Categories
Truly Free Film

Rise Up And Curate! (Part 1 of 2): CINEFIST AND LIVE EVENTS

Today’s guest post if from filmmaker Zak Forsman.

If you haven’t heard of CINEFIST yet, let me explain what it is: myself, Kevin Shah, Jamie Cobb, Neha Shah and Erik Reese — all members of the Sabi Pictures family — needed a new company to separate the production of our films from the distribution and exhibition of them. CINEFIST was born out of that need. When people ask, I say “it handles all things distribution and exhibition.”

If you were to visit the web site you’d see that in addition to an online store (selling DVDs, soundtracks and posters), there is a section for our Quarterly Los Angeles Screening Series and some tools and services on the horizon like our own VOD portal, a private invitation-only community forum, and a digital cinema census. For the purposes of this article I’m going to focus on the screening series, why we started it and what we’ve learned about live events.

In September 2009, I was reading this blog, Ted’s blog, and an new article entitled “18 Actions Towards A Sustainable Truly Free Film Community”. In that article he listed a number of areas where a member of our community could deepen their involvement through mentoring, collaborating, learning, evolving and more. As I went through the list, I was happy to note that we were doing each of these in one form or another with one exception — curating. We weren’t involved in supporting other filmmakers’ work or elevating our local community’s awareness of the works we admired.

Categories
Issues and Actions

Social Media Strategy Overload Of Nothingness

There is a great deal of empty discussion in terms of what a social media strategy is in the indie film world. There’s even a great deal more when it comes to brands. WhatTheFuckIsMySocialMediaStrategy.com does a pretty good job of capturing, albeit with a welcome dose of humor. Just keep restoring the site, and you will get another “pearl” of wisdom with each click.
Hat tip to John Paul Rice and Jon Reiss for driving me towards this epic epicness.