So Many Formats So Little Time

The life that my film Doubles with Slight Pepper has had is completely unexpected. It premiered about a year ago and is still experiencing a healthy festival run. AWESOME!!

One of the unexpected problems (it's hard to complain about such things) is actually getting the film to an audience - LITERALLY. Each festival requires varying formats in which to screen for their audience. It's been a lot of work (and expensive!) to get the film on to various formats. We've got the film on: DVD, Blu-Ray, HDCam, HDCam SR (not the same as regular HDCam!), ProRes (on the USB drive) and hard drive. In fact we have multiple versions of each to accommodate festivals that happen really close to one another. 

Usually a festival's Film Traffic department requires exhibition copies a few weeks in advance to make their technical checks and put them on drives, other master tapes etc... so it requires a lot of planning on keeping track of exhibition copies. Needless to say, larger films and studios have departments devoted to keeping track of it all.

The one glaring omission is that we don't have an actual film print! In probably a sign of the times, and the way in which distribution and festivals are going, we've never been asked to provide a 35mm print. This is lucky, because a physical film print in this day and age is REALLY expensive. 

More and more theatres are moving towards a total digital distribution method, which I think is a good thing!