From Spain comes the BRISA (Spanish for “breeze”), a three-wheeled two-seater 100% solar powered. Tell your folks to trash the hybrid, it’s all sun or nothing now. Read more about it here.
Author: Ted Hope
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Games For Change
Alternative Reality Games and other new media ventures that included a social impact message really hit home this year. There is tremendous opportunity within this field to make something beautiful that means something.
World Without Oil, debuting last year in 2007, set a high standard and had participants from all over the globe.
ITVS helped fund WOW as they did Fatworld.
FATWORLD is a video game about the politics of nutrition. It explores the relationships between obesity, nutrition, and socioeconomics in the contemporary U.S. The game’s goal is not to tell people what to eat or how to exercise, but to demonstrate the complex, interwoven relationships between nutrition and factors like budgets, the physical world, subsidies, and regulations. Existing approaches to nutrition advocacy fail to communicate the aggregate effect of everyday health practices
“Today you have to be like Leonard Bernstein,” said Mr. Kallman, “making sure everyone is hitting the right notes at just the right millisecond. The tipping point, if you will, is when everything converges and your timing with everything is impeccable.”
Finding the new business model for truly free film is not going to be easy. It is going to take a lot of effort in all directions. It is going to require developing new revenue streams where previously there was nothing. It is going to take experimentation. It is going to require a lot of trial and error. And it is not going to happen overnight.
Truly Free Film and Indie Film has always been different from Hollywood product. As an industry the specialized divisions have missed how significant the difference is. The glue that might have kept an Indie ArtHouse Truly Free film community together has withered away. Without this support there will be no gradual shift into the new paradigm. It’s been a brutal year in terms of traditional film sales worldwide, and I don’t suspect it will get better. Our “business” has to become something altogether different, something new.
This blog was started to help recognize what the steps could be to develop a new business model. The I.A.T.F.F. community has to move faster than Hollywood as our margins have always been smaller and what might be small adjustments for Hollywood are seismic shifts for us. It’s fortunate that we can learn from the hardships that the music and newspaper have had to endure.
It was reported in the NYTimes two days ago, that one record company, Atlantic, claims its digital sales have now surpassed its CD sales. Furthermore Atlantic seems to have done this without any significant revenue drop in CD sales. It is not clear whether this is the start of something positive or the exception to the rule. Either way, there is going to be more hardship, before we get to harvest the real fruit. The NY Times points out:
With the milestone comes a sobering reality already familiar to newspapers and television producers. While digital delivery is becoming a bigger slice of the pie, the overall pie is shrinking fast.
In virtually all these corners of the media world, executives are fighting to hold onto as much of their old business as possible while transitioning to digital — a difficult process that NBC Universal’s chief executive, Jeff Zucker, has described as “trading analog dollars for digital pennies.”
The reality that we all will have to work harder and move in numerous directions at once necessitates teamwork. Not only do we have to work together, we will have to share what we learn along the way. Many in the film industry have felt that privately held knowledge has been necessary for individual success. If we don’t truly share information, there will not be an industry to work in. Atlantic’s success optimistically can be viewed on what a concentrated effort might bring all of us. It also illustrates what a vast undertaking it will be:
“I think we’ve figured it out,” said Julie Greenwald, president of Atlantic Records. “It used to be that you could connect five dots and sell a million records. Now there are 20 dots you can connect to sell a million records.”
Truly Free Filmmakers have more than those twenty dots to connect and that can not be done by working alone. For each of those filmmakers fortunate to be selected for Sundance this year, they each need to reach for a different dot and pass it along to each other.
What can I say? I love lists. I maintain many: My favorite things; Directors I want to work with; 100 Ways To Make A Million. I am sure you’ve got own.
One of things on my List Of Why I Love Lists is that it is so easy to forget, and with forgetting can come despair, that is until we re-cognize what we already knew. Lists lift us out of this swamp. I don’t despair. I HOPE.
If this was the year that everyone believed the sky fell (and it did in terms of the unregulated greed based economic system our world has embraced for far too long), it will hopefully be recognized as the moment when we really entered the Free Culture Era. But the hard things, the bad things, still attract our attention. We will remember that 2008 is the year no one could sell their film. We will remember that 2008 is the year that labor strife and cooperate greed conspired for a work shutdown. I will certainly remember that it is the year that I did not have a film in production for the first time in 20 years.
But that is not the memory I want to have. I want to remember 2008 as the year that everything started to change for the better. We need to look and recognize all the positive signs for change that are out there.
Let’s build the list of the reasons TFFilmmakers have HOPE FOR THE FUTURE. Let’s make the list at least 52 entries long so we can get through this next year.
Share with me some of your ideas. Here’s my start (by no means in the order of importance):
- It is so easy to blog that everyone could have their own page in a matter of minutes. I thought about having a blog for several months before I made the leap and then I was up and on it a matter of minutes.
- The more people are exposed to quality films (and culture in general) the more their tastes gravitate towards quality films. I would love to see an actual study on this, but I was told it by one of the Netflix honchos in that their members gravitate to the “auteurs” the longer they’ve been a member.
- Committed Leaders To A Open Source Film Culture have emerged. I have been incredibly inspired by all the work that those I have labeled as Truly Free Film Heroes have done. Even more so I am moved by their incredible generosity in their sharing of all they have learned.
- The Tools To Take Personal Control are available, numerous, and fun. There are more than I can list (but the TFF Tools List is a pretty good start).
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Great Website: Oobject
You may have caught this website before, when we linked to their list of the Top Fifteen Rolling Ball Sculptures but we want to elevate even higher and put in the Nose’s Faves.
OObject posts almost daily new lists of great videos and photos on all kinds of cool things: light sculptures, awesome car designs, steampunk engines, moving walkways, even money making machines. They are an excellent curator of some of our favorite things. Where else could we find a remote control cockroach? Or a list of cars like the one above?
I was completely inspired by Danny Boyle’s SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE. In many, many ways: Form and content aligned; Not only was it about the world today, it was about film history and where it can go; It had total respect for the audience and desired to both please, inform, and encourage. We all need to reach higher.
The list could go on and on for me, but a key thing was the soundtrack. Man, did it rock. And take me to other places. Immediately it went to the top of my wish list. And now I can listen to it free. Legally, too. That’s something to be thankful for.
Rhapsody has added it to it’s library. Rhapsody allows you to listen to 25 tracks for free a month. So that means you can listen to the Slumdog soundtrack right now. It may be early morning, but we are dancing in our house. This soundtrack is to me what Last King Of Scotland’s soundtrack was previously. Why is it that when Brits go to other countries to make great films, they come back with great soundtracks?
Any way, you can join the party and listen to it by just clicking here. Just then add each song to your player and let your ass do all the rest. Happy Thanksgiving!
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How We Watch What We Watch
I look forward to Thanksgiving weekend as a time to catch up on my viewing. I suspect I will see three or so films in the theater and the same amount on DVD. I will probably watch a few video clips on YouTube and some trailers elsewhere on line.
But I recognize I am not the normal American. You probably aren’t either. Last sunday’s AO Scott article on this subject had this nifty chart to accompany it. Film in the traditional sense is at the bottom.
