Besides making shorts in series for web series and possible independent TV series on small cable networks, how else can shorts be made for profit?
It's pay per view with no money up front. Every month they email me a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet showing how many hits the titles get per month. They claim to send a check for each time the total sales in VOD royalties goes above $20.
+1But the issue isn't really finding a place to sell your video...
The problem is marketing, promotion, and convincing an audience to pay for your work, short or otherwise...
So you do the math - how much do you need to make your short profitable? Lets say you made it fairly cheaply and only need $500 to be 'profitable'...
So lets say you somehow made that all happen, and you made your $500 - were you really profitable?...
Now maybe everyone volunteered, so you only had to spend the $500 out of pocket, but that doesn't mean you can discount that time when you start talking about profitability. I think profitability is the wrong thing to focus on, at least in terms of true independent filmmaking, it's too short term. We should be focusing on sustainability - the ability to keep on making films. Profitability is a key underlying component of that, but if you don't think about the long term sustainability of what you're doing it's easy to fool yourself into thinking you've made a profit when you really haven't.
The Superman 2 was just to illustrate how studios come up with similar ways to market films.
Getting a short story published in a magazine with international channels will get science fiction fans familiar with the story, the writer's name, and series name. If they like the story, they will seek it out in other media, such as the short film and a novel.
Getting a short story published in a magazine with international channels will get science fiction fans familiar with the story, the writer's name, and series name. If they like the story, they will seek it out in other media, such as the short film and a novel.
An interesting method: A previously unpublished writer published a
short story in a magazine with international challenes that gets
science fictions fans fimiliar with the story, a short film is made from
that story and makes money.
Can you think of one example of this being a way to make a short
film profitable?
But will they pay for it? Not likely with the short, so again this really has nothing to do with making shorts profitable.
There are plenty of profitable shorts. The formula is pretty simple. Get millions of people to watch your short, and sell advertising against it. It's hard to do with a single short, and in reality it's most profitable for the short aggregators (i.e. YouTube).
The chances of an unknown science fiction writer getting a story published through "international channels" is next to impossible. Fiction readers are just like film watchers---they want to read known writers, so any platform for short fiction will stick with that. New unknown writers only get published in much smaller venues. And even if it did work, would they want to pay to see the short film? No.
VODs can make money from Itunes, CreateSpace, and BigStar even for shorts.