Author: Ted Hope

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Truly Free Film

What Tech Advances May ReInvent Cinema’s Form?

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?

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Truly Free Film

If We Are To ReInvent Hollywood, Start With THE FORM

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:

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Issues and Actions The Next Good Idea

New Crowdfunding Site

“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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Truly Free Film

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?

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Truly Free Film

BondIt: Launching & Expanding BondIts Film Financing Solutions for the Independent Film Business

By Matthew Helderman, & Luke Taylor

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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.

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Truly Free Film

How to Build a Storyworld of Content. And How Not To.

By Karim Ahmad

This is part 2 in a series of posts I’ve been obsessively writing on storyworlds lately. Part 1 was published on Indiewire last week, where I discussed the community-building advantages to creating a storyworld of content around any single piece of IP. Part 3 is now available here.

What I want to discuss here is the how. Assuming you already want to, how do you reboot your process to allow for multiple interconnected stories to exist within a singular storyworld? Well, that’s the first challenge, is that you have to really want to. Innovation is hard, it’s time-consuming, and you have to be willing to question all aspects and habits of your storytelling process. Easier said than done. It takes discipline. And often times, it required working way outside your comfort zone. But if you’re like me, that prospect will excite you as much as it terrifies you. So what does that process look like? What are some of the challenges and pitfalls to avoid? Here are some of the takeaways from our process reinventing FUTURESTATES series from an anthology series of scifi shorts into a collaborative and immersive storyworld of content. Our goal was to make the series stickier by creating interconnections between stories and by creating multi-platform access points for users to engage with the content.

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Uncategorized

TV Is Dead, Long Live “TV”

It was about twenty years ago that I wrote an article called “Indie film is dead. Long live Indie Film”.  It took me a looonnngg time to make that pivot from full time film production. Now I wish it did not take me so damn long.  I am very happy planning an end to end reboot of the entire film infrastructure.

 So when WIRED asked if I wanted to discuss “TV is dead. Long live TV.” with Amazon Studios’ Roy Price, I couldn’t resist.  Roy is the first in new type of film and television executive.  Roy is the only head of television production I can think of that has dealt with both transactional and subscription video on demand, has film and television in his portfolio, as well as apps and community. He just got 5th patent to go along with it all.  When we think of creating & distributing pop culture in this connected age I can’t help but think soon this sort of Roy Price executive will be what everyone in the biz will want at the helm.

Check out our conversation on the future of television in the age of the internet: