Indie Film Distribution

Palm tree Entertainment kicks off the year this week with a showcase screening at the Empire Cinema Leicester Square with Robbie Moffat's film called 'Got to Run' staring newcomer Suzanne Kendall. It is hoped that the film will go into 5 Empire cinemas in the London area in March 2011. This is part of a distribution campaign to work with the Empire to screen as many of the companies films there throughout the year. Palm Tree Entertainment spent last year with its well known Pinewood Studios based film Editor Simon Harris developing the technology to make the Digital Cinema hard drive Packages ( known as DCP's) which is a digital format that replaces the old analog,expensive 35mm screening prints. It took all of last year to refine the process and this week sees the drive or digital print being tested in a real Cinema. Now having tackled the technolgy Palm Tree Entertainnment can make their own digital prints and offer them directly to cinema chains. Im excited that we may be the only independent film Producers doing this in the UK and its not the first time we have been first to do something. Way back in the late 1990's we were testing out the first digital cameras then by Panasonic.

However despite this postive breakthrough the recent news about closing down of the HMV shops (unrelated to Palm Tree small operations) is worrying for the film industry. HMV announced they be loosing 60 shops in their Waterstones related sites after failing to meet their Christmas targets when they lost 60 million in the December month. Such events show that the DVD market is easily hit by factors like bad weather but more realistically it is to do with the proliferation of unsystematic download sites that vary between being pirates to the badly advertised or little known legal sites that are not used well, by the public, who are not yet in the habit of downloading a movie for purchase.

You can find a legal streaming of several of Palm Tree Entertainments films and others on the LA based site called http://www.inmoo.com which was set up by the actor and film director David Arquette. It started well in August and is gathering momentum to stream independent films from many countries. The revenue is small only being advert based and not via download purchases. Unfortunately many of these sites are few and far between and many of the bigger sites fail to monetise the subscriptions back to the film makers. The picture is bleak unless producers and the bigger distributors can get to grips with the download machinery and train the consumers to pay for the product. This year may see the end of the DVD disk market as a supply chain into high street retails shops unless governments reinvigorate this market. In the UK the demise of Woolworth chain was never fully understood as causing a sumani in DVD distribution.

So the film industry, the pundits and the politicians need to find ways of regenerating the film industry and putting back distribution to the makers somehow. The old Eadie Levie helped when it took around 10p from each cinema ticket and gave it back to film production. The most famous of these films were the Carry On Films which though derided at the time have now become classic British comedies.

France has for years provide the cinema ticket levie which has arguably made it the most successful non English language film industry in the world. Here in the UK we need to really think our way out of the box to get indigenous film back on track and generating incomes.

In the meantime Happy New Year for 2011. Please see that the DVD Red Rose our film from Palm Tree Entertainment about Robert Burns is available on Amazon at the link here. For the Burns night season. I see they have not uploaded our images correctly but maybe they will get round to it. Here's hoping and maybe you can download the movie too. Worth trying to see what happens???!!???

Red Rose