About us

The Film Finance Handbook and FundYourFilm.com was created by filmmakers and film professionals. It began at the very end of 1999 as an online guide to film funding on Netribution.co.uk.

That site was largely driven by the question of how to fund a film, and how the Internet can help independent filmmakers in the new digital world. From the start, Netribution.co.uk contained a free film funding section, partly based on Chris Chandler's excellent Lowdown guide for the BFI. It gradually got expanded - Stephen Salter updated it considerably - and Focal Press offered a book deal. In the end, after Netribution ran out of money and shut down in 2002, so we decided to self publish it with Shooting People, who funded and promoted the first edition - Get Your Film Funded - covering the UK ('the banana book'). In 2005 the book returned in partnership with Adam P Davies under Netribution and was updated a third time in 2007 as a global edition covering over 50 countries, in partnership with him, alongside writer James MacGregor, and dozens of lawyers and writers around the world, with info on 50 regions.

As well as the data and theory element, the last edition also looked into emerging models, identifying the promise of crowdfunding, which had only been used for a few short films and one feature at that point.

Since 2007, Netribution moved into a series of public funded R&D projects across film and technology. Firstly came Living Cinema (Tech Stragey Board) looking at pop-up cinema, alternative screenings and reactive visuals; then Valid.ac (Tech Strategy Board, on hold) looking at metadata and decentralised digital rights licensing; then BOP (Creative Scotland), looking at cinema-on-demand, second screen and playlisting. Netribution was tech partner and consultant on Scottish Documentary Institute's 2-year Virtuous Circle project, looking at audience engagement, CRM's and the vertically integrated 'micro-major' – and most recently the Open Video Technology project, funded by the Interledger Foundation.