Author: Ted Hope

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Truly Free Film

Want to Add Thousands of Followers to Your Pinterest Page? Understand the Search Engine.

By Reid Rosefelt

We define and display ourselves in social media through our taste.  We show the books, movies, TV shows, theatre, music, technology, sports, food, and video games we like, and what we have to say about them.   Pinterest does that, with the difference being that it’s not as evanescent as Facebook and Twitter.  It’s not about what you said a minute or few hours ago, it’s relatively permanent.  It’s a series of baskets–your boards–in which you place your interests.  They are always there, you just keep putting more stuff in them.

Your boards are all dedicated to s

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Truly Free Film

Discovery and Appreciation: What Drives Them? A.S.A.C.A.

I think I look for a lot of the same features in apps as I do in live events.  I like things that take me to new things  that I appreciate.  Things.  Granted they are but a small piece of what I look for but things are a good start. Not being a material sort, my things might be different than yours.  My things are generally events, live or not.  Beyond those my eternal search often breaks down.  Why? The problem is that “I contain multitudes”.  No algorithm can  suss out what I really want. They fall far short of my identity, be it public or private. This true, thankfully, for most people — even if those motivated by the sale wish it weren’t so.

Curators struggle with it too.  But I go to festivals with the same hope I have when I look at twitter: show me that thing I did not yet know of that I will later cushion softly with fond nostalgia and invigorate later with aspiration for the future.  Can those qualities be defined? Yup. At least a bit.  They are the qualities we look for and hope to discover.  They are the qualities we appreciate and keep us coming back for more.  They are the qualities you want to have in your work, the presentation of it, the marketing.

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Truly Free Film

Its About The Art, Not The App

By John Root Stone 

Online video is exploding

The global market for online video is expected to grow to $37 billion by 2017. In April, according to Comscore, 182 million Americans – 83% of US Internet users – watched 38 billion videos online. This growth is fed by a vast and ever-growing supply of content that is original and archived, professional and amateur, and distributed across more platforms than anyone cares to remember.

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It’s a challenge and an opportunity

For filmmakers, this growth and complex market mix makes it increasingly difficult to find useful and profitable distribution channels. The film distribution hierarchy of yesteryear is flatter than ever with first run premium content competing nearly side-by-side with user-generated content (UGC) for the audience’s time. While this offers both challenges and opportunities to filmmakers, understanding how to take advantage of this new marketplace is anything but simple.

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Truly Free Film

The Cinema Giants Agree: The Film Biz As We Know It Is OVER. Now What?

Perhaps this blog is now obsolete (now wouldn’t that be excellent!).  Or maybe blogging just doesn’t work the way I hope it would (man, that would be a real shame!).  Perhaps change in the film business just about impossible. I am growing afraid it might well be — at least the kind that comes from positive and strategic influence as opposed to spontaneous or reactionary disruption (that kind of change that always is constant).  So what is the next step? And why the bleep do I have to ask?

What is going on in this world when everyone agrees that something is totally f*cked but no one with power appears to be doing anything substantial to improve it?  Are there secret plansof a new cultural infrastructure hatching and 

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Truly Free Film

Close Encounters Of The Implosion Kind

By Russ Collins

Gary Meyer wrote: I do not like to be a doom and gloom guy but I think there are big changes afoot for commercial cinemas, but not the scenario predicted here.  Steven Spielberg Predicts ‘Implosion’ of Film Industry

 
Like Gary, I am not a doom and gloom guy. However, it is tempting for older cinema artists (like Steven Spielberg and soon to retire artists like Steven Soderbergh or maybe it’s just filmmakers named Steven!) to see gloom in clouds of change. Change is hard. It frequently makes us feel discouraged or unfairly challenged. The shifting sands of change can cause us to see threats everywhere and feel the world as we know it will end.  However, maybe we feel this way because it’s true. The world as we know it will indeed come to an end because change is the only constant, and creativity in art, business and all things is frequently born from what might appear to be destructive forces brewed from dynamic change. It is a defining story of living; a baseline truth, an ever repeating cycle of human existence that the Hindu religion represents so effectively in the story Shiva, whose joyous dance of destruction celebrates the cycle of creation, preservation and dissolution.
 
SHIVA DANCED ON THE MOVIES IN THE 1950s
 
Movie attendance at theaters in the USA by the late 1940s appeared stable at 4 BILLION admissions per year.  By the early 1960s movie attendance at theaters had fallen dramatically and re-stabilized at around 1 billion admissions per year – the theatrical audiences was just 25% of what it had been 16 years earlier. It’s hard to imagine.

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Truly Free Film

Ancillary Rights, The Devil is in the Lawyer

by Andrew Einspruch

Filmmaker Andrew Einspruch recently attended the Australian International Documentary Conference and wrote a series of articles for the event, which he’s graciously allowed us to reprint here. These articles originally appeared in Screen Hub, the daily online newspaper for Australian film and television professionals.

“You learn the most when you have a success,” said Marcus Gillezeau of Firelight Productions. That’s because you find out what exactly you signed away and what you held onto in your contracts back in the beginning. He also said that there are only two times that people read their contracts – when something fails (so they can get out of it) or when something does well (so they can figure out how to get some of the money).

Gillezeau should know. His company is riding the success of Storm Surfers 3D, a feature film that follows on from their previous Storm Surfers TV series. As the award statues cluster on the mantle, more and more people want to get in on the action. He has become something of a self-made expert on ancillary rights, and shared some of that knowledge in a session at this year’s Australian International Documentary Conference.

Gillezeau started by putting this clause up on the screen:

All rights in all media now known or that may be invented in the future in all territories including the universe… and it’s territories and colonies… in-perpetuity.

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Truly Free Film

Why Pinterest Is More Effective Than Facebook

By Reid Rosefelt

Today many marketers are making twice as much money on Pinterest as they are on Facebook.   Does that mean that for you–my filmmaker and artist readers–Pinterest is worth twice as much of your precious time?   Yes, and there’s a simple reason.

All the big social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram have struggled to translate their large numbers into revenue.  Eventually, the costs to simply keep in operation get so astronomical that they throw up their hands in despair–and the only answer they can come up with is advertising.

On the other hand, the ability to market and promote is built into Pinterest’s DNA.   Pinterest is a colossally effective store that is as fun and addictive as “Angry Birds.”   Like that thing you’re looking at?  Click.  Buy.   It’s Google search on steroids.

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