The shot at an "intimate setting" with Australian movie industry gatekeepers has attracted a sell-out crowd for next week's annual Screen Makers Conference in Adelaide.

Aspiring screenwriters, directors and producers get one-on-one pitching sessions with people from all the broadcasters at the event organised by the Media Resources Centre to help new talent get noticed.

MRC director Gail Kovatseff said it was increasingly difficult for fledgling filmmakers or web series creators to attract strong market attention to launch their work beyond film festivals to larger audiences.

"Even if you can commit the resources, volunteer your time and have an organisation like MRC assist you with equipment and mentoring, there's still this other thing of how do I get it distributed, or how do I get an audience to pay attention to it?" she said.

Film offerings 'narrowing' to mainstream

Conference speaker and KOJO Production and Development head Kate Croser, whose producer titles include The Infinite Man, Boys In The Trees and the TV series Danger 5, said the Australian film landscape had seen "huge" changes in the past decade.

She said a varied and diverse film landscape that was targeting differing audiences as recently as the mid-2000s was today "narrowing incredibly fast".

Kate Croser believes streaming platforms will soon engage more proactively with Australian creatives. ( ABC Radio Adelaide: Malcolm Sutton )

Instead it was favouring mainstream films with big casts and well-known directors, all of which reduced opportunities for new voices and resulted in works that were typically less bold than those of the past.

"Just to even get a film financed with a distributor attached, to get exhibitors excited about putting the film on, it pretty much has to play to that silver dollar crowd," Ms Croser said.

"You might have an amazing film that would play really well to a 30 to 45-year-old audience, but either that audience is not going to the cinema, or when they do they are seeing foreign films.

"If you look even younger, 18 to 35, they're probably going to the Marvel films, or the big studio tent pole films, or Amy Schumer films, so trying to get a look-in there is just harder and harder."

She said surveyed audiences still had an appetite for Australian films and would watch them on TV, DVD or streaming platforms, but because few people chose to see them at the cinema, theatres had stopped programming them in a "self-fulfilling prophecy".

"A film like The Babadook, which was made for $2.5 million with a first-time director and was much more bold and edgy in its subject matter and handling, that film did not cut through to the Australian market," she said.

"Australian audiences did not go to see that film, but when it went international it found a huge audience and has been really successful and embraced in the US, the UK and many other markets.

"If you look at what's working in terms of Australian-made films branded with Australian accents [for the local market], generally speaking the audience for that is those over 55 or families."

Films falling through the cracks for streamers

Large players in US and UK are trending away from financing mid-budget films, a category that is instead finding a growing market through streaming services like Netflix and Amazon.

But despite providing an opportunity for niche Australian films that might once have been given theatrical releases, Ms Croser warned that many were "falling through the cracks" because streamers were not proactively commissioning from Australia.

"There's been a handful, but most of the time they've tended to be acquisitions that have been picked up by the market, like Cargo recently, a SA movie that was picked up at a market by Netflix," she said.

"If you have a script and are packaging it up to take it out to finance, you might take it to Netflix, but most of the time they're just going to say, 'We'll wait to see what it looks like when it's finished and then we might acquire it', because it's so much safer then.

"There's so much competition and people vying to be picked up by them that they can afford to wait, but it doesn't actually help you raise the money to make the film."

Despite this, Ms Croser said distributors were still looking for great Australian films to sell.

She said if creatives could be clever by looking at what was working in the market and present their stories to "resonate in the same space", they would improve their chances.

"The other positive is I really feel we are at a transition point right now, with that gap between theatrical and streaming platforms, in terms of buyers in the Australian market.

"I think it's going to become a lot more clear in coming years and Netflix and Amazon and other streaming platform buyers will be a lot more engaged in a proactive way in the Australian market."

Runs on the board attracts distributors

The Screen Makers Conference, which benefits from a State Government grant, runs from July 27 to 28 at the MRC and features Shine director Scott Hicks, casting agent Kirsty McGregor and actress Natasha Wanganeen.

It also brings together a stream of producers and market representatives from such organisation as the ABC, SBS, Ten Network, Nine Network, Matchbox Pictures, XYZ Films, Madman Entertainment, Bonsai Films, Projector Films and Matthewswood.

Ms Kovatseff said the event had sold out every year since it began in 2015, but warned it was important that content makers could demonstrate a track record when pitching for major investment.

"They [distributors] might like your idea and like you, but they're not necessarily convinced you can pull it off, so there's all these other things that need to be in place, directors, attachments, or going to work on somebody else's production and slowly building that reputation," she said.

Adelaide filmmaker to premiere The Flip Side

One such filmmaker is Marion Pilowsky who, after making six short films, is about to premiere her first feature film.

She wrote, produced and directed The Flip Side, which will be distributed Australia-wide by 20th Century Fox on August 30.

Marion Pilowsky says the pool of filmmakers has increased along with the range of opportunities. ( ABC Radio Adelaide: Malcolm Sutton )

Ms Pilowsky said it was very hard for a filmmaker to get financial support for any feature, "that's just the bottom line of it", because "it's a very competitive market".

"I was kind of lucky in that Fox saw a clear pathway to my audience, which was woman 35-plus," she said.

"The market has to believe what you're making has an audience that wants to see it and Fox believed that."

She said the MRC was an "incredible organisation that created a grown-up door for emerging filmmakers and content makers", which she considered critical as a pathway.

"On one level it's harder today because it used to be a much smaller pool, but now every state and place around the world has film schools and diplomas and degrees, and it's about cutting through and punching through and having your own voice," Ms Pilowsky said.

"On the flip side of that, excuse the pun, is there are many more platforms for those voices.

"If you don't want to slug it out and make it a labour-of-love feature, you can do a web series, or an iview series, or you can make something for TV.

"There's just so many more doors to knock on."

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