Ask HN: Can a No Budget Indie Movie Make $1m Online? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Can a No Budget Indie Movie Make $1m Online?

#21

Post by incub8or » Tue, Oct 04, 2011, 10:51 AM UTC

pasbesoin wrote: post #20

stfu wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might want to include in your offer some high quality picture or HD vid of the message on the Times Square screen. Assuming you guys are great with capturing a "scene" in an impressive way, this would make it at least for me much more interesting. You could include there some photomontage of the final result already on the website. Maybe in the end the most important shoot of the movie is going to be the one of t…

This was a thought I also had. An HD recording of the message stream, with enough of the surrounding environment to make it look / demonstrate its "liveness" and context. Rather than trying to deliver individual fragments to all the contributors, see if the ads/messages are clocked tightly enough that you can simply post one or several videos somewhere (YouTube, Vimeo?) and then provide contributors the timestamp of…

Thanks a lot guys. Very helpful suggestions.

Re: Ask HN: Can a No Budget Indie Movie Make $1m Online?

#22

Post by incub8or » Tue, Oct 04, 2011, 10:53 AM UTC

LarryMade wrote: post #18

Is it a good movie?

Great question! We think so but only the audience can answer that objectively. Check out some audience reactions at http://bit.ly/owHzdn

Re: Ask HN: Can a No Budget Indie Movie Make $1m Online?

#23

Post by Fliko » Wed, Oct 05, 2011, 2:15 PM UTC

I don't think it will be as successful as you think, and my reasoning for that is that it really doesn't have much to do with the movie. Don't get me wrong, it's a cool idea and you should do it for the novelty if you want, but if you really want to increase sales you should do something relevant to the product you are selling.

It's probably too late for doing anything with this, but if you do more movies you should consider doing an ARG (like ilovebees, the beast etc.), and I think this would be effective because you are hitting an online audience by releasing a movie that you download. Unless you are pro at creating ARGs, or unless you really put time into it and have a bit of luck it probably won't introduce commercial success, but it would definitely open your film up to a small niche.

Another interesting thing is pricing models, and I think that it won't increase sales, but if some people want to pay more money for extra stuff, they will do so and it will help increase revenue. A good example is at http://joshfreese.com/ (I promise I'm not affiliated, just a favourite musician of mine who had success with this model)

Re: Ask HN: Can a No Budget Indie Movie Make $1m Online?

#24

Post by incub8or » Thu, Oct 06, 2011, 10:59 AM UTC

Fliko wrote: post #23

I don't think it will be as successful as you think, and my reasoning for that is that it really doesn't have much to do with the movie. Don't get me wrong, it's a cool idea and you should do it for the novelty if you want, but if you really want to increase sales you should do something relevant to the product you are selling. It's probably too late for doing anything with this, but if you do more movies you should…

Thanks for the feedback, which I found very interesting. We did look at the possibility of an ARG but decided to go another way for this movie. We are treating the movie launch as a software product: make, launch, get feedback, iterate, repeat. The response we've had in terms of sales and feedback has been phenomenal. We are working on other value added stuff to add to the promotion and looking at the Josh Freese site was very inspiring. Please do let us know what you think when we add more to the offering. Cheers.