Archives for December 2020

Short films have historically been a filmmaker’s calling card for larger projects. Can you make money on a short film in and of itself?

To find out, I did some research and listed all the ways you could possibly make money on just short films.

Product Placement / Sponsor

Get a brand to sponsor the film.

There are many ways to do this. You could do what YouTubers do, by naming the sponsor of the video at the end or giving a promo code from which you get a commission. However, ideally, you would get the brand to pay for the entire film. With this, you’re basically making an ad disguised as a short film, but if sticking a vodka bottle or cool car in your film gets it made, why not. Most big films have product placement anyway. The challenge here is getting a brand to sponsor you.

Examples: BMW short film series, Casey Neistat Make It Count Nike video.

While these examples are big brands, you could do the same for a smaller one. Which creates more attention for a supplement brand? A “buy my supplements” video or an action film where the hero takes pre-workout or uses nootropics in place of coffee to crack the code of a difficult intellectual task. Get creative.

Ancillary Content / Merch

Sell ancillary products for your film. Merch, t-shirts, props from the film, etc.

Sell Your Products

Make yourself the sponsor.

Release the short film for free, but use it as an ad for something you are selling.

Product place your own products.

Cinematic Universe

You could even use the short as an ad for your larger films.

Marvel, Star Trek, and Pixar all do short films in the world of their larger films to build buzz for their features.

Why not do a short film in the world of your feature(s), and give the short film away for free as an ad for your other movies?

In this case, the short film is ancillary content for your feature.

Streaming Platform

Sell the film to a big streaming platform like Netflix, Hulu, HBO, etc. You could also sell to a niche streaming platform (Gaia, Nebula, etc.), or sell per-stream on Amazon Prime. Selling to a bigger platform takes work, Amazon is free, but pays very little a (1 cent per stream). Still, it’s something. Shorts.tv is also one of the biggest distributors for shorts. Some TV networks will buy and produce short films, such as Adult Swim or IFC.

Crowdfunding

Get people to pay for the film directly. The best way to do this is crowdfunding. I created a course teaching people how to crowdfund. Short films are perfect for this model. You could do a single crowdfunding campaign for your short, or have an ongoing crowdfunding campaign for a series of short films. My course will help with either model.

Bundle Short Films

You can sell short films directly if you bundle them or produce them as a series.

For example, you could sell a DVD or VOD for a series of short films linked by theme, genre, or shared element.

You could also produce your film as an ongoing web series. In this case, on-going crowdfunding models would still apply.

Live Event

Make the short film part of a live event. A short cannot fill a whole evening, but if paired with food, comedy, live music, public speaking, a non-profit fundraiser, or the opportunity to connect with other interesting people you can make an event out of it and sell tickets.

Short Film Contests

There are lots of short film contests. Some offer cash prizes. Read the fine print with these, as many have terrible rules or are basically scams. However, if you spend less than the prize you win, you can make money. I know at least one filmmaker who repeatedly does this.

Win An Oscar

The Oscar-winning shorts are almost always released in theaters. In an interview, the founder of Shorts.tv says they make usually make 30k per film just on theatrical. However, I’m not sure this repays the production budget of some of those films, and the festival expenses of promoting yourself to Oscar status. Still, if you can win an Oscar, win that Oscar.

Sales-Funnel

Give the film away to get people to sign-up for your email list.

Most email lists and sales funnels have a piece of free content they give away to get you to sign-up. Email marketers usually use an “ebook” that is basically a glorified pdf. Why not a short film?

If everyone else is giving serious print content, a cool short film will stand out.

I use a short scene from my documentary American Circumcision as a free give-away for the email list for the film.

If an Amazon view is worth 1 cent, a new email list subscriber is worth at least that, especially if you can later sell them on giving $25 to your Kickstarter project.

Wealthy Patron

Just get someone to pay for it, or do it for free.

This is the most common option.

It’s not a business model, but it gets the film made.

What other ways do you think you could make money on a short film?

Follow me on social media and let me know here.

This recent article from YesWeekly exploring the “forgotten holiday tradition of telling scary stories at Christmastime” made me think we really got the tone right for The Haunting of Bob Cratchit. Here is what they said:

“Re-reading it [Charles Dickens A Christmas Carol] this season, I found myself vividly reminded of how genuinely scary it is at times, but also how funny (sometimes in a very dark way), and how concerned it is with social justice.”

Compare that to what I said in an interview on our Christmas ghost story, The Haunting of Bob Cratchit:

Tone-wise, The Haunting of Bob Cratchit is a horror-comedy. I know that might sound odd, but it is a haunting, complete with creepy ghost children and characters being shown their future deaths. People forget these elements, because of the Christmas cheer that bookends the film.

Our book closely follows the tone and style of Charles Dicken’s original A Christmas Carol, while expanding the world, characters, and ideas.

We are keeping the Christmas tradition of ghost stories alive with our own haunting.

Read it for yourself here.

Originally published on MarottaOnMoney.com by Megan Russell here.

A new book by David John Marotta and Brendon Marotta makes you rethink what is happening in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Published just in time for Christmas, The Haunting of Bob Cratchit is now available for purchase on Amazon as a Kindle, paperback, or hardcover. Whether you are a fan of the original or just curious about the kind of fiction book Brendon and David Marotta have authored, you are in for a treat if you pick up a copy.

I recently had the joy of interviewing my father, which you can read about in my article “The Haunting of Bob Cratchit: A New Book from David Marotta.” Now, I have also had the pleasure of interviewing the co-author of the book, Brendon Marotta, who also happens to be my brother.

For those of you who don’t know him, Brendon is a smart, creative artist and activist who can be successful at just about anything he tries. I’m excited to get to introduce you to him through this interview.

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How did you first get involved in this project?

My dad had been talking about it and making notes for years. While I was back in Virginia, he asked if I wanted to co-write it with him. He was more excited about working on this than many other projects I’d offered to help him on. Naturally, I said yes.

What was it like working with your father?

It was great! Men tend to bond over things, especially work they do together. We would work our way into personal topics by talking about characters and how they perceive certain situations or why they might make certain choices.

What was your favorite part of the process?

I loved writing the scene in Stave 4 with Tiny Tim. I won’t spoil it, but it came fully channeled in one sitting and took me by surprise. It made me tear up, and I’ve heard the same reaction from others. That scene remained basically the same all through publication.

Looking back, that was the moment when I discovered that I really knew the characters. It felt like the characters were suggesting scenes and almost talking to me. That made the writing easier. Getting to know these characters was probably my favorite part of the process, but that scene crystallized it.

Tell me a little about the characters in this story.

The characters in this story are more interesting people than most adapting the story show.

For example in the original novella, Tiny Tim says he doesn’t mind being a cripple because it reminds others of “the one who heals cripples.” Who says that? What four-year-old child is happy to be a cripple just because it helps others think about Jesus? Tiny Tim is a much more interesting character on his own than the way he is used in Scrooge’s story. In most A Christmas Carol adaptations, Tiny Tim is nothing more than a prop to make the audience feel sorry for him. In our version, we explore his spirituality a lot more, and it is actually the prayers of Tiny Tim that set the events of the haunting in motion.

What was your favorite moment in the book?

There is a scene where Bob and his wife Emily discuss potential treatments for Tiny Tim. That scene has my favorite line in the book. Let’s just say, Victorian medical treatments would not have helped. You’ll laugh when you read it.

In this project, you had a lot of experience in adaptation, from book to screenplay and from screenplay to book as well as from a 1843 novella to a 2020 book. What did you learn from the experience?

Writing in someone else’s world and style forces you to think about your choices much more, because someone else has already made choices for you. Some of the choices Dickens makes are ones I would never have thought to make. Since you can’t change them, you’re forced to understand them or justify them. Why did he make this choice? How could I make this choice – which I’d never normally make – work for me? It really forces you outside your comfort zone as a writer.

Nine times out of ten when I’d question a choice, I’d discover that, yes indeed, literary-giant Charles Dickens knew what he was doing and deserves all the praise and accolades his writing has enjoyed. (The tenth time, I suspect he was just being paid by the word.)

I also started to learn how and why he made those surprising choices. Now, I think I can replicate some of his genius and weave that style into my own future projects.

Other than A Christmas Carol, what books, authors, or movies is The Haunting of Bob Cratchit most like?

Tone-wise, The Haunting of Bob Cratchit is a horror-comedy. I know that might sound odd, but it is a haunting, complete with creepy ghost children and characters being shown their future deaths. People forget these elements, because of the Christmas cheer that bookends the film. Our story adds an element of comedy, with the funny dialogue you’d expect from modern movies in which an average man is thrown into a supernatural world.

The book that comes to mind is The Chronicles of Narnia. The Narnia books are family-friendly, yet contain some very grown-up ideas and a lot of magic.

Your mom, dad, and sister all work at Marotta Wealth Management. How has coming from a family of financial planners affected your life?

There are a lot of bad decisions I’ve avoided because it wouldn’t even occur to me to make them, like going into debt. Sometimes it’s hard to notice the influence, because that influence is seen in what isn’t there, rather than what is. I think it’s also made me willing to invest in things that I think will pay off long-term, even if they offer nothing immediately. I know my dad made very little during his first years building the business. Now, it’s much more. Because I saw him working at something that paid nothing initially, I’m willing to put in the work on projects that might not pay off till later, which is a skill all artistic ventures require.

What’s your favorite piece of financial planning advice or favorite Marotta article?

The series on A Christmas Carol, obviously.

I also like the series on preparing for the apocalypse, which went viral before “fake news” was a popular term. We made that into a short funny documentary which you can watch here. Watching the impact of that was an education in how media really worked.

Your article on customer service lessons from parenting a toddler is also great. More businesses and people would benefit from realizing that most adults are just grown-up toddlers.

You have been quite successful as an artist. Tell our readers what you’ve done.

I’ve basically worked every job on a film set and edited every type of project, including features. My first feature as director was a feature-length documentary called American Circumcision that appeared on Netflix. I also wrote a book on activism, called The Intactivist Guidebook, made a course on crowdfunding called “Dreams To Reality,” and am currently finishing another book on social issues that affect children.

Truth be told though, I don’t feel like I’m very successful, and tend to focus on the next step, project, or level of success. In some way, this helps make you good at your craft, by forcing you to drive ahead and pursue more. In high school, I compared my projects shot on mini-dv tape to Kubrick, Scorsese, and Kurosawa in an effort to get better. Growth never ends.

What advice would you have for other artists?

Write. Finish what you write. Everything else is superfluous.

I’d also add to trust your unconscious mind and be willing to discover things in the process. This project had a pretty detailed outline, yet we still discovered things in the writing. It’s tempting to want to plan every aspect of a story out, but there will be things you discover along the way. If in a moment a character does something that “ruins” your outline, let them do it and see what happens. You can always edit it or rewrite later.

What financial advice would you have for others who are self-employed?

Create more stuff. When you only have one offering, people can only give you money one way. After I made my first film, people who saw it loved it, but I had nothing else to sell them. Now, I’ve got a film, two books, a course, and more on the way. Ideally, you want offerings at different price points too. Crowdfunding is great, because you can offer something for $5,000 for the people who want more and still give people who only have $5 something too.

In the future, I’d like to expand even more. There are a few artists who are highly successful “one hit wonders,” but they are the exception. When you think about successful writers and filmmakers, there is usually a body of work, even if they have one hit they are best known for, and they are constantly making more. My goal is the same.

It also makes it easier to sell later. Now, if people like this book, they can check out my other stuff. They can even subscribe to my newsletter at BrendonMarotta.com and find out about everything that I come out with.

Read the book The Haunting of Bob Cratchit for yourself here.

It started when I was back in Virginia and asked my dad if he wanted me to shoot more videos for his company, and he said:

“Well, what I’d really like to do is write a movie…”

My ears perked up. This sounded way more fun than corporate videos.

“What’s it about?” I asked.

“It’s called The Haunting of Bob Cratchit,” he said.

Let me back up. My dad is fascinated by Charles Dickens A Christmas Carol. Since as far back as I can remember him writing a monthly financial column, every year he has written something about A Christmas Carol around the holidays. I thought his first article was 11 years ago, but my sister corrected me – my dad has actually been writing about Charles Dickens A Christmas Carol for nearly 17 years. You can read his articles here.

One of the questions that drove his curiosity was: Why is Bob Cratchit so poor? Bob should have been able to support his family, yet Tiny Tim lacked medical care. My dad developed a theory, based on his knowledge of finance, history, and Dickens. Over time, this theory developed into a story of it’s own. My dad laid out an outline he’d been tinkering with for years and added “but I don’t think I’m very good at dialogue. It’s all too on the nose.” I read what he had. He was right. Still, the story structure was solid and the concept was great. He asked me if I wanted to work on it with him. I said yes.

We had a simple routine. Every Wednesday, we’d meet for burgers, talk about the scene I wrote, and then I’d ask him questions about the next scene. What does the scene need to accomplish, why do the characters make their choices, etc. I think my dad just wanted to spend time with me as much as he wanted to write the script. I felt the same.

As I wrote, some scenes evolved a bit beyond the original outline. There’s a scene in the fourth stave (no spoilers, but you’ll know it when you read it) that came entirely channeled in one sitting and made me tear up when I saw it. It made others who read it feel the same, so we kept it basically the same from first to final draft. Other scenes needed a lot of editing. For example, the character of Emily Cratchit needed to be developed more. What do you know about her in the original A Christmas Carol? Almost nothing. Yet, in our story, she is the wife of the title character, so she needed to play a bigger role.

Once we had a script, we had that moment of suddenly realizing if we sell this (which is a big “if”) they’ll probably hire someone to rewrite us. Movies get changed all the time. We couldn’t produce a period piece with crowd scenes and visual effects ourselves, but we still wanted to tell this story. We decided to turn it into a novel, with exactly the same story and dialogue as we’d already written. I asked a writer friend of mine, Aaron Carver, to help as I’d been staring at this story for over a year. He did a first pass from the screenplay, and then we went back and forth in revision mode, much like me and my dad had. It took far less time since the story was already written in one format.

Our idea with the film was always to make it feel like this story took place in the same classic world of A Christmas Carol. If we wanted to do the same in a novel, we had to make our writing feel like Charles Dickens. Dickens is a hard writer to imitate. When we were writing the screenplay, every now and then my dad would give me a note we had to change a line of dialogue because it was way too long. I’d have to tell him “that’s Dickens.” We lifted word for word from the original. “Well, you’re dialogue’s better,” he said, laughing. You can tell Dickens got paid by the word, but there are some turns of phrase that still stand out in your mind, like this description of a character: “Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing.” Does that sound like the A Christmas Carol you remember? It’s in the book.

Working within another writer’s world forces you to learn their language and ways of thinking. The script was one level, the novel another. I feel like I know Dickens at this point. He’s a weird guy. Most people think of A Christmas Carol as a heartwarming story. A man is miserly at the beginning, and generous at the end. They forget the middle has all of these strange phantoms. It’s a ghost story. There are supernatural elements. There are moments of horror and moments of humor. Yet, it’s still a family story. Removing those elements from the familiar makes them new again. 

A Christmas Carol is a great story, but the way it’s told in most adaptations isn’t as original. Our hope is that this book gives you the feeling you had the first time you heard this story, and then goes deeper into the world and characters to show you something new. It showed me something new. My dad has been able to find something new in it each year for nearly 17 years. No matter how familiar you are with A Christmas Carol, this book has something new for you too.

Read The Haunting of Bob Cratchit.

Inspired by Charles Dickens A Christmas Carol, The Haunting of Bob Cratchit reveals the untold story of how the same night Scrooge was haunted by three ghosts, Tiny Tim’s father Bob Cratchit was too.

Written by a father and son, this new Christmas classic tells the story of Bob Cratchit, a father who must learn his own Christmas lesson to save the life of his beloved son Tiny Tim, while facing his miserly employer Ebeneezer Scrooge, the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future, and even troubling characters from other Charles Dickens stories.

A timeless Christmas classic.

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Available now:

• Kindle
• Hardcover
• Paperback

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About the Authors:

The Haunting of Bob Cratchit is written by a father-son team of a financial planner and an award-winning filmmaker.

Brendon Marotta is an award-winning filmmaker and author whose work has appeared on Netflix and Amazon. He has been making films since he was fourteen. Brendon has spoken at conferences and film screenings around the world. He currently lives with his wife in Austin, TX.

David Marotta is the President and founder of Marotta Wealth Management. He first wrote about Charles Dickens A Christmas Carol seventeen years ago in his regular financial column Marotta on Money. David has spoken at financial conferences around the world. He currently lives with his wife in Charlottesville, VA.

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Get the book here.