Scott McMahon of Filmtrooper.com joins Subscriber Nation to talk about monetizing feature films, making videos with basic gear and creating video content for your audience.

Film Trooper is designed to help filmmakers become entrepreneurs.

How do you monetize a feature film? How do you make and sell a product online and where does your film fit into that?

Your film is an advertisement that you’re using to sell something more valuable. You don’t need to sell to everybody – you only need to sell to a small group of people that will buy it.

How did Scott get into filmmaking?

He went to film school, made a lot of bad short films, but created one that was decent enough to get hired at Sony PlayStation. He was there for 12 years and ran their cinematic department.

But there’s always been that need to make a feature film himself and he really wanted to figure out how to make something with just the gear that we own in our backpack. And so he made his film, The Cube, for $500 with no crew.

What inspired Scott to start Film Trooper?

He started wondering about what he can do with his film. This gave birth to Film Trooper, which became a platform where he can share his experience in monetizing films – what works, what doesn’t work.

Learning from a mistake.

It was when he was creating The Cube – he made it all selfishly. He just felt like he had to make something and push it out to the world and you’re only going to get so much reception back from that.

Now he’s doing everything differently and in the right way, taking his time and understanding what the audience really wants. His biggest takeaway from this experience is that filmmakers serve their audience. There’s very little room for an artist to be so self-absorbed and selfish.

Marketing.

When you push content out without thinking about what your audience wants, that’s push marketing, as opposed to pull marketing, which is “What audience would I really love to make something for?”

One piece of equipment you can’t live without.

His iPhone. You can record audio, shoot a video, take photos, create a media empire with this piece of magical device.

How to find Scott:

Filmtrooper.com

Freegearguide.com

Thecubemovie.com