Month: June 2013

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Truly Free Film

Digital Distribution, a Complex Way to Make Money

by Andrew Einspruch

Filmmaker Andrew Einspruch recently attended the Australian International Documentary Conference and wrote a series of articles for the event, which he’s graciously allowed us to reprint here. These articles originally appeared in Screen Hub, the daily online newspaper for Australian film and television professionals.

Tim Sparke, CEO of Mercury Media International, subtitled his talk Digital Distribution in a Traditional Market at this year’s AIDC with “Only for the Brave?” It is certainly a brave new world for filmmakers, with distribution possibilities popping up like mushrooms, and with a few dominant players emerging in certain markets. This is the context within in which your distribution decisions must now be made.

“The digital market can no longer be ignored,” said Sparke. “Over the past two years, those distributors who have schooled themselves on the complexities of the market, balancing digital against traditional and experimenting with creative windowing, have seen good returns.”

So how do you come to grips with that complexity?

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These Are Those Things

We Are Standing In The Dinosaur’s Footprint

The problems and the solutions are both hidden in plain sight.  We don’t know where we are even when the map is right in front of us.  What is this?

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Categories
These Are Those Things

Another Way Of Telling

I have had the pleasure of being a judge for the Disposable Film Festival.  Last night they rocked the house at the Ace Hotel in Palm Springs, celebrating the Palm Springs International Short Film Festival.

I almost forgot how much I love MALARIA.  It’s ambitious. It is risk taking.  It is fun. This is that:

 

Malaria from Edson Oda on Vimeo.

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Truly Free Film

Want to Add Thousands of Followers to Your Pinterest Page? Understand the Search Engine.

By Reid Rosefelt

We define and display ourselves in social media through our taste.  We show the books, movies, TV shows, theatre, music, technology, sports, food, and video games we like, and what we have to say about them.   Pinterest does that, with the difference being that it’s not as evanescent as Facebook and Twitter.  It’s not about what you said a minute or few hours ago, it’s relatively permanent.  It’s a series of baskets–your boards–in which you place your interests.  They are always there, you just keep putting more stuff in them.

Your boards are all dedicated to s

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Truly Free Film

Discovery and Appreciation: What Drives Them? A.S.A.C.A.

I think I look for a lot of the same features in apps as I do in live events.  I like things that take me to new things  that I appreciate.  Things.  Granted they are but a small piece of what I look for but things are a good start. Not being a material sort, my things might be different than yours.  My things are generally events, live or not.  Beyond those my eternal search often breaks down.  Why? The problem is that “I contain multitudes”.  No algorithm can  suss out what I really want. They fall far short of my identity, be it public or private. This true, thankfully, for most people — even if those motivated by the sale wish it weren’t so.

Curators struggle with it too.  But I go to festivals with the same hope I have when I look at twitter: show me that thing I did not yet know of that I will later cushion softly with fond nostalgia and invigorate later with aspiration for the future.  Can those qualities be defined? Yup. At least a bit.  They are the qualities we look for and hope to discover.  They are the qualities we appreciate and keep us coming back for more.  They are the qualities you want to have in your work, the presentation of it, the marketing.

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Truly Free Film

Its About The Art, Not The App

By John Root Stone 

Online video is exploding

The global market for online video is expected to grow to $37 billion by 2017. In April, according to Comscore, 182 million Americans – 83% of US Internet users – watched 38 billion videos online. This growth is fed by a vast and ever-growing supply of content that is original and archived, professional and amateur, and distributed across more platforms than anyone cares to remember.

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It’s a challenge and an opportunity

For filmmakers, this growth and complex market mix makes it increasingly difficult to find useful and profitable distribution channels. The film distribution hierarchy of yesteryear is flatter than ever with first run premium content competing nearly side-by-side with user-generated content (UGC) for the audience’s time. While this offers both challenges and opportunities to filmmakers, understanding how to take advantage of this new marketplace is anything but simple.

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Truly Free Film

The Cinema Giants Agree: The Film Biz As We Know It Is OVER. Now What?

Perhaps this blog is now obsolete (now wouldn’t that be excellent!).  Or maybe blogging just doesn’t work the way I hope it would (man, that would be a real shame!).  Perhaps change in the film business just about impossible. I am growing afraid it might well be — at least the kind that comes from positive and strategic influence as opposed to spontaneous or reactionary disruption (that kind of change that always is constant).  So what is the next step? And why the bleep do I have to ask?

What is going on in this world when everyone agrees that something is totally f*cked but no one with power appears to be doing anything substantial to improve it?  Are there secret plansof a new cultural infrastructure hatching and 

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