Eugene Hernandez had a good post regarding festival prep on indieWIRE yesterday. Click on it here if you missed it.
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Month: December 2008
“I think there is a moral imperative to articulate our path towards something better. Not to leave it a vague post-modernist muddle. Not to shirk from the complexity and realities of costs. And not even to expect everyone to consent.”
I was catching up and reading Kevin Kelly’s great blog The Technium. Although his post “The Missing Near Future” was about this world in general and all the various problems facing us, it is equally true about the state of independent film worldwide. His quote above could be our new mantra: we have to all articulate a plan.
Read Kelly’s NYTimes Mag article from 11/24/08 “Becoming Screen Literate” where he futurecasts the requirements and results of a world awash in screen ubiquity. I particularly look forward to image data search he sees a few years away:
With full-blown visuality, I should be able to annotate any object, frame or scene in a motion picture with any other object, frame or motion-picture clip. I should be able to search the visual index of a film, or peruse a visual table of contents, or scan a visual abstract of its full length. But how do you do all these things? How can we browse a film the way we browse a book?
There’s a lot of effort going on to blaze the path into the new future for film. I would have loved to have attended the MIT “Futures Of Entertainment” Conference. IndieWIRE ran a good story on it, focusing particularly on the “collaborative filmmaking” movement that they have also covered well in the past.
Jon Riess returns to TFF!:
I developed and teach a class at Cal Arts that addresses Ted’s concerns about making a living as a filmmaker. It’s called “Reel World Survival Skills: Everything I Wish I Had been Taught in Film School”. I developed the class because I as the title suggests, I would have been greatly served at the beginning of my film career had I been taught some very practical skills while I was attending the UCLA film school -at that time in my case – pitching.
While teaching for the past 8 years at LMU and I Cal Arts I noticed that the curriculums were still not teaching skills to prepare students for making a film career once they left school. So I developed this class – in addition to pitching it covers literary rights optioning and development, basic film contracts, financing, LLCs and web fund raising, grants, getting a job out of film school, writing resume’s and cover letters (which most people are shockingly deficient in), music videos, commercials and webisodes and then of course the fun wide world of film distribution – making a career from the films you make. The distribution component includes an overview of old distribution models but then leaves those behind for the new hybrid approach to distribution including: new film festival strategies, DIY theatrical and non theatrical distribution, DVD distribution, digital rights, traditional and non traditional marketing, Web 2.0, and most importantly new strategies for developing audiences – for your film and the film community at large.
I am currently in the process of writing a book based on this class – which I hope will be out next year. I am also preparing a weeklong crash course to offer to film schools based on the class and weekend seminars to offer to non film school folks. For the class I have assembled a ton of documents, contracts and articles that I give out on CD Rom. I am actually going to start posting these to my website by the time my 2nd article comes out in the next issue of Filmmaker Magazine. You will be able to sign up and download these documents for yourself. If you have any interest in any of this drop me an email at jon@jonreiss.com. You can also sign up for the mailing list on my website www.jonreiss.com to be notified of when the documents will be loaded, when the book is coming out or any seminars.
– posted by Jon Reiss
Personally, I was initially resistant to social networking for a couple reasons. One was that it feels like a celebrity culture or popularity contest. I can see that my friends have hundreds and hundreds more Facebook friends than I do. So I see their friends count and think, wow, they should make a movie instead, since they have more people who’d go see it. Only it’s usually superficial friendship, just as popularity and celebrity appeal is. So then I think, is this person I’m asking to be friends with really my friend, do I really want to catch up with them after ten years out of high school, or am I only requesting their friend status because I know that once my film comes out I can put a message on their Facebook wall? If I want to be honest with myself, then how do I come to terms with having to strive for superficial popularity, something I jettisoned in high school as I was, well, coming to terms with not wanting it and forming my artistic temperament? Is this still a world where the most popular people are offered the widest financial rewards and/or avenues of self-expression, just like Hollywood, television, and high school? Is art film no longer a venue for the introverted artist seeking personal expression in a way that maybe socially he or she could never achieve? Isn’t that the core of art and artistic language? Aren’t a large amount of artists poor with social skills–choosing to express themselves other ways–probably for a reason that manifests itself in their work? Do we not care to hear their voices? Of course we do, but if this audience building is truly as it is shaping up to be, how do these artists with less than impeccable social skills compete?
As a viewer I’m not a populist. I seek out artists and works with dexterous intent, control over form, style, and content that shows the artist knows his or her stuff as well as has a distinct individual voice. How do we preserve and embrace our individuality if all we’re doing is becoming advertisers who seek popularity? If auteur-driven films is one’s passion, audience participation in their creation is a tough sell at any meaningful level. I’ll see Lance Hammer film or a Bresson or a JP Melville film, but not a crowd-sourced film because of what it will lack: a singular honest soul.
I guess the point here is, how do we clearly, firmly, and concisely establish that the net should not be determining the content nor the artist’s temperament, that films like Ballast will always have a market, that artists are always needed and appreciated for their individuality? The fear and resistance comes when feature length art-house filmmakers start hearing their content must be dictated by a market and then their film is only valid if they’re famous in some way.
-Brent Chesanek
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Outsourcing The Process
One of the questions that comes up a lot is “How am I going to manage and afford all the additional marketing outreach that is required to be a Truly Free Filmmaker?”. I don’t have a good answer for that beyond teamwork. I have always wondered why so many film school grads want to jump right in and make a first feature. Why not make mistakes on someone else’s movie? Why not learn by watching others make a lot of mistakes? Isn’t that part of what teamwork is?
Seriously though, how can you get it all done? That is the question. There was that article and podcast I heard about the guy who outsourced his life completely. It made for a good story, but it has haunted me in a good way too. I still have not heard any stories of filmmakers trying some of these techniques. That would make for some good stories too.
Sunday’s Maureen Dowd Op-Ed piece in the NY Times “A Penny For My Thoughts” brought it all back home. She covers the outsourcing of local reporting; it’s funny and horrifying and the same time. But maybe it is also an answer to some of the problems we are having.
I raise this while at the same time I take some pride in the fact that they I have never taken a production out of the country to save money. I have always found that you can make a film just as cheaply stateside where the filmmaking team is more invested in the success of the film — and believing that communal spirit begets a better movie. Which isn’t to say that the right film couldn’t achieve the same thing overseas. But production and outreach are not the same thing. It would be an interesting experiment to see what could be achieved.
In reading the recent NYTimes article “Shifting Careers – Making Artistic Careers Lucrative”, it feels like a revolution is taking place in the art school curriculum — a transformation akin to what will transform the Independent Film Community into a Truly Free Film Culture.
I have wanted to start an ongoing column “If I Ran A Film School…”. I had been thinking I would post it over at LetsMakeBetterFilms since a lot of my concerns are on an aesthetic level, but truth be told you can never separate the art from the commerce when it comes to filmmaking. And further, and more to the point, I just haven’t found the time.
That said, where is the film school that is going to start to provide courses designed to enable this step to Truly Free Film? Any film school that doesn’t have mandatory classes on DIY marketing, entrepreneurialship, cross platform cohesion, and basic Web 2.0 skills is just not preparing their students for the real world. In fact, if you ask me the whole general film school curriculum needs a drastic overhaul.
I love the sound of what Larry Thompson (that’s his quote titling this post) is doing at Ringling College of Art and Design. I would love to see what that class structure looks like. To start with, it sounds like the film schools should try to adapt it for their students. It’s also great that they are in Sarasota; I got to visit the film festival there last year and was very impressed with the programing and community support. With forward thinking institutions like this in place, you have to imagine that a vibrant film culture could grow there. But I digress…
Regardless of the film schools though, stories like this, of Claudine Helmuth, are an inspiration and we should look at them for clues for not only survival but transcendence from having to create for the current mainstream outlets and demands.
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Monsters In NYC
Groovy beasts in the East Village! Yeah, so what else is new, eh? Still this Travis Louie cat is splendid with the pencil. You can see his monsters here, or go see them live at the Fuse Gallery on 93 Second Avenue.
