January 14, 1978, at The Winterland Ballroom, San Francisco.
Month: October 2013
By Colin Brown
We don’t really know how many feature films will end up being made this year – 50,000 seems to be the best global guess – but what we do know is that their genetic make-up will differ in every instance. “Each film has its own DNA,” observed WME agent Mark Ankner, speaking at a recent panel on film packaging organized by Pepperdine University as part of its certification program for film & TV finance. “No two films are alike,” echoed UTA agent Hailey Wierengo, sitting alongside him. “Each has its own unique set of hurdles.”
What we also know from DNA science is that even something as complex as the human genome – the sum total of all our hereditary information – boils down to four essential building blocks arranged and packaged in a myriad ways. By mapping those arrangements, we can not only pinpoint the individual signatures of our species in all its glorious variation, but also establish some common characteristics that help in making useful working assumptions.
And so it is with cinema: academics may argue all they like about the problems that come with labeling films according to shared storytelling elements and milieus, but genre classification is as good a starting point as any right now for determining a project’s prospects. If that project happens to be a mix-and-match of different genres, as so many are these days, then the commercial realities that come with such hybrids need to be acknowledged too.
At their most forensic, some of those commercial realities can make for uncomfortable reading. In a recent New York Times article, former statistics professor Vincent Bruzzese described how his combination of data analysis and focus groups has led to some of the following blunt conclusions: a cursed superhero never sells as well as a guardian superhero; bowling scenes tend to pop up in films that fizzle. Bruzzese, who spearheads the Worldwide Motion Picture Group, also makes this bold assertion: “Demons in horror movies can target people or be summoned. If it’s a targeting demon, you are likely to have much higher opening-weekend sales than if it’s summoned. So get rid of that Ouija Board scene.”
You may have been noticing, that I am on a mission to create a sustainable investor class. It can be done. Part one is creating a new infrastructure — and that will come through Institutionalized Staged Financing. Part two is an educated investor base. And this, the third part in this blog series of what an investor must have, is part of that second part.
Filmmakers love gravity. Filmmakers love heights. Filmmakers love fear. The list goes on. Is it any wonder we’ve fallen in love with the fall? Take the leap. See how it is done. Determine how you will do it differently.
Gravity: A Falling Montage from Plot Point Productions on Vimeo.
By Reid Rosefelt
When I was a teenager growing up in a tiny Wisconsin town, Chicago was the Big City, and The Art Institute was the only major museum I had been to in my life. My favorite gallery there was the Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection. I could gaze at the huge canvas of Georges Seurat’s “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte,” as well as Toulouse-Lautrec’s “At the Moulin Rouge,” van Gogh’s “The Room,” and many others by such masters as Gauguin, Rousseau, Modigliani, Cézanne, and Matisse. For me, these paintings were celebrities. Being in the room with them was as thrilling as being in the same room with Bob Dylan or Jack Nicholson.
Despite all the riches, I found myself drawn to a single painting: Picasso’s “The Old Guitarist” an iconic image from his Blue Period. I loved the painting, but my real fascination was with something hidden underneath it. Behind the old man’s blue head I could see the face of a beautiful woman, her lips resting behind his ear, her neck flowing out from the Platysma muscle in his neck, and her ghostly eyes burning into my own.
By Annelise Larson
All hail the power of search! If you have read Part 1 and Part 2 of this series I hope I have made you a true believer and helped you understand why it is critical to be search friendly. Now here are 10 search engine optimization tips to help you walk the SEO walk:
#1 – Get problematic technology out of the way.
Technologies like Flash, JavaScript, splash pages, redirects and even too many images instead of text can cause HUGE problems for search friendliness. They can get in the way of the search engines understanding what your site is about, which still lies predominantly in the visible text on the page. Find a balance between the wow and the words.
#2 – Leverage tags.
Here are some of the places you can include keywords from your research:
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HTML title tag (Appears in your page programming, the top of browsers and is the title seen in search results. Make it intriguing to human searchers but also include keywords reflective of the content on your page.)
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Meta description tag (Appears in search engine listings as the description for your page. Allows you to control your branding, but doesn’t help improve search performance.)
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Video & image titles (Visible titles for your video and image assets can include important keywords to help with findability in search, but they need to be relevant.)
