5 Essential Elements of a Filmmaker’s Personal Brand.
Last week we outlined why your brand is so important to your career as a filmmaker. This week, we’re going to dive into how you begin to define your brand. Your brand is the cumulative outcome of all the interactions anyone has with you or your company. As such, this list is far from complete, however, these things are quite important when you’re getting down to defining your brand.
1. What Genres you do primarily work in?
If you start working primarily on thrillers, then it can be hard to effectively transition to something like family. Generally, filmmakers and film companies will have certain genres that are heavily associated with their brand, even if that’s not all they work on. An excellent example of this is Blumhouse, which primarily focuses on the thriller and horror genres. After you’ve got more of an established brand, you can begin to expand into other genres, ideally with some level of stylistic relation to the ones you built your brand on.
Your ideal audience is more important than any specific project or genre, but your audience will have a lot to do with your genre.
2. What elements of your style are similar or the same across your projects?
This is probably more important to keep consistent for your brand than genre is. There are certain stylistic elements that remain largely the same across a director or even a high-level producer’s work.
For Stephen Spielberg, there’s a certain wondrous quality that often feels very clean and expensive. For Quinten Tarantino, his films generally have a pretty strong 70s vibe to them, even when they’re set far outside that time frame. For Jerry Bruckheimer, most of his films are bombastic, with lots of special effects and explosions, and often feature a glorified music video in the film itself to boost soundtrack sales.
3. What unifying themes or motifs do your movies have?
Generally, directors have recurring themes and/or motifs that occur throughout their work. Hitchcock had a long-standing fascination with birds, eyeballs, and Freudian Psychology. All of Kevin Smith’s movies seem to take place in the same extended universe and almost always feature Jay and Silent Bob. Quentin Tarantino’s work almost always features lengthy banter that’s largely disconnected from the plot of the film but serves to flesh out the characters and is almost always incredibly entertaining and enlightening.
4. What is your creed? (Mission statement)
Most business books call this a mission statement, but I personally prefer the tact that’s taken by Primal Branding in looking at your mission statement as a creed. A creed is what you live by. It’s why you exist. It’s a deeply personal thing, and it informs every piece of content your company will ever make.
Film companies don’t have these as much, so we’ll look for other examples to illustrate my point. Apple’s mission statement is “Think Different” Google’s mission statement is to “Organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Google used to have a similar sort of tagline that was “Don’t Be Evil,” But they took that down recently. For my other venture ProductionNext, the creed is “You do the Creative Part, we do the rest.” For Guerrilla Rep Media, the creed is to make that I don’t make movies, I help filmmakers MAKE MONEY with theirs.
5. How do you engage with your audience?
As stated at the top of this article, a brand is the culmination of all interactions any potential customer or business partner has with a company or individual. In this day and age, it’s absolutely VITAL that any entrepreneur finds a way to effectively manage their interactions with their community and their customers. For most of us, that will rely heavily on our social media presence. You’ll need a strategy of what content you share when you share it, and how it both provides value to your potential customers and fits within your mission statement.
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