Change is Good

Out Of Obscurity was set up as a community of partners in the movie business, focused on producing great movies, accessing finance for good projects and providing an innovative opportunity for investors around the world. That was before any of it was possible via online collaboration and the democratisation of film financing. So then social networking came along, all manner of financial institutions became involved in movie financing and our friends at Studio Beyond are now doing a great job of rolling out their international film-makers’ community featuring many of the elements we originally built into OOO. Practice catches up with inspiration. Our original vision of an online community is out there building itself and we’re happy to be part of it all. We’re now a movie company with an innovative funding structure that can work with people all over the world, and that’s where we want to be.

Nowadays right from the top down movies are being financed with many or all of the stakeholders taking a share of the risk and reward. Studios are using the opportunity to lower their talent costs, probably quite rightly so, and the whole playing field of film finance is constantly changing. Indie producers have always been the most creative in devising new ways to get their movies made, and now innovation and collaboration are the watch-words right across the board. We designed the Movie Portfolio Fund as a diversified financial structure to co-finance slates of movies, giving investors risk-reduced access to a novel asset class. We also saw it as a gateway to financing and producing our own movies. Partnering with a group of major Hollywood producers put us on the right track and we’ve helped to form a forthcoming Studio production company, with whom we will produce our own movies – starting with our first feature, The Diamond Runners.

The whole playing field of movie revenue opportunities is also changing, viz Variety’s conference on changing opportunities via technology. We’ve seen a recent wave of movie financing coming out of the Middle East and elsewhere: we like the advent of international financing input. OOO itself is currently in discussions to co-manage a film fund in China, as well as working with new fund partners in Europe the Middle East, Asia and Australia to tap into people’s desire to be a part of the lucrative Hollywood dream. It’s all changing for the good.

The Out Of Obscurity team