Tag: Documentaries

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Truly Free Film

Walk Off the Land After the Harvest

by Andrew Einspruch

Filmmaker Andrew Einspruch recently attended the Australian International Documentary Conference and wrote a series of articles for the event, which he’s graciously allowed us to reprint here. These articles originally appeared in Screen Hub, the daily online newspaper for Australian film and television professionals.

A discussion of ethics in documentary making is a bi-annual tradition at the Australian International Documentary Conference. Screen Hub’s Andrew Einspruch reports on the session chaired by Screen Hub Editor, David Tiley.

Documentary is a hands-on affair. The filmmaker goes into a situation, observes, harvests the story, then moves on. In some cases, like a constructed reality show, participants are put in situations that cause them to undergo a change – or not. In any case, people’s lives are affected, for good or ill. And the documentary maker is faces with responsibilities both before and after their work goes to air.

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Truly Free Film

Long Tail, Teaching Old Docs New Tricks

by Andrew Einspruch

Filmmaker Andrew Einspruch recently attended the Australian International Documentary Conference and wrote a series of articles for the event, which he’s graciously allowed us to reprint here. These articles originally appeared in Screen Hub, the daily online newspaper for Australian film and television professionals.

Screen Australia data showing an overall improvement in the documentary sector was shown at more than one session at this year’s Australian International Documentary Conference. Since the Producer Offset was introduced in 2007, production budgets and hours are up.

That’s good.

For some.

According to Sue Maslin, currently an Investment/Development Manager with Screen Australia, and a long-time producer with her company Film Art Media, the problem is that these improvements are not evenly distributed. That’s because the trend is decidedly toward series over one-offs, and series heavily favour the larger, more established players.

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Truly Free Film

Ye Olde Complete Guide to Formats

by Andrew Einspruch

Filmmaker Andrew Einspruch recently attended the Australian International Documentary Conference and wrote a series of articles for the event, which he’s graciously allowed us to reprint here. These articles originally appeared in Screen Hub, the daily online newspaper for Australian film and television professionals.

You’d already know that formats are all over your TV screen. From Big Brotherto Who Wants to Be Millionaire to Go Back to Where You Came From, formats (shows with “a framework which contains several clearly described elements that are combined in a unique way”) are TV mainstays. What you might not know is that worldwide in 2009, formats generated production worth € 9.3 billion (that’s with a “b”), or $11.8 billion. And that amount would only have gone up since then.

Patty Geneste knows a thing or two about formats. Her company, Absolutely Independent, has won several international awards for the formats it represents, and she sits on the board of the Format Recognition and Protection Association (FRAPA). So she brought lots of expertise to her AIDC session on dealmaking.

The first formats were gameshows, like Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy. Next came light entertainment, like You Bet or Honeymoon Quiz. Today, formats cover a wide range of styles, from factual entertainment to scripted or constructed reality, from observational documentary to comedy drama. Shows that are formats are often not obviously so. The drama Homeland, for example, was an Israeli format sold into the US.

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Truly Free Film

Making Money Under the Education Kanopy

by Andrew Einspruch

Filmmaker Andrew Einspruch recently attended the Australian International Documentary Conference and wrote a series of articles for the event, which he’s graciously allowed us to reprint here. These articles originally appeared in Screen Hub, the daily online newspaper for Australian film and television professionals.

The heretical statement came from Andrew Pike, MD of Ronin Films during a session called “Education Rights – Ensuring Profitability & Sustainability”. At the Australian International Documentary conference, dedicated primarily to making docos for television, Pike compared making TV doc to an extreme sport. “Like whitewater rafting, it is full of pitfalls. It is full of people shouting opinions at you about which direction you should go and how you should manage your affairs. It’s an area with a high adrenalin rush, and a lot of exhilaration. There’s high emotion when you get a pre-sale, and high emotion, despair, and doom when you get knocked back.”

By contrast, Pike called the education market the “unglamourous area of the film industry,” devoid of red carpets, billboards, bright lights, or posters with your name plastered all of them. “It is an area for worker bees,” he said. But worker bees can turn a profit.

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Truly Free Film

Keeping the Pirates at Bay

by Andrew Einspruch

Filmmaker Andrew Einspruch recently attended the Australian International Documentary Conference and wrote a series of articles for the event, which he’s graciously allowed us to reprint here. These articles originally appeared in Screen Hub, the daily online newspaper for Australian film and television professionals.

It comes down to money.

Ultimately, money is the reason most people steal (or “pirate”, “borrow”, “find”, “preview” – call it what you will) digital content, although other factors can come into it, like not wanting to wait for something to become available legally.

And money is the reason there is a problem with those people who are doing it, since it represents potential lost revenue to the content creator. “Piracy takes distribution out of your hands,” said Lori Flekser, from the Motion Picture Distributors Association of Australia. “You can’t control how you distribute it or how you monetise it. That is the worst thing about piracy to me.”

Flekser cited research from the Intellectual Property Awareness Foundation, who anonymously surveyed 16,000 people over 18, saying the the myth that “everybody does it” is just not true. While the survey missed the crucial under-18‘s demographic, it still showed that only 73% of those surveyed said they had pirated material. Of the 27% who do pirate, the vast majority (86%) said they do it because it is free. The bad news is that of those who regularly pirate, they would still do it even if a paid option were easily available.

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Truly Free Film

Digital Distribution, a Complex Way to Make Money

by Andrew Einspruch

Filmmaker Andrew Einspruch recently attended the Australian International Documentary Conference and wrote a series of articles for the event, which he’s graciously allowed us to reprint here. These articles originally appeared in Screen Hub, the daily online newspaper for Australian film and television professionals.

Tim Sparke, CEO of Mercury Media International, subtitled his talk Digital Distribution in a Traditional Market at this year’s AIDC with “Only for the Brave?” It is certainly a brave new world for filmmakers, with distribution possibilities popping up like mushrooms, and with a few dominant players emerging in certain markets. This is the context within in which your distribution decisions must now be made.

“The digital market can no longer be ignored,” said Sparke. “Over the past two years, those distributors who have schooled themselves on the complexities of the market, balancing digital against traditional and experimenting with creative windowing, have seen good returns.”

So how do you come to grips with that complexity?

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Truly Free Film

Ancillary Rights, The Devil is in the Lawyer

by Andrew Einspruch

Filmmaker Andrew Einspruch recently attended the Australian International Documentary Conference and wrote a series of articles for the event, which he’s graciously allowed us to reprint here. These articles originally appeared in Screen Hub, the daily online newspaper for Australian film and television professionals.

“You learn the most when you have a success,” said Marcus Gillezeau of Firelight Productions. That’s because you find out what exactly you signed away and what you held onto in your contracts back in the beginning. He also said that there are only two times that people read their contracts – when something fails (so they can get out of it) or when something does well (so they can figure out how to get some of the money).

Gillezeau should know. His company is riding the success of Storm Surfers 3D, a feature film that follows on from their previous Storm Surfers TV series. As the award statues cluster on the mantle, more and more people want to get in on the action. He has become something of a self-made expert on ancillary rights, and shared some of that knowledge in a session at this year’s Australian International Documentary Conference.

Gillezeau started by putting this clause up on the screen:

All rights in all media now known or that may be invented in the future in all territories including the universe… and it’s territories and colonies… in-perpetuity.

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