ENTERTAINMENT AND MEDIA BARTER

Prints and Advertising Financing comes into play as film production wraps and the film moves into post production, in which editing occurs and special effects are added after which distribution transpires. Three months before a film has undergone the final edit, a Filmmaker will come to us and seek P&A financing.

What is included in a Prints and Advertising budget?

Although the term Prints and Advertising implies there are just two categories of costs, in fact there are three: Prints, Media and Other Costs. Let’s briefly look at each.

Prints

In the past, this would have involved creating 35 mm celluloid prints of the movie, but more recently this has become creating a hard drive containing a digital video file. The video file is encoded using the Digital Cinema Package (DCP) format and requires a second permissions file in order to play. This allows the DCP to be locked until a certain day or even to work on a particular projector. The distributor will need to pay for:

• The Virtual Print Fee, which is an extra charge paid by the distributors to the cinemas in order to repay them for the costs of upgrading to digital projects a decade ago.
• Shipping costs of getting the hard drives to the cinemas.
• Buying or renting hard drives, and having the DCP file transferred to each one.
• Licenses for using any proprietary formats, such as Dolby’s audio technologies.
• The encoding of the original DCP file.

Media

The largest proportion of a Prints and Advertising budget will be going to the cost of running trailers and promotional spots. These typically play in one of five places:

• Television (broadcast & cable)
• Outdoors (billboards, buses, trains, etc)
• Radio
• Online
• Print (newspapers and magazines)

This support for the film industry is commonplace and readily available to a slate of creative ventures.