Take Digital Control of Your Project: Berlin workshop with Stacey Parks and Thomas Mai for

Thomas Mai of Festival Darlings invites you to "Dawn of The Micro Major Film Producer: Everything you want to know about VOD and Crowdfunding"" on 16 February at 09:00 until 1:00 at the Ritz Carlton in Berlin.  Support comes from Screen Daily as does the text of this blog.  I post it here because Thomas has come a long way as has film itself since he began at the onset of Lars Von Trier's company Trust when Von Trier was calling the shots for indie filmmakers with his Dogma 95 rules of filmmaking.  He has since sold his international sales company to Nordisk and Thomas has moved on as the only European international sales agent (perhaps with the exception of Celluloid Dreams) to fully embrace the digital technology as the answer to the crisis faced by international sales and distribution.

The event aims to inform attendees how to stay on top of the changes in financing and distribution models and teach producers how to take control of their projects in the new world. For more information or to book you seat, please click here.

Parks and Mai will cover topics such as:
- engaging and aggregating your audience via social media platforms;
- bringing on marketing and promotional partners for your film at various stages of production;
- executing effective email campaigns to your target audience;
- leveraging crowd funding for financing your next film and combining it with traditional forms of financing;
- combining crowd funding with other traditional forms of financing;
- optimizing your film’s website for direct-to-consumer sales;
- maximizing VOD revenue:
- capitalizing on specialty screenings.

“The whole film business as we know it is rapidly changing and for the independent producer it is one of the best times ever to be a producer,” said Mai. “No more gatekeepers and no more exclusivity means that you can fully finance, shoot and distribute your own films worldwide through the internet. It is now possible to be truly independent and make money while you are sleeping as a producer. We have created this event to help producers not only understand the new tools but also teach them how to use them.”
Added Parks: “We want to teach film producers how to leverage all the new opportunities out there to make better films for audiences, and to actually be able to sustain a career making films. That’s everything from fund raising, to promoting, and of course distribution. There are so many new and different platforms out there, and we want to show filmmakers how to make the most of all of it.”

Parks has been a sales agent since 2001 and, after several years in the trenches of film and programme distribution, wrote the book “The Insider’s Guide To Independent Film Distribution” in 2007. At the same time, she launched FilmSpecific.com, a website dedicated to educating film-makers about film financing, distribution and marketing. In 2009, she launched Media Sparks Entertainment and currently focuses on film and TV projects for all media platforms.

Mai, who was formerly head of Trust Film Sales from 1998 to 2000 and head of new business at TrustNordisk from 2006 to 2009, has produced four feature films and is a well-known speaker on new digital possibilities.