This is my recent FERA Keynote speech (London, UK BFI South Bank,September 27, 2013 145PM):
Children love playing “The Opposite Game” where “yes” means “no”, and “no” means “yes”. Politicians seem to love to play that game too…
This backwards world has infected many of our cultural fields,taking hold as an everyday concept reflected in our every action. In comics, it is known as the “Bizarro” World, a common plot scenario where our strength becomes our weakness. That is of course a fictional conceit, but in the world of cinema, we all now too truly inhabit a similar land of opposites, where what we say we love to do is not what we do at all.
When considering how to apply business concepts like economies of scale to Independent film, in the case of production we have to reorganize our thought process a little. In this post, we start by treating a small group of Indie filmmakers as a story producing company with each member having both objective story telling capital (skillset, equipment, etc.) and subjective story-telling capital (interest in project, loyalty, emotional connection to material). The more story-telling capital that can be attained through cooperation, the more a group can benefit from production Indieconomies of scale.