Attention, Filmmakers: Here's the Most Important Person on Set You Don't Know About

On the road in places like South Jordan UT, Memphis TN, and Houston TX, we met a lot of filmmakers of all ages and experience levels united in their desire to find sustainable ways to make their films. There’s no question: in this day and age, youth has an advantage. Digital natives have a leg up in the world in which you are responsible not just for making your film but connecting directly to your audience. That raises a couple of very big, important questions:

What about the delicate-but-brilliant filmmaker-introvert?

READ MORE: An Introvert’s Guide to Crowdfunding

What about older filmmakers who have filmmaking experience but find social media frustrating, if not downright terrifying?

I thought I had reasonable answers to these questions (something pretty cold-hearted, to be honest, like, “Well, adapt or die”) until I was asked to moderate a marketing and distribution panel at the Austin Film Festival where I met Melanie Miller. At that time, Melanie was the VP of acquisitions and marketing at Gravitas Ventures. She has an absolutely encyclopedic knowledge of windowing, marketing and theatrical, digital and VOD distribution. She has since resigned from Gravitas to focus on her own venture, Fishbowl Films, as a Producer 1st and Producer of Marketing and Distribution or PMD.

If you say “PMD” to most filmmakers, they’ll nod at you like they know what you’re talking about (with the same feigned confidence they use when someone’s throwing around terms like “windows” and “VOD strategy”).

But filmmakers should get familiar with the term, and sooner rather than later. A PMD does not get involved with the film when it’s finished. A PMD is there from the beginning, building the creative strategies for marketing and distribution as the filmmaking team is building the creative makeup of the entire project.

The PMD is becoming an essential member of the filmmaking team and the answer to the questions: what if you don’t have it in you to get involved in the outreach because of age, or introversion, or just your damn preference?

I will say this: if you think you’re going to spearhead a project in ANY capacity, you better be conversant with the business of film. Let me repeat something a lot of people are now willing to say: Every film is a business – you have to start an entity like an LLC, hire people, pay them, sometimes get unions involved. It’s a company. If you’re leading the charge, you’re the CEO. Imagine a CEO says to an investor “I’m just not good at the business stuff, I’m just a creative.” That investor would be insane to invest in that company. However, if you walk in with a solid plan and a PMD, you have a different conversation because you have demonstrated a commitment to building a strategic business model for your film.

Your PMD could also help you build strategic crowdfunding campaigns whose purpose is to set you up not just for funding, but for long-term audience engagement as a part of the distribution strategy.

The most prestigious film schools are educating the next generation of auteurs, and many of them have “producing” programs, but I haven’t met a single recent-graduate who feels like they have a deep understanding of distribution and windowing, strategic audience building, or tools for successful crowdfunding.

So what will it take to get film schools to launch PMD programs alongside their filmmaking programs that work as collaboratively with the film students as those students are required to work with one another?

How else can we codify and promote this position?

This post was originally published on Seed&Spark’s blog and appears here with permission. Emily Best founded Seed&Spark to make a contribution to the truly independent community in which she would like to make moving pictures. Emily was named one of the 2013 Indiewire Influencers, dedicated to 40 people and companies who are asking the big questions about what the independent film industry is today (and why) and, more importantly, what it will become.

READ MORE: Attention, Screenwriters: Here’s Your Chance to Write Dialogue for Godard

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