service Feedback On Device For Cinematic Distribution

[bingewave]

OK, so who's setting the ticket price - me (the organiser) or you (service provider) or the film-maker?

The pricing is really set by the filmmaker. Going back to $3/$3/$1, think of as Filmmaker Price/ Organizer / Binge. The organizer is always paid a flat fee of $3. The filmmaker can up and lower thier price as they please, so it can be $6/$3/$1, which is a $10 ticket shown to the customer. I caution filmmakers though to consider how their pricing impacts tickets sales.

As a customer, sometimes I'm shown the total price, which is the only thing that matters; sometimes (e.g. Airbnb) I'm given a click-baity price that gets inflated as I go through the booking process. I realise that this might be yet another trans-Atlantic cultural thing, as here in Europe customers must be given the final all-inclusive price up front, and a breakdown of the taxes and charges later, if at all.

We have an early bird price and a regular showing price. We do this to get people to buy tickets beforehand to have a better headcount. They generally have up until 1 day in advance. So its:

$6/$3/$1 Early Bird

$6/$3/$3 Regular Price

The result is more people buy earlier which helps the organizer better plan their event. It also increases our margins working with those late planners.

Between the two, I look at that 3/3/1 and see that the first 3 is irrelevant to me as an organiser: it's not your role to tell me how much to charge for my event ... and this is what I was referring to in an earlier post. Once you release the service into the wild, you lose control of this element, and can't sell the service on the basis of guaranteed lower cost cinema tickets unless you're also handling the payment processing - and that's a whole other kettle of fish-headed vipers! But if you're not selling the tickets, how can you ensure that you're charging enough/not too much - you'll have no control over the number of people who watch the film, unless I tell you how many I sold tickets too ... and what happens if I just give the tickets away for free ... ?

Great questions and these are at scale problems. To address it's not your role to tell me how much to charge for my event....we are giving the organizer first-run films to screen (eventually) and a free place to host their screening. Thats already a good deal right there. I encourage the hosts to make money in a variety of different ways like selling their popcorn, sponsors, etc.

To summarize, if an organizer is:

1. Not having to find the license holder for a film and negogiate pricing
2. Not having to find a venue and negotiate pricing
3. Only responsible for promoting and setting up the event
4. The risks for failure is nothing vs losing rental fee and having to a pay a license fee

How much control should they have of the event and what counts as a fair deal? Btw, this has not been push back we've gotten yet, but its good to consider. If we weren't doing a lot of the negotiation work for them and mitigating their risk, I would agree that I would not be able to tell them how much they are making per attendee.

How do you translate that to a late-night film screening or an all-day film-fest ?

Late night screenings is the same logistics. All Day film festival, I don't know. That is later down the road. I would describe our current state as learning how to crawl. An all day festival is when we have learned to walk/run.

 

[CelticRambler]

We have an early bird price and a regular showing price. We do this to get people to buy tickets beforehand to have a better headcount. They generally have up until 1 day in advance.

So you are acting as the ticket seller?

How much control should they have of the event and what counts as a fair deal?

I encourage the hosts to make money in a variety of different ways like selling their popcorn, sponsors, etc.

This is where the concept starts to break down for me as an organiser. I can think of a thousand ways to generate this ancillary revenue, especially in a non-traditional environment (café, park, roof-top, movie-club, themed-event-side-show, whatever) but very few of those will work efficiently if I have to ask people to book (and pay for) tickets, even worse if it's through a third party.

Lets go back to my St. Patrick's Day Weekend event. Lets say I want to show a programme of one mainstream Irish-made feature, one Irish-interest documentary and three Irish-themed 15-minute shorts. I might ticket the feature as the main event, three nights in a row, preceded each night by a different short; but run the other two shorts at midday and 4pm, no ticket necessary (to keep my public on site for as long as possible); and maybe I'll run the documentary (unticketed) from 2-3 on the Saturday and Sunday with a talk/concert featuring the subjects of the documentary afterwards [I'm thinking of specific examples here, so this is a reasonably "real" scenario ...]

All that takes place within a programme of food and drink and music and dancing over three days. The use of the films (shown in a proper cinema if available, but it could equally be in a space set up for the purpose) is a promotional activity in itself, and as such, I have no problem in paying the licence/service fee - but I do have a problem with relinquishing control of the ticket sales for the main feature, on the one hand, and requiring people to look for tickets for the free screenings on the other. If you're insisting on handling the ticketing as well as the licensing, what advantage are you offering me over a regular distributor?

To my mind, it wouldn't be hugely different if I were a restaurant owner offering a movies-and-mascarpone menu once a month, or a foreign language movie-meetup for exiles and expatriates in the local church hall. Unless you're offering an amazing line-up of work, why wouldn't I just just get hold of a few DVDs or stream my choice of titles via Netflix and pay the local performing rights administrators the usual fee?