Indie FIlm Business Side - Kevin Gieger

Artist and producer Kevin Geiger http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1819623/, who is known for his work on Reign of Fire, Species, and Chicken Little to name a few of his collaborations has become an instructor on the methodology on the business end of feature film. Geiger mentions that organization is extremely important in the development of your company. He mentions how a production company may serve as the whole entity or umbrella company that may be producing the film itself under its own company, usually a Limited Liability Corporation (LLC).

           

This structure allows you to plan your business plan and ready it for a pitch to investors. If you can’t summarize your business model in ten slides, you don’t know what the hell you are doing.” Also, he mentions the need to do research for a feature film in comparing at least five other similar films. Perhaps his greatest point is the need to do the research for your business plan and pitch. Despite his personal injections of his political points of view his videos do explain his business plan concept for feature film quite well.

http://youtu.be/46eZG_uFyA0

Provided by  Ryan Cimino

 

Though Kevin Geiger has not had any active IMDB credits since his debut as a producer in 2009 with “Roads To Home”, Kevin has had a very active career throughout his years in the business. From his work as a computer animator for Species in 1995 to his work as a digital artist on Reign of Fire in 2002, Kevin has had a fruitful work career that has led him to being a CG supervisor for Walt Disney. As an article at Twitchfilm.com states, since leaving Disney several years ago, he co-founded a small independent animation production company called Magic Dumpling (Twitch 2009).

While researching Kevin Geiger and his thoughts on business plans, I came across Entertainment XChange, a site that has Geiger’s four part video lecture on indie film business plans that is embedded on their website. Having watched through the lecture, I was able to understand what it was Geiger was trying to teach his audience and that it is extremely important to have a unified creative plan and business plan when pitching to potential investors (Geiger 2008). Geiger also went on to add that “you need to proceed according to your development activity plan, you don’t want to deviate from that so once you have a plan, execute the plan” (Geiger 2008).

Provided by Robert Jutchenko