian film-maker Rebecca Barry is using a similar approach, using the internet and online communities not only to promote her film but also to secure funding and support in the initial phase of production.

Started in 2010, I am a girl captures the story of the plight and bravery of women around the world through the stories of five girls in five countries. Barry secured her first tranche of funding through a listing with the Australian Documentary Foundation , an organisation that aims to connect documentary film-makers with philanthropic investors.

A $30,000 donation from The Intrepid Foundation gave her the money she needed to travel to India and Cambodia to film two sequences for the documentary. These she used to start the I am a girl website describing the project, and a listing with online funding tool IndieGoGo . She also established a presence on Twitter and Facebook inviting followers to show their support for the I am a girl documentary project.

“Normally you make your film and then you market your film but our approach has allowed us to market the film from the first frame,” Barry says.

“We’ve been able to create a community around the film and we have incredible statistics and demographics about who our supporters are and where they come from.”

The next phase of the project involves a trip to Papua New Guinea, thanks to the support of Women’s Plans Foundation and nearly 100 sponsors who have pitched in anywhere from $3 to $1000 through ADF, IndieGoGo or a Paypal link on the projects’ home page.

Barry is confident the project will be completed by the end of 2012, or sooner if she is able to raise the $600,000 she needs to enable her and her production team to work exclusively on the remaining stories.

“We’d like to include girls’ stories from South America, Australia, Afghanistan and perhaps Africa,” Barry says.

“No matter what happens, the film will get completed but we can get it completed sooner if we can raise all the funds we need.”

Moreover, unlike many documentary film-makers who struggle to sell their films once they are completed, Barry is already fielding enquiries from potential distributors because of the interest the project has received over the internet.

“Creating a community around the film as we go has been incredible,” Barry says. “Most documentary makers focus entirely on making the film and not getting it out there but we’ve seen the power of transmedia in getting the idea out and getting a lot of information about the audience for the film once it is completed.”

In some cases, documentary film-makers are working the other way and offering their services to tell stories and ideas that already have a strong following.

Having recently returned from the US, independent documentary film-maker Neroli McSherry has found an innovative way to work on inspirational stories through working closely with non-profit organisations.

“Non-profit organisations are really interested in funding films that will promote awareness of a particular cause and they’ll put up the funds to make that possible,” McSherry, speaking on location from the Sydney Children’s Hospital, says.

“Really they are marketing films made in a documentary style but there’s still an important message to get across.”

Having made films in conjunction with very large philanthropic organisations in the US, including the Gates Foundation, McSherry has created a production company Neroli Films , which focuses specifically on creating documentary-style films for the non-profit sector.

“Most of the time the films won’t be broadcast, they’ll be distributed by the non-profit for a particular reason,” McSherry says.

Documentary film-maker Alejandra Canales took a different approach again. Keenly interested in the artistic side of documentary film-making, she launched the Antenna International Documentary Film Festival in Sydney to ensure film-makers had the opportunity to have their films aired.

“There are lots of film festivals that include one or two documentaries in the line-up but these get taken over by the other sections of the festival,” Canales says.

“We’re trying very hard to choose documentaries from film-makers with a very strong cinematic approach rather than reportage-type pieces.”

BRW

Comments (0)