15 Strategies to Box Office Success
(with credit to Vaiaoga-Ioasa’s producing team: Wilhelm Voigt, Nicola Eton, his sister Dinah Ioasa and his mother Vaeani Vaiaoga)
1. Define Success Emotionally
Vaiaoga-Ioasa’s definition was a statement of what he didn’t want, but it was clear and it had that necessary emotional element: If my own people don’t watch this movie and laugh, then I’ve failed.
2. Test yourself
Vaiaoga-Ioasa was weary of the state of indecision so common to those with filmmaking ambitions or, we might say, any ambition. He took making Three Wise Cousins as a personal challenge. After 10 years in the TV world, harbouring a desire all those years to make a movie, he wondered if he still had it in him. His attitude was, “I can’t really say I don’t like filmmaking until I’ve made one”. Thus he set himself the test to see if he really did have the passion, the skill set and more importantly, the ability to finish a feature project.
His previous schooling as a lawyer helped Vaiaoga-Ioasa find the tenacity to deal with the paperwork.
“Law contracts are all about certainty,” he said. “You just have to put in all the possibilities of what could go wrong and what everybody’s responsibilities are.”
Vaiaoga-Ioasa chose his actors from the Mr Lava Lava series on TVNZ’s Fresh, a local Pacific variety show that he worked on as a director and camera operator. While they’d been on TV before – and therefore had proven screen-appeal – they had no idea about acting and playing a character. To remedy this, co-producer Wilhelm Voigt spent two weeks with them in rehearsals and preparing them for their roles.
4. Keep your team lean
Vaiaoga-Ioasa enlisted cast, crew and a producing team who were close friends or family. (His partner and sister were both Associate Producers, and his parents were Unit.) He didn’t want to compromise his vision or feel inhibited by others’ scheduling demands so he kept the team small and was himself the sole investor.
5. Speak English (with a little Samoan)
It suited the story of Three Wise Cousins to have most of it in English, as the lead character doesn’t know how to speak Samoan. But having the film as an English language film – with some parts in Samoan – allowed it to reach a wider audience, speakers of other Polynesian languages and the broader populations of Australia, New Zealand and America.
6. Build your fanbase
Before putting up the trailer Vaiaoga-Ioasa wanted to start building a fan base.
In March 2015, having already shot in Samoa, Vaiaoga-Ioasa brought two of the actors, Vito Vito and Fesui Viliamu, to New Zealand for ADR. He used the opportunity to use their faces (well-known from TV2’s Fresh) to give the public a chance to take photos with them. The pics drove 3,000 Likes on Facebook (now there are 48,000).