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Film Finance: the barrier to open filmmaking?

Films are typically financed thru either pre-sales or, more commonly, a mix of financing sources (public, tax-rebate, private investors, crowdfunding, salary-deferment) in the hope the completed film with be sold. Sales – be it pre-sale or on-completion, is largely specific to a territory or group of territories, and a specific platform, or group of platforms. For e.g. Channel 4 may acquire UK TV rights while Arté buy French and German TV rights for a film. Amazon Prime might buy subscription streaming rights and Sony Entertainment buys all Cinema, DVD/Blue-ray and Video-on-demand rights outside of America. In all of these sales, rights are licensed for a period of time for a specific jurisdiction, with the main exception being an all-out sale, where - say - Netflix or Disney - buys a half-completed film, or just a script concept, pays to complete it, and then releases it as a Netflix Original, owning the rights in perpetuity (including for sequels and adaptations).

None of these sales channels are designed to buy open source films – why would they when anyone else would be free to release the film on a competing channel? Indeed they could already show an open source film on their platform without paying, but probably wouldn’t as these platforms are driven by exclusivity; attention as a business model holds up for the free-platforms like YouTube and Facebook.

Other than declaring open source film as an edge-case for hobbyists and philanthropists – this leaves at least three options for open source film financing:

  1. Reduce the costs of development, production and post-production so it can be done by volunteers (as Wikipedia is now);
  2. Cover the costs of development, production and post-production fully before anything is released;
  3. Develop new method to gain income from the completed film(s).

1. Reduce the costs of development, production and post-production so it can be done by volunteers on tiny/zero budgets

Networks such as Unsplash.com have shown that great quality work is available under an open source license, and it’s possible by distributing the costs of documentary creation that it could be easier to lower the overall costs down. For instance - interviews and lectures can be shot and shared by different people around the world, building an ever increasing database of interviews and archive footage.

Challenges

  • No quality control between assets - they can appear in a variety of formats, styles, approaches, appearances - and may be a challenge to cut together.
  • The time required aggregating that source material into a single film and creating a compelling narrative with it is far more time consuming than shooting an interview and requires a single person or team to commit to it to create a finished film.
  • Ongoing changes and edits to that films will also require time, while video files requires hosting and bandwidth.
  • Finally: given it requires skills and time to do well, why shouldn’t people be paid to make films that have an audience?

Conclusion This is the Wikimedia/Creative Commons approach at present - if it was a viable method to produce open source films there perhaps would be more of them already. Furthermore this mass de-expertification of media, undermining paid professionals could be described as one of the factors driving our current media space where higher-quality video is available to paid platform subscribers, and the rest must navigate disinformation and false video online.

2. Cover the costs of development, production and post-production fully before anything is released.

  • Some film financing is ‘soft’, ie non-recoupable tax-rebates and public funding. On a commercial feature film it can be between a quarter to half of the total budget.
  • Many documentary filmmakers have made up the rest, or even removed the need for other funding with crowdfunding.
  • Platforms such as Patreon provide a further revenue stream to filmmakers ‘up front’ - and don’t depend upon selling the final project.
  • Wealthy benefactors and foundations, educational institutions and other ‘soft’ sources may be convinced to adopt the model given the net-benefit of high-quality open source film.
  • Convince public sector broadcasters to finance and release their work under an open license.

3. Develop a method to gain income from the completed film(s).

A few sub-options and sub-sub-options here:

  • Convince platforms to buy open source films on the basis that either:
    • It’s a good thing;
    • Sell them unique copyrighted cuts for sale - while the raw assets remain public;
    • Include some copyrighted assets - ie a soundtrack, titles or animation to ensure there is some exclusivity around the film;
    • Hold back the public availability of assets, even tho the film is under an open license - ie offer convenience to the buyer;
    • Do this but in combination with shorter episodic films; ie so that the platform is the first to show the film, unofficial versions appear later;
    • Create a copyright window (ie 2 years) for exclusive sales, before the film is released under a fully open license;
    • Create a subscription platform specifically to finance films like this and encourage films to be viewed through this to track and reward popular titles.
  • Convince governments to mandate that public-owned broadcasters must buy a certain percentage of open source films.
  • Some kind of advertising model.
  • Some kind of donation model (similar to Wikipedia at present)
  • Some kind of micropayment attention token (e.g. Brave Browser's Basic Attention Token, or Coil's WebMonetization protocol)
  • By using Creative Commons Non-Commercial (or similar) as base license and then licensing commercial exceptions.

This last option opens up a fourth possibility which I will discuss in the next piece.