Month: May 2009

Categories
Bowl Of Noses

Jam With An Awesome Band!

Iron Fred G-nose knows of The H2Y’s love of Daft Punk, the Bowl’s greatest techno band.  He served up the tools and Mr. M-nose took it higher.  

Want to play alongside the robot guys’ who get the whole world moving?  Here’s what you gotta do:

Step 1: Boot up the kickin’ keyboard synthesizer where you too can play the robot voices with a flick of a finger: http://www.najle.com/idaft/
Step 2: Open a new tab in that window on your browser.
Step 3: Open YouTube and find Daft Punk’s “Harder Better Faster Stronger”.  Load it.  Play.
Step 4: Shuttle back to the iDaft keyboard and play along.  You are now jamming!
We suggest to do it all standing up so you can dance along as you play, just like if you were wearing your robot suit too.
Categories
Truly Free Film

Email Blast: Good Movies And What You Can Do To Save Them

Periodically I send out email blasts to various film folk and some actual film enthusiasts.  I resort to the blast because there still is a certain breed of people that don’t seem to do much web surfing.  They want their news delivered and they haven’t mastered RSS feeds or Feed Burner subscriptions (I know, I know, no one likes to enter their email address, but…).  It usually is a recap of much of what I have previously written here, perhaps with a few Twitter posts thrown in.   Since many are industry types, I need to stir them up a bit.  I sent the following out yesterday afternoon.  Here it is for your reading pleasure.

I have been asked why I stopped doing these email blasts; was it that everything is now okay in Indieland or was it that good movies stopped coming out? Did the lack of blasts = no news to report? I am happy (okay, sort of happy, sort of really really frustrated) to report that none of that is the case.

The good news is a week doesn’t go by now when I don’t see at least one film that really impresses me (Goodbye Solo, Treeless Mountain, Star Trek, The Exploding Girl, We Live In Public, Made In China, Humpday, The Yes Men Fix The World, Sugar, In A Dream, Tulpan, Hunger), but the unfortunate flip side is that it is rarely in a commercial theater that I see these films anymore. It’s bad that it has become increasingly hard to read about such films (please check out HammerToNail) as papers and magazines fire critics and give less space to ambitious work. The really horrible reality is the trickle down is going to reduce & effect the films you see for years to come completely altering the movies that get made and find their way to your eyeballs.

The next few years’ culture dose is corroding rapidly away as I type and your diet is about to get really limited and hyper-specific. Trust me, as someone who has tried this with other such essentials like food — even if it is delivered right to your door, you don’t want the same meal on a regular basis, particularly when they can’t source or afford the best and most unique ingrediants. Filmmaking is going on a horribly bland diet that is not good for anyone.

Now if I was really good, I would tell you how we can all solve this by working together. But I am not. I need your help for that — and that is a hard thing to both get and then to use.

I stopped doing email blasts as I thought the blogging would give more people access and thus I would get more input, but I am now not believing that is the case. On TrulyFreeFilm, I have spent the year speaking of solutions for Indieville, but what I always find people prefer to hear about the problems. On TheseAreThoseThings, I have attempted to curate a little corner of pop culture, but it’s hard to get people to participate. On TheNextGoodIdea, I’ve hoped to publicize the things that are making this world a better place step by step. I lost steam at InfoWantsToBeFree hoping to highlight the issues that shaped our media-mindscape, as I was encouraged to build it and others would join, but that just wasn’t so. And yes, there is the one I do with my son, for the young ‘uns too: BowlOfNoses. I would love it if you chose to subscribe to these blogs so I could believe they were valuable to you — or maybe I need to recognize the opposite.

So today, I blast out with a statement of the obvious: Art FIlm culture will dwindle down further to a bloody flatline unless you start to act to preserve it. Everyone sees it, but what are we going to do about it? This is urgent. Really urgent. More good films are going undistributed than ever before.

Mainstream news media has started reporting on Indie’s presumed death. This is the first time that in twenty years I think that MainstreamMedia looked at Indie without naming it Weinstien, Sloss, or Sundance or that wasn’t during the Oscar season I believe (okay, so I exaggerate for the sake of emphasis, but you know what I am saying). In prepping for what was my first live broadcast appearance (what? you didn’t yet look at that earlier link? just click on it now), I tried to consider what were the problems facing Indie film, and in less time than it took to write with this email, I came up with 38 Problems. Thirty Eight. And that was easy. Read them. Ponder. Link. Distribute. Add to the list. To kill the beast, we must name the beast.

But the situation is worse than what I just wrote. If you missed it Hollywood Reporter did an article how even the A-list auteurs’ star-filled agency-backed packages are failing to find US buyers at Cannes on Sunday:
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/content_display/film/news/e3ibd965fb07c296111fd0b189f8ac38b39

And that’s not the only one. Foreign sales acquisitions have fallen. Festival funding is drying up. Places to push the message out, like newspapers and magazines, are folding. And is anything taking their place? I have been twittering similar stuff for a long time. What? You are not on Twitter yet? Forget about what others have said; Twitter is a great filter, a curating tool. I have found a film project through it, music to listen too, art to see, books to read, and issues to respond to. Forget the folks who Twit about what they… eat. Follow the ones I follow. Heck, follow me. It’s simple and free and I dig it.

It’s funny. I wrote this blast for a clear reason. The title still sticks, even if the answer never made it to print. I have now gone on too long to burden you with such further details. That will have to be another blast. Or blog post (where you will miss it if you don’t subscribe). I am sure you have some ideas for solutions, or evidence to the contrary. Let me know them. I will blast about them. Or I would be happy to have you post on any of the blogs. Let me know.

But don’t despair. Trauma generally breeds action. As a species, we’ve generally demonstrated we don’t act until the pain of the present becomes greater than the fear of the future and the unknown. I think we are there — maybe not at the bottom, but with a little imagination we can now see the bottom or at least guess the depth. And there are reasons to look up (many of which have been chronicled on TFF): as has been said by others “The theatrical market is healthy; the economic model is not healthy.”. A better delivery system has been found, albeit by the bootleggers, but hopefully someone — and someone with a commitment for equal access and equal opportunity — will learn how to monetize it.

In the meantime, please go see some films. Tell your friends, family, fans, and followers why you liked them. Tell them to see them. Curate. Facebook about them. Take culture into your hands. Bring people together. Tell the media you care about culture and want it covered.

Maybe come here me talk about all this stuff. I am doing an event 5/28 for NY Foundation For The Arts. Please come.

Thanks for reading. And watching. But don’t fiddle. Our culture is burning.

Ted

Categories
Truly Free Film

38 Problems Discussion Continues

If you haven’t checked out the comments to last week’s post, scroll down now and do so.  It’s a lively discussion with lots of interesting points raised.

The discussion has also migrated to some other blogs too. Scott Macauley over at the Filmmaker Mag Blog gave the list a gander and had some futurecasting thoughts as a result:

In the “up” years of the indie film economy, enough people were getting a little bit of action, and the difficult questions of which models to endorse going forward and which to let die did not have to be made. Now due to collapsing revenue and business models, they do. Independent film is, after all, content, and while having specific challenges of its own it also shares many of the troubles that all content, from scripted one-hour dramas to daily newspapers, is currently facing. So, one question I had after reading Ted’s list is whether the loosely defined, loosely configured movement known as indie film will organize itself around the answers to these problems, or whether makers will decouple from the definitional tent of independent film and address them using entirely different paradigms.

Categories
Bowl Of Noses

Styles Of Animation #6: Praxinscope

The zoetrope was replaced by the Praxinscope. You’ve seen a zoetrope in the museums.  You know you spin the wheel and look through the slots.  

“The praxinoscope improved on the zoetrope by replacing its narrow viewing slits with an inner circle of mirrors, placed so that the reflections of the pictures appeared more or less stationary in position as the wheel turned. Someone looking in the mirrors would therefore see a rapid succession of images producing the illusion of motion, with a brighter and less distorted picture than the zoetrope offered.”

In the video below, the filmmakers took that method and applied it.  No camera tricks at all.

Pretty darn neato if you ask me.


Thanks Brainpickings!

Categories
Bowl Of Noses

360 Degree Views

Panoramic photography is pretty darn cool — particularly on the internet.  Click on the controls and spin around.  Check this out and swim through the coral reefs without getting your hair wet!


Ile Aux Canards Coral Reef Noumea in Noumea

They’ve got a lot of other places to visit too if you got the wants but not the jets.


Escapade Coral Reef Sphere in Noumea

Thanks Boing Boing!
Categories
Truly Free Film

Ted Hope Live On Fox Business Network: Is Indie Film Dead?

I never did get to my 38 Reasons but I did get one good answer in.  Peter Guber got my questions (but man, is he GOOD!  He answered the challenges questions better than I could of) and Marina kept getting my other questions.  I did get to give props to Lance Hammer but he was only the first of at least ten people I wanted to mention!  I have to admit though it was a lot of fun.  Many thanks to Reed Martin for getting me on the show (read/buy his book now!).

Categories
Truly Free Film

38 American Independent Film Problems/Concerns

Okay, I think it’s obvious that I prefer to look at the opportunities and solutions before us, as opposed to the problems and concerns, but I am afraid this post may obscure that just a tad.

I am going to be on the Fox Business News network’s “America’s Nightly Scorecard” (630P-730P EST) tonight and I thought I would put my mind to what issues are affecting indie film right now. Off the top of my head I came up with a few issues that we need to solve to return to the glory days of years passed.   I am sure with your help, we can come up with some more too.
I don’t have time to rank them so maybe you can let me know how you feel.
 
  1. Too many leisure options for film to compete without further enhancing the theatrical and cinematic experience.
  2. Too many “specialized” films opening to allow such films to gain word of mouth and audience’s attention.
  3. Too many films available and being distributed to allow films to stay in one theater for very long, making it more difficult to develop a word of mouth audience.
  4. No Access
    No Access
    Lack of access — outside of NYC & LA –to films when they are at their highest media awareness (encourages bootlegging, limits appeal by reducing timeliness).
  5. Distrib’s abandonment (and lack of development) of community-building marketing approaches for specialized releases (which reduces appeal for a group activity i.e. the theatrical experience).
  6. Distrib’s failure to embrace limited streaming of features for audience building.
  7. Reliance on large marketing spend release model restricts content to broad subjects (which decreases films’ distinction in marketplace) and reduces ability to focus on pre-aggregated niche audiences.
  8. Emphasis on upfront compensation for star talent creates budgets that can’t reasonably recoup investment.
  9. HP&W fringe levels at too high a level to allow low-bud production to benefit from know how and talent of union labor.
  10. Lack of media literacy/education programs that help audience to recognize they need to begin to chose what they see vs. just impulse buy.
  11. Collapse of US acquisition market requires reduced budgets for filmmakers, and thus resulting in limiting content.
  12. Collapse of International sales markets requires reduced budgets for filmmakers, and thus resulting in limiting content.
  13. Foreign subsidies for marketing of foreign film makes reduces buyers’ acquisition appetite for US product.
  14. Foreign subsidies for foreign productions contribute greater budget percentage than US tax rebates do, allowing foreign productions to have larger budgets and thus more production value and expansive content — thus making it harder for US product to compete.
  15. Recession has reduced private equity available for film investment.
  16. Credit crunch has reduced ability to use debt financing for film investment.
  17. Threat of piracy makes library value of titles unstable, which in turn limits investment in content companies and reduces acquisition prices, which in turn reduces budgets, which in turn limits the options for content — so everybody loses.
  18. No new business model for internet exploitation at a level that can justify reasonable film budgets.
  19. Lack of community embrace of new creative story expansion models that would facilitate audience aggregation and participation (to seed, build, drive audiences).
  20. Emphasis on single pictures for filmmakers vs. ongoing conversation with fans has lead to a neglect of content that helps audiences bridge gaps between films and that would prevent each new film to be a reinvention of the wheel for audience building.
  21. Panic due to the 15 year promise of crystal clear downloads over internet despite the reality that it still has not developed — allowing the fear to move to a business practice of inactivity.
  22. Bootleggers have developed a platform that allows audiences to simply download whatever they want where ever they want whenever they want — something that the film industry has yet to do.
  23. Loss of job for newspaper based film critics reduces curatorial oversight which lessens word-of-mouth and want-to-see.
  24. Reliance on synopsis style reviewing fails to provide enriching cultural context for film and thus reduces audience satisfaction.
  25. Lack of marketing/distribution knowledge by filmmakers limits DIY success.
  26. Indie filmmakers mimic Hollywood’s obsession with regurgitating past success models, by regurgitating past festival hits’ story-lines or navel gazing. Cinema is 100 years old but we still tell the same stories in the same ways.  Audiences get bored, move on, play video games.
  27. Amer-Indie filmmakers are only recently starting to look at non-US-centric stories that can “travel” into international territories.
  28. America has no funding for the arts so filmmakers have to develop material based on pre-existing markets instead forward thinking inspiration.
  29. America has no co-production treaties (other than Puerto Rico’s Letters Of Understanding) that allow filmmakers to access foreign soft money subsidies.
  30. The specialized distributors force exhibitors to program for full week runs, preventing them from developing local community audience or niche programs on off nights.
  31. The truly independent exhibitors are not yet developed into a collaborating organization that would allow true independent features to be easily booked nationwide.
  32. There is no independent collection and disbursement agency that could allow DIY distribution to take hold.
  33. Filmmakers still believe that festivals are first and foremost markets and not media launches.
  34. The ego-driven approach to filmmaking vs. one of true collaboration generally yields lower quality of films and greater dissatisfaction amongst all participants.
  35. Lack of real role models who represent integrity and commitment to the craft (in order to inspire others).
  36. Corporate hierarchy and access that is driven foremost by privilege (college, connections, class) limiting diversity and new content and approaches.
  37. Inability for filmmakers to influence iTunes editors to promote their work.
  38. Lists like this make the foolish despair.

Ted’s note: I wrote a sequel the next year.  Here are 38 more problems. If you want to move into the future still further, here are the Really Bad Things In Indie Film 2013.