Demand for documentaries is greater than ever – but licensing fees are dropping. And filmmakers are learning their lesson. Leaner, meaner docmakers desperate to keep costs down are apparently behind what Marilyn Kynaston, director of international sales at Vancouver distrib Forefront Releasing, says is an emerging trend to ‘lower-budget shows shot on digital, with fewer exteriors, fewer locations. That’s a reality. With licence fees dropping in different territories, producers can’t afford to keep production values up there.’

For distributors, cheaper product is not the only answer – not when savvy distributors can cleverly repurpose product.

Sandra Green of Edmonton-based Great North International, freshly returned from mip-tv, says, ‘My big concern with the market right now is that when channels started up over the last 10 years, I don’t know if broadcasters knew who their demographic was; you could take one property and shop it to six or seven [channels]. But now they are much more focussed on who their audience is and [the channels are] interested in their brand.

‘It is not unusual for us to have only one or two places to take a product. Often the quality is fine, but it doesn’t fit in with the brand image. So competition between the channels has led to a much tighter target. But they’re not competing with each other – they are not having bidding wars.

‘We have an a list and a b list [of broadcasters], and by the time we get to the b list they know they don’t have to be very aggressive about it. We’re selling more than we’ve ever sold before, but the dynamics of the business are changing. We need to have much more property and need to be more targeted when we take on a property. We need to know where we’re going to take it before we sign on. If we don’t think we can place it we don’t take it on.’

Editorial flexibility is key

The flip side of the coin is the case where a project can be fitted into a number of subject areas: ‘Sometimes we’ll get a project that works in more than one strand because it’s more universal, not easily definable.

‘There’s a wonderful product called Lost and Found that goes to the Tokyo Underground, the London Underground and talks with people in the lost and found departments and has all these wonderful segues and stories: like some kid loses a $30,000 violin and it turns up later. It’s a very universal topic – everyone loses things – and it’s very human interest. But programmers have a hard time knowing what to do with it – it doesn’t fit with any of their strands. That’s how tight they’re getting. When things are peripheral you really have to work to get them into the schedule, you have to find a way to make it appropriate to their channel.’

And the secret to this? Flexibility. ‘Producers are making more than one version of the show – for example, one for bbc and one for History, even though it’s the same topic.

‘We did one recently, Shiver, on the science of cold, and we’re looking at a version for National Geographic that’s very much to do with science and a version for Life or Discovery that’s much more people-oriented. Discovery Health wanted a medical angle, so we’re going to take the six-and-a-half hours that we’ve done and let them look them over and pull out segments to do with that and repackage it for three one hours.

‘Producers do that more and more frequently. They have to do different versions for different markets. The whole issue of editorial has to be much more flexible. It used to be ‘Take it or leave it’, now it’s ‘Can they do it this way, can they do it that way?’ ‘

Three distinct markets

Jan Rofekamp, ceo of Films Transit International in Montreal, sees the emergence of three distinct markets. ‘The first market is primetime major channels, the second market relates to the young cable and satellite market that has emerged in the last 10 to 15 years. That market’s become very hungry for documentaries, but hungry only for documentaries that are cheap to make – cooking channels and god knows what channels – that is where the fast, cheap stuff happens. The third market is coming to us through the Internet, but it’s not there yet – it exists as technology but not commerce.

The second market ‘needs a lot of stuff, but the big problem with the second market is that it’s a low-dollar market. I sell my films in the first market and for the first time in history there’s a longer life for that documentary. It’s lower income but a regular longer-term income that didn’t exist five years ago.

‘We’re trying to get it back quicker by offering two years or only a first-year exclusive. Some cable operators only pay for $1,000 an hour – so it’s worth it to me to tell them to wait a little. I can put the film in a file and pull it out later – in a film’s lifetime, two years is nothing.’

The third market, the Internet, is ‘unavoidable,’ says Rofekamp, and only four or five years away.

‘It’ll be the ultimate pay-per-view; you will make your own programming out of massive choices – like a library where you pick out a book, that’s a nice comparison.’

The only unanswered question with the Internet – recouping investment.

‘Someone who makes a film for a million dollars, how is this person going to recoup their investment when each individual sale is $1.29? I’m wondering about the economics of it.

‘The Internet is global and the only ones who can deal with it are the ones who own global rights. Anyone else is not in the picture.’

Stephen Ellis, president of Ellis Releasing in Toronto, also freshly returned from mip, talks of ‘the emergence of the new media as the coming thing – as another means of exploitation that we’re going to have to come to grips with.’

Ellis is in the essentially experimental process of developing a Web presence. ‘We have a conviction that a new kind of programming is going to emerge,’ he says, ‘we can’t just show one-hour documentaries as on tv, and that goes for even when [broadcast quality is as high as television]. We think [the Internet is] going to promote a new kind of content. It’s going to be a lot shorter, certainly it will be more layered. Actually, it’s liberating because we’re such slaves to programming slots; this can open it up to the length the program needs to be.

‘No one really knows what is going to work on the Web, but we know it’s not going to be the standard format.’