Month: January 2011
Today’s guest post is from Diary Of A Bad Lad producer, Jon Williams. This news was pretty shocking to me. It is sure to evolve as the year goes on, but Dylan Martin’s ordeal should concern anyone that is striving to produce a Truly Free Film model. BE SURE TO CLICK IN TO DYLAN’s ARTICLE. What Jon describes as Dylan’s Kafka-esque nightmare with Google is nothing short of a grand tragedy of a hero learning how it can all work and being profoundly penalized for the knowledge. This is sure to get a lot of people buzzing.
I want to draw your attention to a recent article, “Adsense, no sense at all –
what it’s like being sacked by a computer…” by Dylan Martin (http://www.duckworksmagazine.com/11/columns/guest/winter/index.htm).
I think it’s particularly relevant when it comes to ‘new distribution models’ (NDMs).
Over the past couple of years or so there’s been a whole slew of books published, and seminars organised, promoting internet-based film marketing and distribution models. Often the author is someone who makes a living as an internet marketing consultant, or someone who made a DIY-distributed documentary with a clear niche-market target who’s found that writing internet marketing manuals and doing speaking engagements is a much better and more reliable way of making a living. But little of this is of any use to indie feature filmmakers.
Often the disconnection results in bafflement. How can you, as the advice goes, build an audience for a film which you haven’t even got into development? If it’s a feature you can’t, unless you happen to be an established auteur, that is.
Today’s guest post is from filmmaker Lucas McNelly.
Earlier this year, I made a film in the middle of nowhere called UP COUNTRY, a thriller about a fishing trip gone wrong, set deep in the Northern Maine woods. It’s tricky making a film several hundred miles from a city, in a town that has so few residents it doesn’t even have a name. There’s no rental houses, no hotels, no Starbucks, no airport, and no community of filmmakers to work with. You have to bring everything with you, including the cast and crew. There are no local resources. And while that’s a daunting hurdle to overcome, in the end it frees you, allowing the production to pull people in from all over the country. You quickly realize that there’s great filmmakers all over the place, not just in the usual places, and not just where you live.
Sure, you already know that, but it’s something else entirely to see it in person.
It got me thinking about how over the last year or so there seems to have been an influx of filmmakers who are making a name for themselves outside of NY and LA, thanks to the rise of social media and transmedia all those web 2.0 buzzwords we’re always hearing about. Whereas before, you had to be in NYC or LA to get your projects made, people are starting to find ways to be successful in out of the way places like Minnesota and Idaho and Georgia and the deep woods of Northern Maine. How? What are they doing to make that happen? And just how connected are we by social media and all of our hip technology?
That’s why I’ve decided to embark on quite possibly the craziest project around.
If you didn’t notice this is a new year. It is also a new age. My resolution is to help all filmmakers and members of the film industry to understand it. Hopefully we can also all get started on adapting for this Age too.
This is The Age of Access & Surplus.
This is no longer the Age of Control & Shortages (that was last decade).
These times require New Rules & New Emphasis:
- Discovery
- Participation
- Demystification
We need to conceive of both our creative and business practices in terms of how they incorporate these three elements.
When 45,000 films are made globally each year
Categories
Slow Print, Slow Films…
There’s been more chatter about The Death Of The Book, than there has been about even The Death Of Film, yet the book has proven to be pretty damn resilant as it morphs into new forms. We can only hope that film follows suit. The LA Times had a nice overview on the opportunities that digital offers over print, and vice versa. It can’t help prod you a bit to answer what can be analogous in the film space to some of the innovative solutions both sides of the publishing world that the film biz can mimic and expand upon.
Publishing also shares many of the vulnerabilities that film does
It’s that time of year again. The National Film Registry just got 25 more films. Like the last two years, it only gives a nod to indies. What people seem to forget is that we, the people, can make recommendations as to what gets listed. How great would it be if every reader of this blog wrote in and recommended an indie film? There’s no charge for this blog, no pay wall to avoid, so how about that for a subscription fee: you have to nominate a film to the National Film Registry?
The Librarian of Congress provides some guidelines on what to nominate for next year’s registry at the Film Board’s website at www.loc.gov/film. To be eligible for the Registry, a film must be at least 10 years old and be “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.” I list my recommended films on last year’s post. My list is not changing this year.
To nominate films, send up to fifty titles to:
Categories
Best Kids Books Of The Year?
Okay this is mostly for the under 7 set, but still, BrainPickings has a good list to consider. Let the parents take note.
