It’s been a while since our last Priced Out update, and a lot has happened.
Priced Out DVDs have been authored, shipped and orders are being fulfilled. The process took much longer than expected because Cornelius insisted on doing the whole thing himself (to save money). We did save money, but the authoring process using an edition of Adobe Encore (the program is no longer supported by Adobe) took over a month to do after all the glitches were ironed out. The product is a very lovely quality DVD. It includes menus, chapters, closed captions, Priced Out with filmmaker commentary and our first film, NorthEast Passage, with its menus and chapters. The production owes a lot to our friends at NW Documentary who put up with Cornelius camping out in their office for what seemed like all of the spring.
These DVDs are for the institutional and educational market only at this point. These DVDs run $120 or more. So, these DVDs are mostly for schools and a handful of folks like Kickstarter supporters, limited pre-sales, and superfans.
Filmmakers distributed through a process called “windowing” in which increasingly larger audiences are exposed to the film. Classic windows are festivals, theatrical, broadcast, educational, digital (AKA Netflix), and VOD (aka iTunes, Amazon, etc.). While the industry is changing very quickly the educational market is still our best way to make back some of the money that went into the film. We are talking with distributors. Hopefully, we’ll have the movie broadly available on Amazon, etc., by the end of next year or sooner.
Speaking of distribution, Priced Out was accepted into this August’s Social World Film Festival’s Young Film Market in Naples Italy. It’s our first international exposure. A film market is a non-competitive showcase of films where potential distributors can see and option films, just like a festival but without the glamor. We’ll take it! It looks like a very exciting event, and maybe next time we’ll have the budget to send Cornelius out there to soak up all the Euroglitz.
Did you catch the PBS Newshour feature on Portland’s Right to Return policy? The policy is designed to provide additional housing assistance to African Americans who were involuntarily displaced by gentrification in Albina.
The show featured a lot of great folks who were also involved in the Priced Out production, including Maxine Fitzpatrick of Portland Community Reinvestment Initiative. That group is working on putting out 1,000 new affordable homes in Albina over the next ten years.
Cornelius gets a cameo in this excellent report. Check it out. It’s not the Amalfi Coast, but we’re all happy he’s getting the message out there.
Please follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and our YouTube Channel for regular news and updates about gentrification and affordable housing in Portland and other cities.