Month: May 2010

Categories
Issues and Actions

Is Google TV What Indies Have Been Waiting For?

Scott Macauley tipped me to NoFimSchool’s post on Google TV. It, along with all the excellent links in the comments there, have picked up my spirits. Now with a little SEO strategy, maybe everyone can get a bit closer to having their work seen. Maybe soon they can even make some money from that and pay off this expensive hobby we have!

If you prefer to get your news from a major source, here’s how the LATimes are covering it. It’s true that with all the myriad of options, we need better search tools. I just wish that people would offer more filters. It’s one thing to be able to find what we are looking for, but we still need to know what it is that we want — particularly if we want to make other work that that which is justified by a huge marketing spend.

I know I want a few trusted curators. Let me know if you know where I may find them.

Categories
Truly Free Film

The Living Wake: The Path To Self Distribution (Pt2 of 3)

Today’s guest post is the second of three from filmmaker Sol Tryon, whose The Living Wake is currently in theaters.

Like many indie films, with The Living Wake we were continuing to raise money as we went and post-production was no different.  We used the dailies from the shoot to show new potential investors what we were creating.  Fortunately, Charlie Corwin and Clara Markowicz from Original Media saw our vision and believed in us enough to finance the completion budget and help escort us into the next phase of our journey with the project.  After an extended post-production due to schedules, we had a film that we felt surpassed all of our initial expectations for the project. We were sure this was going to be a darling of the film festivals and people all over the world would appreciate our bizarre little movie.

While we knew it was a very particular film and that it wasn’t really headed for big mainstream success, we felt that the film was well crafted, had an amazing combination of comedic wit and emotional sensibilities and that the cult classic potential was off the charts.  Unfortunately, we were hitting the festival circuit right at the time when the bottom was falling out of the industry.

Continue reading “The Living Wake: The Path To Self Distribution (Pt2 of 3)”
Categories
Truly Free Film

Sol Tryon on “The Living Wake”: Doing it differently (Pt. 1 of 3)

Today’s guest post is the first of three coming from the filmmaker Sol Tryon.

The Living Wake has been a truly original project from the get go.  With a creative team of first time filmmakers we knew every phase of getting this film made and distributed was going to be an immense challenge. Peter Kline, Mike O’Connell and myself developed the project from its origins as a 20-page one-man show into a full-length feature film.

Once we had the script ready to go, we knew it was going to be something that we were going to have to make on our own to prove ourselves to the film community.  We shot a short film based on the characters from the feature to help us show investors that we had a distinct voice and vision.  From there we were able to raise our seed money to get us going.

The three of us moved to Maine intent on making this film however we could.  

Continue reading “Sol Tryon on “The Living Wake”: Doing it differently (Pt. 1 of 3)”
Categories
These Are Those Things

Cancelled Dreams

Banksy in Boston…
Thanks to James Lilly for spotting & FBg this!

Categories
Bowl Of Noses

Papercraft & More!: Dr. Shroud

“Who’s Dr. Shroud?” you ask. Well he’s one cool and creepy dude and you can build him yourself pretty darn quick. Check out the papercraft here.

And why stop there.  Dr. Shroud’s creator has just announced:
Dr. Shroud Virtual Sticker Contest!

We’re giving away a Dr. Shroud Prize Pack, including a Dr. Shroud action figure, a Dr. Shroud T-Shirt and 5 Dr. Shroud Stickers!

The winner will also get a mention in the upcoming Dr. Shroud episode.
Here’s what you have to do to win: Simply take the following “virtual sticker” code and copy and paste it onto your website, Facebook page or wherever. Starting April 1st through April 30th, we will track the number of clicks from your site with the highest number of clicks taking the prize.

Just copy the code below and paste it today on your space:

<a href=”http://www.drshroud.com” target=”_blank”><img longdesc=”http://www.drshroud.com” src=”http://www.drshroud.com/drshroud_sticker.png” border=”0″ alt=”Dr. Shroud” width=”216″ height=”288″ /></a>

It should look like this:

Dr. Shroud




Categories
These Are Those Things

Tattered Palaces

The NYTimes has a beautiful series on abandoned movie theaters.  They are heartbreaking and packed with emotional metaphor.

Thanks to Phillip Lefesi for making sure I checked it out.

Categories
Truly Free Film

How To Pitch Investors

This article on how to pitch VCs could apply equally well to pitching new film investors. I consider my 60 feature productions equivalent to 60 start ups. I recently had the good fortune of participating in an investors’ forum and got to speak to the other producers a bit after. From the conversations, it sure sounded like all the other film producers could have benefited from this advice.