Promotional Materials Required to Market Your Movie

If you are a filmmaker with a completed film, and you would like us to act as your agent to help you find distribution for your movie, you will need to provide us with some promotional materials. Remember your film will be competing for attention with thousands of other movies. You need quality promotional materials to represent your movie. Also see the Movie Sales FAQ.

Trailer

The trailer should be short 2 minutes or less. The trailer should grab the viewer's attention immediately with something dramatic, drop to a slower pace to review some highlights and then end with a bang. Do not try to tell the whole story of the movie. Leave them wanting more. We will need a copy of the trailer in digital format such as uncompressed avi or Quicktime on a DATA DVD. (Please no proprietary Mac formats.) We can also accept trailers on miniDV or DVCAM tape. Please make them WIDESCREEN ANAMORPHIC because that will look best on the HDTV displays we use.

Sell Sheets

A movie sell sheet (sometimes called a "one sheet") is typically 8 1/2 x 11 inches on 80+ lb glossy stock. The front should resemble a movie poster and should include your "key art" (the photos or graphics you want to represent your movie). The front should be full color. The artwork needs to be dramatic enough that it will attract people to it from 20 feet away at that size. (Stick it on the wall and stand back 20 feet to test it.) The back can be color or black and white. On the back you should include a movie still or two, a brief synopsis, quotes from reviews and awards won, and contact information. (Please include your sales agent's (That's us.) contact information, too.) We will need 50-100 of these. Please do not print them on your color printer. If you need help finding a designer or printer, please let us know. We have some contacts. (While large size posters are nice to have, we don't always have the space to display them at the market. Postcards, half sheets, and other odd-sized promotional handouts are not really useful.) When you are designing the one sheet or key art please keep copies of the artwork and text elements separate either as separate files or as a layered Photoshop file, and provide us with a copy of those files on CD. Some foreign distributors will also want to use those files for foreign distribution.

Screeners

We produce DVD-R screeners for distributors on demand. We need a master for your screeners in uncompressed digital video on a hardrive or DVCAM tapes. WIDESCREEN ANAMORPHIC is required.

Production Stills

These are color still photographs taken of scenes in the movie. They are primarily used for promotion in trade magazines and other media. They can be taken during shooting or rehearsals, or they can be posed. They should not be screen captures. They should not be taken with a disposable camera. The most cost effective way of getting such stills is to borrow or purchase a good digital camera (not a webcam or phone camera), take hundreds of photos, and then pick the best. They should not be "behind the scenes" picture showing the crew. They do need to be compelling. Since we usually e-mail the stills to the trade magazines, we prefer them to be in digital form (tif, jpg, psd). You can send them to us on CD-R.