I have been very fortunate to be able to work with Todd on several films. His influence is huge. I think Marcus Pinn is on to something here.
Month: February 2011
Categories
I Am Over Evolution
Thanks to DUELITY I now get creationism.
Duelity from Ryan Uhrich on Vimeo.
Let’s celebrate! The prospects look good for a lot of smart money to be available again for appropriately budgeted indie films. The key now being the “appropriately” part of the equation.
The days of Machiavellian moves to maximize an limited audience art film’s budget seem thankfully over — and as sad as I will be to seem some friends’ films become obsolete, I smell another golden age brewing. Filmmakers and investors seem to have both embraced the “less is more’ ethos. Expect may more films to be made in the lower than $5M bracket, and far fewer indie works in Mark Gill’s former sweet spot. The large indie finance companies of 5 years ago, had to make films at higher budget levels in order to justify their overheads and salaries. Those companies have crashed and so did the silly models of $20M art films.
The Film Biz is coming off two consecutive extremely robust film markets. Toronto 2010 saw almost 30 deals close during the festival. Sundance 2011 exceeded that mark. Surely there were quite a few deals done post market too (I have not seen any reports to track this; let me know if you know any). Coming off of two years where the prudent would not expect anything for US rights, this an exceeding positive change. With a well produced and well positioned films, investors can reasonably hope to recoup — and then some. Now the challenge for producers will be to be disciplined enough not to allow the budget creep to return.
There are other factors, beyond the sales market itself, that heighten my optimism. The
Okay, okay. I stand corrected, but it was a good headline, wasn’t it? And I am not sure if $385Million per year in the US of online renting and downloading is cause to rejoice.
Besides, if you noticed, my post was really a jumping off point to try to address how we want to watch, or at least like to watch. We do have to offer our work for single transactions, but we have to recognize that is not how most people are choosing to watch. And yes, as many noted, we should not judge the lack of traction on YouTube for online rentals as representative of much. As Scilla Andreen pointed out, you need to honor your work with appropriate placement. YouTube has done so well building a community of generators and viewers accustomed to watching for free, it may be antithetical to the experience to pay anything ever there.
Erykah Badu – Gone Baby, Don’t be Long from beeple on Vimeo.
There can never be enough spaceships in the bowl.
yes, another Vulture tip!
Categories
Everything Is A Remix
Discovery is deeply connected to relevance. In our time-challenged culture, getting quickly to the meat of the message is crucial for attention gathering (granted, deep context is required fo true understanding, but that’s an issue for later). You don’t want to just send your friend an article, but you want to tell them why you find it interesting. The same holds true for videos, but it has been difficult to tell them what point of the video demands their attention. Problem solved! BlipSnips to the rescue!
TechCrunch reported late last month on the new video tagging tool BlipSnips:
BlipSnips allows users to mark “moments” within videos that mark specific events. Users can also caption these moments with comments and descriptions.
Another unique capability within BlipSnips is the ability to
