Did you ever wonder why you shouldn’t give guns and other dangerous weapons to birds? Next time you eat a bagel, think twice before feeding flying friends — at least if you happen to have any nuclear bombs within your reach.
We have a guest post today from Miao Wang, director of Beijing Taxi, set to premiere shortly in SXSW.
A number of people have asked me for my secrets in regards to Beijing Taxi’s successful recent Kickstarter campaign. Frankly, the campaign’s success far exceeded my expectations. As is often the case, I simply had no alternative. I had gotten the last of my rejection letters from the post production grants I applied for. I had just received my invitation to have BEIJING TAXI’s world premiere at SXSW. It gave me a much-needed boost of energy and a deadline to push for! I knew having SXSW’s world premiere would be a crucial element in the fundraising effort, yet it was a couple of weeks before I could publicly announce it. The pressure is on! It was either get into mounting debt for the post production expenses, or do my best to raise as much as I can! It seemed like a win-win situation. I had heard about Kickstarter a few month ago, but didn’t manage to find an invitation to post a project until the last minute. Luckily my friends at Argot Pictures came to the rescue and helped me secured an invitation. I was due to start color correction and sound mix in two weeks!
I was reading on Estsy an article by Stacey Brooke that gives recommendations to their community on how to help buyers recognize what they are getting when they purchase a hand-made item, and I couldn’t help but feel that a lot of it is readily applicable to the world of Truly Free Film. We are talking about hand-crafted personal work, not assembly line market-driven product. Truly Free Film is “a different thing entirely” from Hollywood. Brooke sums it up well:
Your products aren’t the blue arugula created on an assembly line by workers paid far too little and shipped across the country to big box warehouses who take all the money and credit for your blood and sweat. You make things and sell things you put your soul into. You need to impart that message to your buyers. You need to show them — it’s a whole different thing.
What she discusses is also so true about truly free film. Brooke & Etsy suggests to their sellers to document their process and post videos. In the film world, this is our “behind the scenes” video. Generally filmmakers just call this “additional content”. Yet, as pointed on Etsy, these videos help audiences and buyers recognize why a work is distinct.
They encourage their community to “bolster their descriptions” about what they are selling, to explain the process in detail. With a complex work like a feature film or cross-media project, this is not simple by any means. Yet the more we understand what an artist set out to accomplish, what they discovered, what their influences were, how things shifted over time — the more we are allowed into the creative process — the more we will feel intimate with the artist(s). The move we feel intimate with the artist(s), the more we are likely to promote and curate their work.
I personally love it when film gets personal. It’s one thing to do it with the content, but for me, being of the mind that cinema is really everything that surrounds a particular feature, it’s something a whole lot more, when the personal is illuminated in the process. I love the post that Matthew Porterfield did about his film PUTTY HILL because it felt truly heartfelt for me. It was intimate. That is another thing that all these Kickstarter campaigns do for me: they keep it intimate. I see their success and failure measured
Part Two left with my cliffhanger. Zak & Kevin have come up with several answers to the questions (along with raising the bar for whatever you’d call the quick release group discussion centered around a common event). Watching this I was very won over by Sultan Sharrief ‘s efforts. I sit with so many filmmakers who remain willing to put their trust in the old way of getting stars and expecting them to bring out the fans, finance, and distrib’s appetite. It is very refreshing and inspiring to see folk like Sultan Sharrief accept the world as it really is and not let it stand in the way of their creative efforts. And thanks to Sabi Pictures for helping to spread that energy and reality. Check out their whole series if you haven’t. You will be glad you did.
NEW BREED PARK CITY – Exploring The Solutions, Part 3 from Sabi Pictures on Vimeo.
When you think of it, why has it taken twenty years for the filmmaking community to take advantage of a location specific event like Sundance, and gather together people to discuss what it going on in our community at this time? Zak and Kevin at Sabi do it so well, here’s hoping that other festivals recognize how this type of film can launch their festivals to the next level and should employ these guys to make these films regularly!.
Oh, and since I forgot to post Part Two, here it is:
NEW BREED PARK CITY – Exploring the Solutions, Part 2 from Sabi Pictures on Vimeo.
You can also see Part One here, or check out all of Sabi Pictures posts on Vimeo.
Press/Pause/Play is a new documentary work-in-progress “about the change in production, distribution, and consumption of creative works”. Obviously it is subject that interests me. The filmmakers came by my office to interview me a while back. Check it out.
Everyone knows that America’s public support of the arts is minimal and embarrassing. Rocco Landesman has promised to shake things up. Newsweek thinks he is and it’s a bit inspiring to see a mainstream journal cover his goings on. When he was appointed, Tony Kushner said it was: “potentially the best news the arts community in the United States has had since the birth of Walt Whitman.”
Read Newsweek’s peak into his first steps.
Now comes the test. It would be great to have easy access to what the NEA is up to and how we all could be more involved.
