By Zak Forsman, Film School Rejects
The other day I saw a discussion on Facebook about whether or not filmmakers should watermark the screeners they send to film festivals. Filmmakers generally seemed to be for it. Festival personnel seemed generally opposed, some citing it as a red flag for the filmmaker’s naiveté – like the people who ask you to sign an NDA before reading their screenplay. In the past, I never felt that obscuring the picture with some text was going to stop the sort of person who was set on pirating my movie, so I didn’t bother with it. Besides, I might argue I had yet to make a movie someone would want to pirate.
A bootlegged spanish-language DVD emerged with the title El Contrabandista that featured images of Tom Sizemore on the cover. Tom Sizemore is not in my movie. (Zak Forsman, Film School Rejects)
However, with my latest feature, Down and Dangerous, we had a genre picture with muscle. Its potential to garner eyeballs was greater than anything we’d produced before. So if it were to appear on torrent sites, I wanted at least to know where it came from. Following the studio’s method of placing those “little dots” on film prints, I added a bit of unique text to a single frame of the movie for every screener we sent out. This was imperceptible to the viewer, but if you knew which frame to look at, you could plainly see the initials for the festival or distributor hiding in the shadows.
By the time we made a deal in September of 2013 for a domestic VOD release, we were already seeing foreign sales to several international distributors through our sales agent. We provided a unique slate of deliverables for each with a unique watermark for who it was going to. In late November, the Scandinavian VOD version began showing up on torrent tracking sites. In late December, an actor from the movie sent me a photo of blu-rays he found in Hong Kong where only VOD rights had been sold.
A bootlegged spanish-language DVD emerged with the title El Contrabandista that featured images of Tom Sizemore on the cover.
Tom Sizemore is not in my movie.
With a looming US/Canada release date still two months away, we decided to keep a lid on all of it. I briefly considered using the piracy to drum up more awareness for the movie, but ultimately decided that it would kill the unbridled enthusiasm our domestic distributor was showing our release.
Tweets and user reviews were showing up on IMDb and our Facebook page from people who could only have seen a pirated version. I was torn between retweeting positive reactions and revealing that it was out there.
In January, a copy of the Turkish-dubbed broadcast was uploaded to YouTube. This version had cut 15 minutes out of the movie to remove nudity, drug use and… a shot of a box of tampons. The movie has been uploaded in its entirety to YouTube about a dozen times now. Most recently, I issued a takedown for a Vietnamese-subtitled version.
Read the full article by Zak Forsman from Film School Rejects.
