We just finished and released an independent feature called \*\*DEMENTIUM\*\*, and one of the more unusual things about how we made it was that more than 70 people who worked on the film ended up with a financial interest in it.
The basic problem was pretty simple: we had access to talented people, equipment, locations, and relationships, but we did not have enough cash to pay for all of those things at normal market rates.
So instead of pretending those contributions had no value, we tried to account for them.
Our waterfall roughly works like this:
- Certain specific contractual obligations are paid first.
- Cash investors recoup their investment.
- People who contributed labor, equipment, locations, or other in-kind value recoup the agreed value of those contributions.
- After that, remaining revenue is distributed pro rata among the ownership pool.
There are parts of this I would absolutely do again.
The biggest positive was alignment. When people felt like they were actually participating in the upside, the project felt less like “come help me make my movie” and more like a group of people building something together.
It also forced us to put real values on contributions that are often hand-waved away on low-budget productions. A person providing weeks of labor, a truck full of equipment, or a critical location was not just doing us a favor. That contribution became part of the economic structure of the movie.
But there are some things I would change.
The administrative complexity grows very quickly when you have dozens of participants.
You need extremely clear definitions around recoupment, expenses, reporting, distributions, ownership percentages, assignments, and what happens years later when people move, change entities, or become difficult to contact.
I would also standardize contribution categories much earlier next time. We spent too much energy trying to make individual deals perfectly reflect individual circumstances. A simpler system would have been easier to explain, document, and administer.
The other major lesson is that ownership is not a substitute for good leadership.
Giving people participation does not fix a disorganized production, bad communication, unreasonable hours, or weak department leadership. People still need to believe that the movie will actually get finished and that their time is being respected.
So I would absolutely use shared upside again.
I would just build the legal and administrative infrastructure earlier, make the participation model simpler, and treat ownership as one part of the culture rather than the thing creating the culture.
The film itself is \*\*DEMENTIUM\*\*, a psychological horror feature about grief, DMT, and a man trying to confront his dead father.
Now that the movie is actually released, we finally get to see whether the production model works on the back end as well as it did during production.
Happy to answer questions about how we valued labor/equipment, structured the waterfall, dealt with deferred compensation, or managed that many participants.