Back In Action & Market Updates

Hi everyone,

Hope you all have been doing well!

It’s been a minute since I sent out one of my dispatches (6 months to be exact!) but I wanted to check back in with everyone, give a few updates, and see how you’re doing.

For starters, we moved over to a new newsletter platform so if you’re reading this, you’re still on the list for receiving my occasional updates and newsletters. If you’re no longer interested in reading such dispatches, you can unsubscribe below and I promise I won’t be offended :)

Next up is we updated the Film Specific site to reflect our current offerings which at this point are advisory/consulting services for features and series. Due to my production schedule these days, I’m not going to be offering any courses in the short term, rather I’m focusing energy on advising select projects in an EP capacity and on my premium subscription community FS Pro. Email me if you’re interested in more details for either of these things: stacey@filmspecific.com

More about what I’ve been up to…

Since we last spoke in January I was meant to go into production with a feature in March/April that got pushed to the fall due to our lead actor falling out. Competing with big-budget TV series for attaching talent to Indies is a tough game even when you’re fully financed.

The film I shot towards the end of last year finished post and we’re out to festivals and distributors right now. Tough market! Low to no MG offers even with medium-level names. I think our savior will be AVOD lol. The features I’m advising that are recouping and profiting are in the $250K range (some a little more, some a little less). Doesn’t mean you can’t make anything for a bigger budget, but it requires a structured finance approach like the old days of combining equity with tax incentives, pre-sales, and whatever else you can cobble together.

I currently have two back-to-back medium-budget indie features scheduled for production this fall and am lining up my schedule for 2023. On the Series side of things, we’ve got about a half dozen IP-based projects we’re developing and taking to market both here and internationally. Looking forward to getting one off the ground soon and hopefully adding that to the shooting schedule for next year. I’m prioritizing international projects on the series side of things at the moment as that’s where all the growth is at the moment in global TV/streaming.

Personally speaking, I got back to international travel (finally) for business and pleasure, got through Covid and came out the other side, and otherwise have been hyper-focused on expanding business networks here and abroad and prioritizing partnerships and collaborations… it’s the way forward in this crazy over-saturated, over-leveraged, streamer-retracting, market we find ourselves in.

But enough about me, what about you?

I love hearing from you guys so thanks to everyone who’s been checking in! Drop me a line at stacey@filmspecific.com and tell me what you’re up to, what you’d like to hear more about as I restart these dispatches, where the holes are in your current knowledge and skill base, etc.

I look forward to starting up some conversations again :)

On that note, I’ll wrap things up for today. I wish you a wonderful day ahead and I’ll speak to you again soon…

To your success,

Stacey

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