What's In Your Financing Package

The basic financing package you’ll need is: finance plan, trusted sales estimates, and a solid production plan. PLUS doing more with less while innovating on old paradigms.

In my last newsletter we talked about the concept of full stack filmmaking - the idea that you should have a handle on all parts of the process of making your film or series, from IP acquisition to development, to financing strategies, and all the way through to sales and distribution.

It doesn’t mean you have to wear every hat of course, but being cognizant of what’s happening at every stage ensures you can hire and manage a team of experts while not getting ripped off. It also means you can effectively hack the process by making things go quicker on specific parts that could take you a year of Sundays to figure out on your own (and fail at).

They say things happen in waves and since I sent the last newsletter, I’ve received at least three opportunities to work on projects that need advising at the financing stage - specifically in pulling together a credible finance plan, shaping the related docs to go with the finance plan, and generally overseeing all the liaising between financiers, sales partners, and the producing team. Essentially the role an EP would play.

Maybe it’s because we had that discussion over the fact that traditional film business plans are no longer relevant in today’s market, but it’s created newfound interest in my EP Services and has shifted a lot of the discussions happening inside the FS Pro group.

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On Doing More With Less

Given we’re experiencing a little ‘down time’ in the market right now due to double strikes, it feels appropriate going into deep dive mode with financing strategies, and talk about here in the newsletter what you can be working on at least on your own right now to get yourself ready for a busy fall season.

I’ll start by saying this: if you’re at the stage where you need to attach talent to get the attention of financiers, you’ll probably need to submit to SAG for an interim agreement / waiver. So get your paperwork in order on that.

I’m packaging a few projects right now and in all cases, the agents are actually quite open to reading and in some cases even sharing scripts with their clients, but require a SAG interim agreement to formally attach anyone or move forward with meetings and introductions.

If you want to be out there pitching investors, the basic financing package you’ll need is: finance plan, trusted sales estimates, and a solid pitch deck with production plan.

And by production plan I mean - how can you do more with less? How can you create an absolute no-brainer of a situation for an investor to join your crusade?

That can take many forms from upping the ‘impact’ elements of your project to moving a production overseas to save on budget to looking at alternative financing models. There’s lots of hacks to explore and no two ways about it, you need to be thinking in terms of innovating.

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I’ll leave it there for now and open the floor for questions….

Go ahead and post them in the comments below and I’ll answer!

And if you’ve got the creative on lock but need personalized help with organizing the finance and distribution side of things for your project, apply to become a part of FS Pro where I can guide you or email me at stacey@filmspecific.com if you have some development funds to play with and prefer personalized consulting.

On that note, I’ll wrap things up for today. Have a fabulous day ahead and I’ll speak to you again soon!

To your success,

Stacey

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