Month: March 2010

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Truly Free Film

Should Movie Poster Tag Lines Be Transformed

“Earth.  It Was Fun While It Lasted.”  Armegeddon’s tag line sticks with me, because I instinctively substitute “Earth” for “Indie Film” when I read it.

In these days of RampantFilmBizChange,  everything is ripe for reconsideration.  MCN hipped me to AdWeek’s collection of “66 Great Movie Taglines“.  Sure the list gets a smile regularly from me, but I walk away deadened and jaded.  The sell is obvious.  The dominant clever factor feels like a child beauty pagents’ related icky. “Look at me!  Look at me!  Give me a trophy!  Now!!!”.  Get me outta there.

Can’t we do better?  Or at least do different?

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Let's Make Better Films

Conquering The Mind Through Better Editing?

FilmmakerMagBlog tipped me to this NY TImes article on “evolution” of editing to mirror the way the brain works or likes to.

The basic shot structure of the movies, the way film segments of different lengths are bundled together from scene to scene, act to act, has evolved over the years to resemble a rough but recognizably wave-like pattern called 1/f, or one over frequency — or the more Hollywood-friendly metaphor, pink noise. Pink noise is a characteristic signal profile seated somewhere between random and rigid, and for utterly mysterious reasons, our world is ablush with it.

Movies today are, on average, much pinker than the films of half a century ago. Their shot structure has greater coherence, a comparatively firmer grouping together of similarly sized units that ends up lending them a frequency distribution ever more in line with the lab results of human reaction and attention times. “Roughly since 1960,” Dr. Cutting said, “filmmakers have been converging on a pattern of shot length that forces the reorientation of attention in the same way we do it naturally.”

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These Are Those Things

Lego: The Force Unleashed

Lego and Star Wars are like peanut butter and jelly.  Stop motion and YouTube are their bread.  There is such a huge supply of great work out there, we are ready to see the best of list of the genre.  For now though, we are willing to venture that this is worthy of inclusion on just such a list.  Hope The Younger wanted this placed in The Bowl but the violence is a bit intense for the young ‘uns, and we are not ashamed to confess our total love of these things anyway, so it’s landing here today instead.

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Truly Free Film

Thoughts On Last Night’s Oscars

The opening  number felt so inappropriate that I first hoped that the show would keep up a feel of a high school spoof of the Spirit Awards.  Shouldn’t such a celebration of art & entertainment aim to contextualize all that is great about this Dream Factory?  Okay, if they can’t figure out how to do that, I would be fine with several hours of pure crass classless puns like the song & dance intro promised too, but no.  We get 4 hours of dullness instead.  The fun of the show becomes critiquing all the mistakes.

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The Next Good Idea Truly Free Film

Invest in Artists, Not Art; in Individuals, Not Projects

MCN tipped me to this article in Barrons on Creative Capital’s practice of investing in the artist, and not the project.

BRENT GREEN WAS 25 AND ABOUT to relinquish his dream of becoming a filmmaker when he discovered Creative Capital.

Green had been looking high and low for a $14,000 grant to finish an animated film. Creative Capital, a nonprofit based in New York, sized him up and offered something entirely different: $43,000 to help support his career over the next three years. It would go toward everything from equipment to transportation to the cost of a publicist. In return, Green would give Creative Capital a small cut of any profits.

In the five years since then, Green’s work has been shown at the Sundance Festival and a number of museums and film festivals in North America and Europe. He has even found himself turning down galleries eager to represent his work.

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Bowl Of Noses

The Taj Mahal: Perhaps Better Than The Lego Model

The Lego version has already made it into the bowl, so why not the virtual tour now?

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Truly Free Film

Thoughts on The New Festival Model

I love that the Tribeca Film Festival has facilitated an immediate VOD launch for some of the films premiering there this year.  This is a key step in freeing festivals from their geographic limitations.  With the collapse of print and the firing of local film critics, festivals have become our most vital curatorial voice.  Whether we like this or not, it is the time we are living in, and it requires festivals to aggregate their audiences and expand their base; that is if they really want to help film culture grow and deepen, which I thought was their mandate (maybe that no longer is what it about; maybe it is now, like everything else, primarily financially motivated).

Unfortunately though the VOD experiment as currently structured (or at least as I understand it) is not the distribution or marketing solution for filmmakers that is necessary.  I worry that the lack of prior promotion,non-existant window, and filmmaker-led marketing will lead Tribeca’s bold step forward to mirror the popular (and negative) wisdom that came from the Sundance YouTube experiment (i.e. Fail!).  This is totally avoidable.  We already have better answers.

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