Categories
Truly Free Film

What Issues Do Filmmakers Need To Track?

If filmmakers don't track core issues, they will find their form abandoned in the parking lotA creative life is a precarious thing.  Actions occur that could profoundly effect your ability to earn a living doing what you love.  We get blindsided again and again, sometimes not recognizing things until they are too late to alter them.  It’s one of the reasons I have tried to meticulously track for you what are the good thing and bad things happening in indie film these days.  Yet, it seems to me we all need to do a better job of tracking them if we don’t want to get trapped in a future we won’t be part of..

My thought is that we should be able to define a series of issues in which we can put events, ideas, and articles into as they occur, helping each other stay on top of them. 

The first step is to define the issues.  That is what I am doing today .

Categories
Truly Free Film

Diary of a Film Start-Up: Post #48: What You Must Know About Amazon CreateSpace

KNLOGOBy Roger Jackson

Previously: Quality Control or Why Films Fail

Filmmakers frequently upload their movies to Kinonation after they’ve submitted to Amazon’s CreateSpace service. This is a truly excellent service for book authors, musicians and filmmakers to self-publish their creative work and make it available on Amazon.com. And in the context of films, a good way to make DVDs available without upfront expense.

BUT: for getting a film onto Amazon there are many reasons to use a specialist VOD aggregator like Kinonation, instead of CreateSpace. I’m not saying that out of self interest. Yes, Kinonation (or any aggregator) takes a fee or percentage of gross revenue – in our case 20%. But it’s much more about video quality, speed, marketing and, above all, access to many more Amazon US and global platforms, including Amazon Prime.

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Truly Free Film

BondIt: The Value of Strategic Partnerships in the Business of Filmmaking

By Luke Taylor & Matthew Helderman
 
UploadBuilding a business is an incredibly challenging task. You must recognize a problem. You must find a solution. You must structure a business model that is viable, strong, and withstanding. You must raise money on an idea alone. You must assemble a team. You must prove a market. You must acquire a customer base. You must create. You must operate efficiently and effectively. You must scale. Most importantly – you must provide a return.

Categories
Issues and Actions

There Are Solutions To Some Problems

You read about them first here. And second here too, but it is great to see BondIt getting wider industry coverage.  I was happy to give them a quote.

“I believe they are taking a community-minded entrepreneurial approach to improving our industry,” said veteran independent producer Ted Hope

Categories
These Are Those Things

If You Love Something, Set It Free

I caught all the toads I could as a kid.  I kept them in cages.  One morning, they were all gone, and in their place was a note from Walter Wart The Freak Frog.  This lovely short animation reminded me of those days…

TANK from Nate Milton on Vimeo.

Thanks yet again for Disposable Film Festival for tipping me to this.

Categories
Issues and Actions

What Tax Incentives Are Where?

Get your Free 2014 Incentives Guide For US Film Prodctns, 112 pg State-By-State + Int’l report [.pdf]

 http://bit.ly/1i2Ycjs

Courtesy of CastAndCrew.com

Categories
Truly Free Film

The Box Office Numbers for Favor

By Paul Osborne

TeaserPoster_WebSizedSmallThere’s been a recent battle-cry within the independent film community – lead by folks like Ted Hope and Jon Reiss – urging us filmmakers to publish the revenue generated by our movies, specifically in regard to new forms of distribution.  Unlike the weekly box office reports of studio films, the actual figures for indies, particularly those using newer release methods such as Video-On-Demand, are hard to come by.  Without them, and subsequently without any way of determining the success or failure of specific releases, it makes perfecting and improving new avenues of distribution quite difficult.   How do you know what’s working, and what’s not, if you don’t see the results?