Official Selection
On September 11, 2014 at 3 PM GMT the Viewster Online Film Festival (#VOFF) will commence and run through September 25. The public will decide if Justice Is Mind advances to the jury who will announce the winners at the Raindance Film Festival in the United Kingdom on October 5th. While everyone wants to win, I’m just honored that Justice Is Mind was selected. For the first time, worldwide audiences will have the opportunity to see Justice Is Mind online for FREE. As soon as the direct link to Justice Is Mind is sent to us by Viewster, I will post it here…and promote the hell out of it!
What’s terrific about Viewster’s festival schedule is that, for our film, it runs right through our Cape Code Premiere on September 18 at the Chatham Orpheum Theater. This is akin to the popular “day and date” releases I have been reading about for the last few years. How it impacts on Justice Is Mind will be very interesting. Will we see a spike in votes? Praise? Critiques? Whatever plays out, it can only help.
The one thing all filmmakers love is organization. Both Viewster and the Chatham Orpheum Theater are so wonderfully organized. From the “creators kit” Viewster sends its filmmakers to the Chatham Orpheum’s staff and marketing team, it’s a filmmakers dream working with organizations that want to work with you.
I know it sounds cliché, but we are all in this together. VOD platforms and theaters need quality content and filmmakers need distribution outlets from traditional to digital. As I’ve said before, I will say again, I cannot stress enough the importance of both. Theatrical screenings build audience, awareness and press that just benefits you when you go to VOD. Likewise, VOD provides long term revenue to filmmakers. The old adage if you build it they will come, in my view, just doesn’t apply to movies. You have to market to call attention to yourself. If you aren’t going to toot your own horn who is?
A sample slide from my PowerPoint presentation that was approved by Cunard.
Speaking about promoting, I’ve been reading the daily trade reports coming out of the Toronto International Film Festival. Again, it’s an honor if your film is selected, but dear lord the competition for attention is beyond the beyond. When you read about the quiet market and how distributors are now placing films with A list cast on direct platforms like Vimeo on Demand, you know this is an industry in transition. But I still hold true to consumer curation. As long as a film is “findable”, audiences will watch what they want to watch either in a theater or online.
For anyone that has followed me on any regular basis, you know I’m all about marketing. Simply put it doesn’t matter what you do if nobody knows about it. When I first published niche sports magazines in the early 1990s, well before anything called the internet, we had, and still do to some degree, this wonderful device called direct mail. You can be sure that when the net came into reality I put our web address on our direct mail efforts. I was advised by so many “experts” not to do that. Seriously. Isn’t it up to the consumer how they want to buy your product? The same holds true for film, you just have to be in as many places as possible. You want to hear conversations like, “I saw this at the Orpheum” “I watched it on Viewster” and after October “I saw it on the Queen Elizabeth”.
From the global platform of Viewster to the intimate audiences at a state of the art theater like the Chatham Orpheum, this will be a tremendously exciting month for Justice Is Mind.
Day and date.
The Ashton Times 
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