Author: Ted Hope

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Truly Free Film

Forward! Facebook Advertising

By Rob Millis

Facebook ads are perhaps the most targeted promotional tool available to filmmakers on a limited budget. Instead of tying your ads to search terms, Facebook advertising enables targeting based on location, particular interests, even employer.

Let’s say you’re promoting a documentary film about the Boston Marathon. Instead of spending money to reach a million people interested in “running” (who may not really care about marathons), you can focus ads more accurately by reaching people who have expressed clear interest in specific races like Bay to Breakers or the Boston Marathon, as well as those who have indicated that they are training for a marathon.

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Issues and Actions

Just Because You Can, Doesn’t Mean You Should

Let’s say you are one of the biggest corporations in the universe, and you own the most successful company in a particular sector, and they in turn own one of the most popular purveyors of a particular type of product; and, well, in some ways there is no denying that each of you are revolutionary.  Between the three of you, you have provided an unprecedented structure that allows anyone to reach virtually everyone at what appears — on first blush — to be no cost, or at least very little.  On top of that, you give people a way to actually make a few cents on what they love doing anyway (pennies for your passion, pennies for your passion — we don’t even need a rallying cry in this world of win win).  Does this alleviate the need to work ethically or even just the need to do the right thing?

Not sure what I am writing about?  Well….   If you haven’t yet read or heard about the contracts that Machinima, Maker Studios, and other YouTube partners have evidently demanded their makers sign, you might want to.  

But be warned this knowledge may cause harmful

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Truly Free Film

The State Of Cinema (As Per Christine Vachon)

I totally dig that the San Francisco Film Society does these “State Of Cinema” Addresses.  Jonathon Lethem, Kevin Kelly, Tilda Swinton.  CHRISTINE VACHON.

Video streaming by Ustream

 

Who will it be this year? Some of you

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Truly Free Film

Blue Potato — Knowing the Film Market

By Kavita Pullapilly 
 
Following a successful and well-curated Sundance Film Festival, this is shaping up to be a great year for independent films. But in order to be financially viable, significant planning and business strategies need to happen in script development and pre-production to make indie films appealing to the global market. 
 
Last year, award-winning filmmakers Aron Gaudet and Gita Pullapilly worked with a team from Harvard Business School to develop an innovative strategy for independent filmmakers and studios to work together successfully.  With their new feature film, Blue Potato, Aron and Gita have now begun implementing this road map that will allow both the filmmaker and distribution partner to limit their risk, increase audience reach, and maximize potential profitability.

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Truly Free Film

Diary of a Film Startup: Post # 20: Video-on-Demand Sales Tips

By Roger Jackson

Previously: Searching for Green Card

It’s now exactly 6 months since we started building KinoNation. We’re very close — a month or so — from opening the platform to the world. We now have deals with all the major US video-on-demand outlets, plus several non-US outlets. And doing more deals every week. There are never less than 2 films being uploaded to us at any time, and we have well over 100 movies in the Private Beta. We’ll have a representative at Berlinale and the European Film Market next week, and I’ll be in London in the spring to cement a series of deals with VoD outlets and content owners there. We have big — but also realistic — plans for 2013.

So I now feel moderately qualified to give advice on how to make a film stand out from the crowd — and it’s VERY crowded — in the world of video-on-demand. It’s all too common for filmmakers to pour time and money and passion into making a film, and then fall short on some basic sales elements. Video-on-demand platforms are remarkably similar to video stores. Both are segmented by film genres, and both have lots of titles arranged in some sort of grid — whether online or on-demand TV or on store shelves — that encourage consumers to scan dozens or even hundreds of titles quite rapidly. And then move on. So you have to grab audience attention within a couple of seconds. That’s not much time.

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Issues and Actions

Replace “Journalist/Journalism” With: “Filmmaker/Filmmaking”

Reading this post by Jay Rosen in PressThink this morning, it sure is clear the Film Biz is besieged with many  of the same problems and misconceptions as Journalism is.  My thoughts below are a reflection through my lens of what Rosen wrote on his site:

Good stories are built on commitment & focus — which is very hard to do when you have to do something else to earn a living.  We can’t just rely on each

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