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Come Fly with Afterburner Films
February 23, 2007

With a history in marketing such movies as The Fast and the Furious, The Bourne Identity and American Pie though his 10-year-old film marketing company, Panopoly, Dave Riggs felt that he had a pretty good idea on how to reach the 18-24-year-old demo with a genre film, particularly a low-budget genre film.

Last year, Riggs took his knowledge and put it to work with the creation of Afterburner Films Inc. and the company’s first film, an “experiment” entitled Succubus: Hellbent. Riggs executive produced the sexy supernatural thriller (which was budgeted at approximately $1 million) and then tapped his own film marketing expertise to get the word on the film out to the public. Attention has been garnered with exposure to the 18-24 demo via pages and videos on MySpace and Youtube, a snazzy homepage (www.succubushellbent.com) with a cool interactive game, text message and mass email campaigns, a sweepstakes competition offering winners a date with leading lady Natalie Denise Sperl or a flight in a jet, and even a mobile marketingcampaign through a www.HollywoodMobileTV.com, a mobile content marketing company with which Riggs is partnered. Last year, Riggs sold the film to Universal, where it has been scheduled for DVD release on April 17.

“Studios have expressed interest in this type of content, but they have a hard time making inexpensive product and selling it profitably,” said Riggs. “They can’t create it and market it in their infrastructure as well as we can.”

Riggs’ premiere “experiment” has since led to four more films on the Afterburner slate. Two of the upcoming titles include Fast Glass, which Riggs describes as “The Fast and the Furious with airplanes” and Scareport, which is about a group of teens being stalked by a killer while stranded at an airport. The pair will go into production this spring.

Why all the planes? Well, that’s all courtesy of Riggs’ aerospace company Mach 1 Aviation (www.mach1aviation.com). With Mach 1, Riggs is able to inject some serious production values into Afterburner Films projects (an afterburner, incidentally, is a device used to augment the thrust of a jet engine by burning additional fuel).

We’re reverse engineering these films,” said Riggs. “We have the planes and we’re using the aviation company. You could say we’re basing the film stories on what we’ve got.”

Posted by Laurence Lerman on February 23, 2007 | Comments (0)