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Month: May 2014
There are many ways I could answer this question. The one thing I know for sure though, is that if you work in the film business, and you don’t have at least one answer to that question, you are being irresponsible. I have a few other thoughts that stem from that same point, but I will leave those alone for now too…
We need to be able to have some answers to our industry to work in the same way we should be able to answer it regarding our government, or your kid’s education — we should have an opinion on how we’d like them all to work. Okay maybe the film biz is not as important as either of those things, but don’t you think we all should have an opinion on all of these? I do.
We just shouldn’t accept the way things are. We should try to move things forward.
One of the things I most want the film biz to be able to do is
HOPEfully you are currently participating in our conversation to ReInvent The Form of Film. Although I am writing from the past, and posting in the future, I anticipate the conversation is currently based on creative solutions to the form. I imagine some of you are wondering about technical innovation and how that may change things for us. To that end, I wrote up this list of recent advancements to consider. Some I was able to find good links for. Others I have not succeeded yet, and could use your help.
How will these technological advancements play into storytelling?
Today will be the first episode of the web series I am hosting, “ReInvent Hollywood”. It will be live at 11A PT on http://reinventors.net/series/reinvent-hollywood
The first episode is on “The Form”. Is the era of feature film dominance over? If so what is to take it’s place? We will look at technological advances and cultural changes that effect the manner in which we tell stories. Has science influenced us? Will it? What are good examples? Are their best practices? We have a great group joining in to participate: Karim Ahmed, Tiffany Shlain, Michel Rielhac, Liz Rosenthal, and Lance Weiler.
I wrote the following blogpost to give you an idea of the why and the how:
“Based in Vancouver, dana.io is a new crowdfunding platform for international filmmakers, artists, and activists. Unlike other platforms, dana.io doesn’t
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Lean World-Building
By Karim Ahmad
This is part 3 in a series of posts I’ve been obsessively writing on storyworlds. Part 1 was published on Indiewire, where I discussed the advantage of creating a spreadable storyworld for any piece of content. Part 2 was published right here, where I shared some takeaways from ITVS’ first major foray into building an immersive fictional web series – our fifth and final season of FUTURESTATES. Here, in part 3, I want to talk about another approach to building community through storyworlds that we’ve just recently adopted. A leaner approach.
The biggest drawback to the FUTURESTATES model was that we had to spend a lot of time and money before anything launched. And when you spend more time building in silence than you do sharing your creations, you can’t maximize sustained community engagement. But what if you could iterate an interactive story like FUTURESTATES over time? What if you could develop and prototype an immersive web series like any piece of software, and then audience test them like a TV pilot?
By Matthew Helderman, & Luke Taylor
Launched officially in January of 2014, BondIt found an audience fairly quickly. Liquidity (ease of cash-flow) proved to be a major issue for a large portion of the independent feature films being produced in North America – which was our target audience.
Providing cash-flow/financial coverage for union deposits was a new idea – a concept we devised after producing 30+ feature films between $200k – $4M budgets, We recognized a need to utilize union performers and workers – but the deposits (surety bonds) required often crippled the productions liquid assets.
