Author: Ted Hope

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Truly Free Film

Diary of a Film Start-Up Part 7: New Mantra: Do More, Faster

By Roger Jackson

Previously: Late Nights and Early Breakthroughs

 

Latest & Greatest

Lots more great films submitted to our Private Beta launch this week. The quality and diversity of the filmmaking is impressive. Every time we watch one of the trailers we’re reminded of why we’re building KinoNation — to make it simple for movies like these to actually get released, exhibited and watched “on-demand” by the global audience that undoubtedly exists for them. I talked to Marianne Hettinger, director of the delightful Mango Tango. Marianne submitted her award-winning film to KinoNation at least partly because — unlike traditional distributors — we’re not seeking a “lock-up” commitment of 10+ years. In fact, there’s no lock-up at all, beyond what is required by any VoD platform that selects a KinoNation movie. Meanwhile,

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Truly Free Film

Do We Know What We Learned From Our Film Experiences?

I have been doing a fair amount of interviewing lately.  I need to staff up as part of my new mission.  Team building is an art, but it’s been awhile since I had to put one together that would last.  It’s a bit different when you staff up for a film.  Sure a feature is a long distance run, but it is not a marathon.  I would like to find the folks I will be with for a very long time in San Francisco.  Luckily for me, there is a pretty great group already in place, but there are still some vacancies.

Interviews have become a sort of standard fodder for humor in film.  Perhaps that is a legacy from TRAINSPOTTING…  As a result every time I ask one of those standard issue questions I feel like I am mocking myself.  Still though they are useful.  But the real hypocrisy is that I probably can not answer them myself.  I do think each movie I have made so far has changed me, but I am not sure if I can name how.

It strikes me that we would all be better filmmakers if we tried to name what we learned from each of our movies.

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The Next Good Idea

“If We Can Build This, We Can Build Anything”

The Invisible Bike Helmet means that a sustainable indie film biz & culture that benefits the creators & appreciators is 1000% possible.

What about that logic do you fail to understand?

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These Are Those Things

Punk Rock’s Cranky Old Man Speaks The Truth

I saw Black Flag live for the first time around 1984 and they blew my mind, full throttle.  To see Henry Rollins powered by the band’s onslaught was to see rage and force and commitment unleashed.  It was scary fun and is forever seared onto my DNA. I owe a debt to that band (among others).  That must be why I find it so much fun to see him now tell it like it is, in his “cranky old man” guise — but he really gets it right, and you don’t have to be a “young person” to need to be reminded of this advise.  It is not fair, but so what?  Be stronger and don’t let their good fortune or bad ways get in the way of what you know must be done.

But oh man was he anything  but that back when:

 And check out this show too when it really was just people in a garage letting loose.

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Bowl Of Noses

Total Awesomeness: HexaFlexagons

Math is fun.  It may look like magic but it is not.

Thanks to Dan McGuire and iO9 for the tips.

Categories
These Are Those Things

Beautiful & Sad, Confused & Lost… Glorious.

Dash Shaw (Bodyworks, Bottomless Bellybutton), John Cameron Mitchell, Sigur Ros.  What more could you want?

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Truly Free Film

‘Personalized TV’: Why I Made a Gay Web Series

by Jon Marcus

I am a single gay man. I date, and I have sex. I’m not bipolar, or a murderer, or a drug addict, and I don’t toss snappy punchlines into every conversation. For all the groundbreaking gains that gay characters have recently made on TV, I don’t see myself anywhere onscreen when I go to the movies or flip through channels. Equality is about a lot of things for me, and in a time when I see proliferating ads for “quirky” or “unconventional” lead characters on TV, I would like to jump past the part where we fight for “gay” to be another quirk, right to the place where it’s so normal that seeing us kiss isn’t still controversial.

I didn’t get beaten up as a kid, and I haven’t faced a lot of overt discrimination in my life, but

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