Ferrari has a car of the future: the Monza. It’s a car but you operate like you operate a computer. You tell it to do something, say go 243 miles per hour, and it does the rest.
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Cool Cars #2: Ferrari Monza
Month: November 2008
Check it all out here.
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Ivan’s Cool Contraption
Bowlers know we have a nose for Goldbergian complexity. THE WAY THINGS WORK will forever remain our our list of Required Viewing. We also endorse “home-made” and “swede-ing” amongst all nose-wearers. We gave a Golden Honker today to Ivan in Austin for his embrace of all this goodness on 11/9/08.
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Aggregate NOW!!
I was listening to Scott Kirsner‘s podcast from Futures Of Entertainment 3 Conference on Digital Distribution recently, and heard Jim Flynn of EZTakes say they currently don’t charge clients to digitize and upload their content — that is clients that provide twenty or more titles. Since the two approved indie aggregators for iTunes (New Video & Docurama) evidently charge $500/title, EZTakes is looking like a sweet sweet deal.
This gives every Truly Free Filmmaker out on the festival circuit the mandate to aggregate on their own: you have got to find the other 19 filmmakers you want to keep company with AND YOU HAVE TO FIND THEM NOW. There’s got to be some young smart producer out there who wants to curry favor with 20 good filmmakers, right? If I was such a filmmaker I would definitely pay a cut of my revenue to whomever pulled such a feat together.
Maybe saving $500 is not enough of an incentive for you, or even getting your film up on the internet for digital download to own is still not enough of an incentive. All I can say is the reasons to keep good company, and as much of it as you can, will continue to multiply. I think at every festival the Truly Free Filmmakers need to organize their own summits and band together to maximize future opportunities for their films — be it building their own traveling festival, sharing theatrical booking tips, accessing download sites, or whatever: the filmakers united, will never be defeated. The others on the other hand…
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Pixar’s UP
Where were we? How’d we miss that this was Pixar’s next? And no robot? No cute creature? A grumpy old man?! I guess it’s clear we didn’t go to ComicCon. Still it looks pretty neat.
Here’s the description we found:
Carl Fredricksen spent his entire life dreaming of exploring the globe and experiencing life to its fullest. But at age 78, life seems to have passed him by, until a twist of fate (and a persistent 8-year-old Wilderness Explorer named Russell) gives him a new lease on life. UP takes audiences on a journey where the unlikely pair encounter wild terrain, unexpected villains and jungle creatures.
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What Scott Learned
Scott Macauley interviewed Scott Kirsner for Filmmaker Mag Blog about Kirsner’s new book “Inventing The Movies”. Scott’s answers about what he learned from self-publishing and self-distributing the book are directly applicable to fimmakers:
Three things. You really need to have a platform and a built-in audience to really be successful promoting something now. The platform that I built over a couple of years is the CinemaTech blog, and that has a couple of thousand people who come to it every week. Two, you want to make things available in a lot of different ways that are convenient for people. A lot of publishers don‘t pay any attention to the ebook, but I wanted to have the book available in print and, for instant gratification, in digital form. I had a debate at the IFP conference with Tom Bernard from Sony Pictures Classics where I argued that the moment a lot of movies get the most attention is when they appear at a festival, so why not let people pay a premium price and download the movie then, or the week after? I wanted to do that with the book. And the third thing is something I did a little bit of, which is sharing the material as I was gathering it. I did a couple of interviews with Mark Cuban, and I posted those interviews on the blog and it was interesting to see other people‘s comments. He even posted some comments on the blog himself. So, by posting raw material and seeing what people want to know about [the audience] can steer you in directions you never would have thought of. I‘m trying to carve my way through the jungle of a new approach to book publishing in the same way that filmmakers are trying to find a new way to make movies.
Or in other words: seed, sort, and test.
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Cool Buildings #5: Cool Homes
