Tag: FH2A

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Truly Free Film

Know Your Digital Rights

I was on another fun panel yesterday at the Woodstock Film Festival.  All of these discussions are part of the ongoing conversation on the future prospects for both Indie and Truly Free film.  There’s a lot more that I can write about that panel, but one thing I felt was the filmmakers’ position getting stronger.

John Sloss, the man and the legend, and Ryan Werner of IFC Films were among the panel’s participants.  IFC Films is certainly the leader in terms of number of films that they are putting up on VOD, and John, among many other things,  probably sells more films to them than anyone else.  Sloss’s Cinetic Digital Rights Management initiative is also probably the leading aggregator of digital rights for feature films.
This whole arena is new for everyone and it all can easily be looked at as one big experiment for the time being.  The market is being created as I type and as you read.  The model is not yet set by any means.  Yet Cinetic and IFC are arguably the market leaders of the moment.  That’s why I was so heartened by what I heard them claim they were open to — something that could truly be a great step towards creator empowerment and ultimately also towards audience access.
Neither company, to my knowledge and according to what was said on the panel, currently does anything to provide the content generator/creator/filmmaker with access to any of the data that their work generates.  I hope that’s now going to change, and what was said on that panel makes me believe it could.
Matt Dentler, Cinetic’s Digi-maven, has expressed that Cinetic’s DRM initiative is all about transparency for the filmmaker.  John Sloss backed that on the panel by saying that he thought it made sense that future contracts include a provision mandating that buyers provide the digital data to the filmmakers.  Not that Cinetic does that yet for its clients, but it can, and as John said, it will.  Ryan Werner also replied to an earlier question that he felt that such information could be provided to the filmmakers if they asked for it (even if they did not contract for it).
Now its up to the filmmakers to demand that their lawyers craft such language.  What will that be?  What is the information we need?  And how can we make sure that we are able to share it with each other?  It would be great if an industry leader on the legal side really stepped up and showed their commitment to filmmakers’ rights and drafted something that could become industry standard.  It would be great if we could link to it now!  Who’s going to help?
If you are licensing your film for next to nothing, if you have decided to split your revenue with your sales agent, shouldn’t you at the very least get the information on who your audience is, where they are located, when they are watching or purchasing, whatever.  If you, the filmmaker, feel forced to make this kind of deal, shouldn’t you at the very least be getting the data your work generates?  As filmmakers, not only should you be asking for language from your lawyer, but demanding that your licensor, your distributor provide this.  Do it and according to the leaders on the panel yesterday, they will listen and provide.  I hope it is so.
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Truly Free Film

The Effect Of The Vanishing Film Critics

This is an earlier post from Let’s Make Better Films.  I started that blog to discuss the films and filmmaking process.  Sometimes we all just feel like we want to bury our head and avoid the biz altogether.  I started TFF to help build and rebuild the infrastructure to support those better films.

We started Hammer To Nail because we found it hard to get go analysis of what Truly Free films that were out there were truly worth watching. The mainstream critics had stopped covering the smaller films.

Ad Age is now running an article on the effect of all the firings of the established critics on the specialized film business. The loss of established voices has brought a serious drop at the box office.

“It’s the consistent relationship [with a critic] that gets people to go to these movies,” said Mr. Bernard. “[Editors] felt they should get critics that connect to that younger audience that’s getting its news online, but they’re not looking at how the box office is affected when the critic changes.”

Of course, the loss of these critics had no effect on the revenues of all the interesting and great films that weren’t getting the theaters or coverage in the first place. For those films, just go to Hammer To Nail.

For a discussion on the state of film criticism, check out Greencine’s podcast here. 
And to keep a vast and diversified culture alive, vote with your dollars, and go out to see a movie today. Seriously. We will lose it otherwise.

There’s a great new program in NYC that bumps the film experience up a notch with direct contact with the filmmakers and a post screening celebration. It also confronts head-on the over emphasis the exhibition biz puts on the first weekend revenues.

Credit the IFP and Michelle Byrd with putting their money where their mouth is an truly supporting both Independent and Truly Free films with their new First Weekend series (all done without corporate backing — c’mon you sponsors, follow suit!). Read about it here.

And guess what their inaugural film is? BALLAST! Did I tell you how much I admire this film? How great it is? How much I like it? I think I have. Go see it.

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Truly Free Film

Building A Truly Free Film Culture

Thanks to all the great response I got from my Keynote Speech at Film Independent last weekend, I’ve started this blog to try to lay out some of the work that can be done to build the Truly Free Film Culture that I ranted about.

I will also try to cover some of the issues that are effecting the emerging new paradigm.  Let me know if you want to help out.  You know where to find me.  You can certainly start by commenting to the upcoming posts and subscribing to this blog’s feed.  Stay tuned…