Admit it: these are overwhelming times we live in. Supposedly over 50,000 feature films are generated on a global basis each year. In America we manage to consume about 1% of the year’s supply — and that makes up the top consumption market for films worldwide. Good movies just don’t get seen. People find it hard to connect with the films that may suit them best. So what can we do about it? Well…
Month: April 2013
Categories
Creating Value in Free Film
by ornana films
Over three years ago we started having conversations delving into the story that ended up on screen at South by Southwest in March and is now on Vimeo in full, for free. Between those points, we spent thousands of hours working through this story to turn it in to a film. However, I think the more interesting part is not what we did, but what we didn’t do.
Filmmakers should supply Film Festivals with their film’s hashtag at the time of application to the festival and then stick with it. Which of course means filmmakers should select a hashtag early and not deviate from that hashtag.
Which brings up the question of
” in 1978, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and the screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan worked through an idea…”
If you weren’t in the room, here’s your chance to read how it was done.
I was forwarded this clip of me yesterday; I am quite confident is from before I was offered the job to become the Executive Director of the San Francisco Film Society. In it, I am clearly frustrated with the state of the film industry, where I felt I (and my contemporaries) were being rewarded for quantity over quality. No wonder I accepted the job when it was offered; I had already
Remember those places you loved? The ones you wanted to return to some day? What did they have in common? What were the details they shared? Are any of those aspects around you now? Forget about the tourist sites, but what are the favorite places you’ve been to?
1) I miss my treehouse only 12 ft off the ground but there I was king and had escaped from it all (even if it had yet to begin).
2)We had a pine grove behind where I grew up where the trees were tall and straight and all in a line and
By Roger Jackson
Previously: Comparison Shopping
Update for Beta-Testers
Klaus and the coding team have been pulling late nights on one of our toughest tech challenges: building the system that does the automated delivery of films to video-on-demand outlets. Right now we have a backlog of film orders — for iTunes, Amazon, Hulu, SnagFilms, Viewster, etc. — that we’ve been delivering manually. That’s hugely time-consuming and inefficient. It takes several hours to prep one film for a single outlet. Not just the custom transcode, but the custom everything — metadata, images, file naming conventions, FTP delivery, etc. But it’s good to do this manual work a few times — in the same way it’s good to hand wash a pile of really dirty clothes to appreciate the genius of a washer-dryer! Now we’re days away from having an automated delivery system for our three beta VoD outlets, Hulu, Amazon and Viewster. And then we’ll scale it up to five then 10 then fifty global VoD outlets. What does automated mean? It means that the “several hours” manual job (even more when I’m doing it) of authoring custom metadata and image files take just a few seconds. And it’s way more reliable than me. It means we’re getting close to the point where a filmmaker can upload her film, get it reviewed and selected by several (and ultimately dozens of) VoD outlets, then automatically delivered to them and in front of audiences — in less than a week. (Of course, how quickly the outlet says yes or no is out of our control.) So we’re building KinoNation as fast as we can, and working through the catalog to get all our films delivered. And our Private Beta is still open for feature film submissions – now’s a great time to jump in.
Amazonian Challenges
Like many businesses built “in the cloud” we’re relying on
