Sunday, November 28, 2010

Taking the Show on the Road

Well, the deed is truly done.

Last Friday, Francine G. (our fantastic, patient and positive post-production coordinator), Barbara, Claudine and I all screened - and approved - the glorious 35 mm answer print of our finished film!

In French, the answer print is called "copy zero" - meaning: the only way to go is up. Meaning: from hereon in, the film goes forth and multiplies!

And so do we - in the sense that we now hope to grow the number of people who have seen the movie by many multiples!

And so the "distribution and promotion" phase of this adventure begins....

To officially kick it off, we will be screening the answer print for our investors and distributor (Métropole) here in Montreal on Monday and then Barbara, Theresapedia and I will once again travel that well-worn trail of celluloid dreams to Toronto, cans of film in the trunk and high hopes in our hearts.

Once we've shown the finished film to both our Quebec and Toronto-based distributors (Mongrel), we'll sit down with both offices to discuss distribution and marketing strategy. Will the approaches be different in Quebec and the ROC? What festivals will the film be submitted to? When will the film be released in theatres? What can we do to draw people to those theatres? What means and media can we exploit?

If all goes according to plan, we'll have theatrical trailers to cut, posters to design, web sites to build and god help me, interviews to give!

I'll keep you posted on all of that as we go, but in the meantime, we (Barbara, Luc and I) have started a very cool side project, a natural offshoot of the film ...

We're putting together a kickass soundtrack album! A whole new frontier, but with familiar faces - very cool.

Oh, and Go Als!