Promotional Materials Required to Market Your Movie
If you are a filmmaker with a completed film, and you would like us to act as your agent to
help you find distribution for your movie, you will need to provide us with some
promotional materials. Remember your film will be competing for attention with
thousands of other movies. You need quality promotional materials to represent your movie. Also see the Movie Sales FAQ.
Trailer
The trailer should be short 2 minutes or less. The trailer should grab the
viewer's attention immediately with something dramatic, drop to a slower pace to
review some highlights and then end with a bang. Do not try to tell the whole story of the movie.
Leave them wanting more. We will need a copy of the trailer in digital format such as uncompressed
Quicktime on a DATA DVD or harddrive. (Please no proprietary Mac codexes.) We can also accept trailers on DVCAM tape.
Sell Sheets
A movie sell sheet (sometimes called a "one sheet") is typically 8 1/2 x 11 inches on 80+ lb glossy stock.
The front should resemble a movie poster and should include your "key art" (the photos or graphics you want
to represent your movie). The front should be full color. The artwork needs to be dramatic enough that it
will attract people to it from 20 feet away at that size. (Stick it on the wall and stand back 20 feet
to test it.) The back can be color or black and white. On the back you should include a movie still or two, a brief synopsis,
quotes from reviews and awards won, and contact information. (Please include your sales agent's (That's us.)
contact information, too.) We will need 50-100 of these. Please do not print them on your color printer. If
you need help finding a designer or printer, please let us know. We have some contacts. (While large
size posters are nice to have, we don't always have the space to display them at the market. Postcards,
half sheets, and other odd-sized promotional handouts are not really useful.) When you are designing
the one sheet or key art please keep copies of the artwork and text elements separate either as
separate files or as a layered Photoshop file, and provide us with a copy of those files on CD. Some
foreign distributors will also want to use those files for foreign distribution.
Screeners
We produce DVD-R screeners for distributors on demand. We will duplucate the DVD that you provide to us. Your screener DVD should be in 16x9 ANAMORPHIC. We prefer that the DVD not have excessive
watermarking. If you insist on watermarking do not make it too intrusive. (Watermarking does not stop pirates but it is irritating to people trying to evaluate your movie.)
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Production Stills
These are color still photographs taken of scenes in the movie. They are primarily used for
promotion in trade magazines and other media. They can be taken during shooting or rehearsals,
or they can be posed. They should not be screen captures. They should not be taken with a
disposable camera. The most cost effective way of getting such stills is to borrow or purchase
a good digital camera (not a webcam or phone camera), take hundreds of photos, and then pick the
best. They should not be "behind the scenes" picture showing the crew. They do need to be
compelling. Since we usually e-mail the stills to the trade magazines, we prefer them to be in
digital form (tif, jpg, psd). You can send them to us on CD-R.
Movie Master
We also need a 16x9 master of your movie and both the full mixed soundtrack and the Music & Effects soundtrack. A 5.1 surround mix and separate music stems are even better.
Inferno Motion Pictures is a registered trade name of Inferno Film Productions, LLC
