Categories
Truly Free Film

Financing in a Post-Capital Plane: Reflections on Putty Hill’s Kickstarter Campaign

Today’s guest post is from Stephen Holmgren, Putty Hill’s producer.

Last winter, Putty Hill director Matt Porterfield and I met with a small group of friends at Matt’s house for a home-cooked Baltimore dinner. We were there to discuss fundraising ideas for Matt’s pending feature, Metal Gods, which we were determined to shoot over the summer. Matt had been polishing the script for years, and we were having success meeting great teen actors from local auditions. All we needed was some money to shoot and edit the movie.

We were open to working with production companies and investors on a variety of levels– wanting more than anything just to have something completed by our self-imposed September deadline. We had various budget levels, including a best case, worst case, and disaster scenario. We knew that, despite positive industry responses, the reality was that if this movie was going to happen it would most likely have to come from local financial support. We brainstormed a long list of ideas, knowing we needed to reach outside of friends and family, to people who supported the arts. At this point, Kickstarter was in its infancy and
not on our radar.

Categories
Truly Free Film

IndieGoGo Acquires Distribber: Filmmakers Win!

We just got this press release from IndieGoGo and it sounds like a great thing.  Users will now have access to the iTunes, Amazon, and Netflix distribution platform.  Exciting development indeed.

The acquisition enables a full range of project execution tools for IndieGoGo members.

Berkeley, California, March 15, 2009 – IndieGoGo (www.indiegogo.com), a fundraising platform, announced its acquisition of Distribber (www.distribber.com), a digital distribution service. This acquisition enables IndieGoGo to offer clients a full range of tools for project execution – from funding to distribution.

Categories
Truly Free Film

You Too Can Have Cassavettes’ Distrib Work For You

It was a busy week. Jeff Lipsky, distributor turned filmmaker, has returned to his distro roots and wants to work with you! I got an email from him and have been meaning to post but my To Do List is a bit unruly. I need an extra hand. Now I was beaten to the punch, but better late than never.
Jeff’s email states:

Categories
Bowl Of Noses

Special Effects: Cycles

“No teddy bears were harmed in making this video”.

So you say you want to be a special effects designer, eh?  Here’s a neat display of what can be done with Adobe After Effects.

Things get a little weird.  Which is how we like them here.

Categories
Bowl Of Noses

I Could Watch Rube Goldberg Devices All Day

Sure it’s been everywhere, but we have a nose for it too.

Categories
Issues and Actions Truly Free Film

Battelle On iPad as Metaphor For All That’s Wrong With Media Distribution

I got hipped to this by MovieCityNews.  I had not read John Battelle before, but in his broadside he sums up what he doesn’t like about the iPad and he sums up our current situation pretty damn well:

Media traditionally has gained its profits by owning distribution. Cable carriage, network airwaves, newsstand distribution and printing presses: all very expensive, so once you employ enough capital to gain them, it’s damn hard to get knocked out.

The web changed all that and promised that economics in the media business would be driven by content and intent: the best content will win, driven by the declared intent of consumers who find it and share it. Search+Social was the biggest wave to hit media since the printing press. And the open technology to make better and better experiences has been on a ten year tear: blogging software, Flash, Ajax, HTML 5, Android, and more and more coming.

Read the rest of the article here.  I look forward to reading more of him in the days ahead.

We are in a battle where the hope and promise offered by a free and open internet is challenged by the traditional drive for total control by excessive capital.

Categories
Bowl Of Noses

Awesome Legos: Crawling World

This may well be the greatest build ever! Or at least of the week… But the fact that it is invented and not based on anything else scores real points in our bowl. Check out the full Flickr file here.

You tell us: what’s better, Crawling World, or one of the 17 Top Lego Creations Of All Time.