Like most of us, I wander around the web and like to get lost. The best times are when from being lost, I am found. You know what I mean? You know how sometimes you find something that feels like they wrote it or built it just for you? I like that. I like that a lot.
It’s happened a few times for me in 2013. I thought I would share it with you. The following folks are doing great posts, and I only just stumbled upon them this year (2013).
By Jon Raymond
If you aren’t shooting in 4K (aka Ultra HD or UHD), you’re two years late. In two years from now any film you shot in HD will be as obsolete as the stuff you shot in SD. But don’t take my word for it, and expect that within a few weeks or sooner, there will be new advances announced. Keep tabs on 4K news here.
4K is just slightly smaller than digital cinema resolution (6% smaller at 3,840 × 2,160 pixels, 256 pixels less wide) to accommodate the TV 16:9 standard as opposed to cinema’s 17:9. Purists will be annoyed (although 1080 HD is also 16:9).
Could 4K become the new near-first run releasing window (instead of VOD), just as theatrical once was before Day and Date, Ultra-VOD, VOD, and digital platforms became the rage? With 4K Blu-ray, disks become very attractive, versus buffering HD streaming or cable.
By Jay Webb
Previously: A 2014 Resolution 4 Independent Artists — Separate Your Egos
Walking down Main Street of the Sundance film festival this year, it felt like there was an ever-growing gap between the east and the west side of the street. Hollywood and Independent seem to be growing further and further apart, making the Sundance film festival, and other L.A. hyped festivals like it, such an increasingly awkward phenomena. You have a festival director who wants to keep the slate as Independent, fresh, and intriguing as possible, an audience that attends who has come to expect way more “accessible” stories, and big biz owned media companies like Variety claiming the festival “suffered from too much Brooklyn” and squawking at 2 million dollar advance tags for indie films in today’s market. We feel for you Mr. Redford, we do…but you created this monster, and now it ‘s become a near perfect representation of the dichotomy within the film Industry.
The divide:
This is not an East vs. West thing, but more of a continued divide in mentality and approach to film. It is exclusivity, public relations, and celebrity versus collaboration, community building, and storytelling. Old Hollywood versus new thinkers. Creatives vs. creative exploiters. I think there is some ancient adage about a poor old man with a paint brush who grew frightened he may never be able to buy paint again if something were to happen to his even older brother who convinces the village people that the old man’s art is worth money. If there is no adage, then now there is. The artist and the thinker are inherently self-critical and the Hollywood older brother is inherently opportunistic.
by Bill Cunningham
Ted invited me to expand on a comment I made here on how the case can be made for rethinking the design standard for movie poster artwork in order to maximize the visual value to today’s audience, considering a film will likely be discovered online. What I’m proposing is taking the movie poster and turning it on its side, filling our view on the screen and our heads with storytelling potential. Not so much a radical rethink of key art design, but the next step in what has been an evolutionary process tied to distribution. People do judge a movie by its poster, and if independent filmmakers and distributors are to maximize their resources without maximizing costs, then the role and design of key art is definitely in order.
THE ROLE OF THE MOVIE POSTER
A picture is worth a thousand words, but a (good) movie poster ignites a thousand ideas – an expression of both art and commercial intent, selling the movie to the audience. It does this through craft, style, technique and marketing – ballyhoo made manifest. This is why key art is important, especially to the indie, because if it makes a positive impression, it means the potential for financial as well as artistic success. The better your key art, the lower the sales resistance.
THE TRADITIONAL MOVIE POSTER / KEY ART
It’s important that we understand the basics of what we call the movie poster. The standard movie poster has become a vertical 27” x 40” design originally made to fit inside a theater’s display. [This ignores lobby cards, window cards, the insert, the half-sheet, and the 3 and 6-sheets as well as the European and Asian anomalies.
by Andrew Einspruch
Filmmaker Andrew Einspruch attended Screen Forever 2013, the conference of Screen Producers Australia, this past year and wrote a series of articles for the event, which he’s kindly allowing us to reprint here. These articles originally appeared in Screen Hub, the daily online newspaper for Australian film and television professionals.
A session at Screen Forever looked at some of the ins and outs of financing a feature film with some amount of money from the USA. Andrew Einspruch reports that success factors range from making sure the Aussie elements of the project work to developing credibility as a producer.
One of the key differences between making a film with a USA-based company versus, say, a Canadian, British or French firm, is there is no official co-production treaty. In fact, co-pro treaties are in place specifically to counter the might of Hollywood.
Even so, plenty of Australian productions have a USA component, and the lack of official co-pros simply means the deals have to stack up on some other basis. These elements were explored in a session called “Working with the USA: the Eagle and the Kangaroo”, moderated by lawyer Craig Emanuel of Loeb & Loeb, and which brought together producer Tony Ginane of FG film Productions, sales agent Clay Epstein of Arclight Films, distributor and EP Greg Coote of Larrikin and China Lion, and Tracey Vieira, representing Ausfilm.
The bad news is that the USA remains difficult terrain. It is still very hard to pre-sell North American rights, and the trend with studios (as reported previously) is they are making fewer, more expensive, mostly tentpole films. This, in turn, puts pressure on North American distribution, and forces projects to get financed without it.
And can we both help women filmmakers in the process? Here’s how:
The only thing you need to make a film is to not be afraid of anybody or anything. John Cassavetes said that. John was inspiring, but he was also direct. He knew that there was no time to be indecisive, or to worry about whether the decisions you’ve already made were right or wrong, good or bad. I think that for John, there was no such thing as a “mistake”—you can only move forward, you can never move backward, and you can profit from absolutely everything.
Many times in my life, I’ve told the story of John’s advice to me after he saw a cut of Boxcar Bertha, a picture I made for Roger Corman. In essence, what he said to me was: Just concentrate on making the movies you need to make. Of course, many directors have approached this in many different ways—Claude Chabrol, for example, who never stopped working and made many, many movies, personal and impersonal. Even John made pictures like Gloria and Too Late Blues. The point is this: Protect the ones that you need to make, keep them alive for yourself, and then make them.
