Former Raintree Pictures chief Daniel Yun is joining forces with Festive Films’ Low Yuen Ping and former Salon Films executive John Sim to launch a Singapore-based outfit, Home Run Pictures, with a focus on executive producing and international sales.
Home Run aims to package and executive produce projects in the $5-15m range, combining soft money with financial institutions and other private investors. The company will have a special focus on China, as Asia’s fastest-growing market, but also look beyond towards the entire region as a target market and source of projects and talent.
“At Homerun Pictures, we don’t look at movies as local or international. The nature of movies is borderless. We will produce movies with Asia as our domestic market,” said Yun.
One of the company’s core aims is to raise funds for the development of projects – a process that Yun says is often under-funded in Singapore. It plans to raise a three-year matching fund for development with China’s Hengdian World Studios and is looking to raise a similar fund out of Australia.
The company is also in the final stages of talks about a merger with local distributor Festive Films, after which it will launch an international sales arm to handle its own and third-party projects. At present, Singapore does not have any international sales agents, although local projects are represented at markets and festivals under the umbrella of Singapore’s Media Development Authority (MDA).
On the soft money side, Home Run plans to work closely with the MDA and the Singapore Film Commission (SFC).
“As executive producers, we hope to actually serve as an interface between the MDA and local production houses and also between MDA and some international companies,” Yun said.
Yun added that will start discussing collaboration plans with Asian companies from this week and hopes to announce the company’s debut slate in the last quarter of 2009. Locally he is in talks for collaborations with Eric Khoo’s Zhao Wei Films, Kelvin Tong’s Boku Films and his former employer MediaCorp Raintree Pictures.
Yu produced more than 30 movies during his 11-year tenure at Raintree, owned by government broadcaster MediaCorp, including co-productions such as The Eye and The Eye 2, Turn Left, Turn Right, Infernal Affairs 2 and Painted Skin.
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