Category: Truly Free Film

We are on the verge of a new film culture and infrastructure.

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Truly Free Film

What Happened To Indie Film Over The Last Decade? (Pt 2 of 3)

Yesterday, I started my reflection on the last decade of American Indie Film.  I will conclude it tomorrow (I promise).  Today, I wonder what opportunity did we miss over the last decade.

There wasn’t really ever a transfer of power in the film biz, was there?  During the growth of AmerIndie, Hollywood remained a business of blockbusters.  Yes, previously underserved audiences got full on banquets of offerings as the menu of filmed entertainments grew more diverse, but the clamoring  hordes born from  the niches didn’t climb the castle walls as some have claimed; the same power sat on the same throne as before.  Fanboys & geeks were inevitably the masters once Hollywood embraced the logic of tent poles — so there is nothing surprising about their current reign.  And yes, Hollywood’s current crop of top directors were born from that indie big bang of the nineties, but for those directors, Indie always seemed more like a training ground than sort of a manifesto.  And the power in the Hollywood system, still rarely rests with the directors.

What is it that happened between Indie’s growth in the 1990’s and now?  What did the last decade do to the hopes and dreams of  The Indie Wave?  

Continue reading “What Happened To Indie Film Over The Last Decade? (Pt 2 of 3)”

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Truly Free Film

Tic-Toc: Thinking About Generations & Opportunity (Pt 1 of 3)

I was reflecting at the end of the year.  It got me to this three part post.  I offer you my apologies in advance for any rambling.  Stay tuned for the posts to come tomorrow and Saturday.

I graduated from high school in 1980, the year often associated with when the Hollywood Business fully became the Blockbuster Business.  When I graduated I thought I had a revolution to run (even if I wasn’t prepared to run it), but I didn’t get around to finding the film business for a few more years.

I was fortunate in the timing of my professional &  artistic pursuits that I could benefit from the DIY aesthetic, the approach of the first wave of punk rock (circa 1977), and political events like the class antagonism of the Reagan Years, and the fear & consequences of the AIDS epidemic.  Add to that the prevailing post-modern, multi-culti, deconstructionist sway of academia, the birth of a new distribution platform (VHS video), and Hollywood’s abandonment of the complex and personal.  What could have been a more perfect storm for the coming wave of American Indies?

Circumstances gave me and my generation of filmmakers opportunity (even if some paid a high price).  Has such an opportunity come again over the next thirty years?  Did we miss it?

As fortunate as I have been, I think it does not compare to the opportunity appearing before us now.

Continue reading “Tic-Toc: Thinking About Generations & Opportunity (Pt 1 of 3)”

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Truly Free Film

Filmmaker Sent To Google Jail For Building THE NEW MODEL

Today’s guest post is from Diary Of  A Bad Lad producer, Jon Williams.  This news was pretty shocking to me.  It is sure to evolve as the year goes on, but Dylan Martin’s ordeal should concern anyone that is striving to produce a Truly Free Film model.  BE SURE TO CLICK IN TO DYLAN’s ARTICLE.  What Jon describes as Dylan’s Kafka-esque nightmare with Google is nothing short of a grand tragedy of a hero learning how it can all work and being profoundly penalized for the knowledge.  This is sure to get a lot of people buzzing.

I want to draw your attention to a recent article, “Adsense, no sense at all –
what it’s like being sacked by a computer…” by Dylan Martin (http://www.duckworksmagazine.com/11/columns/guest/winter/index.htm).
I think it’s particularly relevant when it comes to ‘new distribution models’ (NDMs).

Over the past couple of years or so there’s been a whole slew of books published, and seminars organised, promoting internet-based film marketing and distribution models. Often the author is someone who makes a living as an internet marketing consultant, or someone who made a DIY-distributed documentary with a clear niche-market target who’s found that writing internet marketing manuals and doing speaking engagements is a much better and more reliable way of making a living. But little of this is of any use to indie feature filmmakers.

Often the disconnection results in bafflement. How can you, as the advice goes, build an audience for a film which you haven’t even got into development? If it’s a feature you can’t, unless you happen to be an established auteur, that is.

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Truly Free Film

Road Trip! A Creative Work To Unite Filmmakers

Today’s guest post is from filmmaker Lucas McNelly.

Earlier this year, I made a film in the middle of nowhere called UP COUNTRY, a thriller about a fishing trip gone wrong, set deep in the Northern Maine woods. It’s tricky making a film several hundred miles from a city, in a town that has so few residents it doesn’t even have a name. There’s no rental houses, no hotels, no Starbucks, no airport, and no community of filmmakers to work with. You have to bring everything with you, including the cast and crew. There are no local resources. And while that’s a daunting hurdle to overcome, in the end it frees you, allowing the production to pull people in from all over the country. You quickly realize that there’s great filmmakers all over the place, not just in the usual places, and not just where you live.

Sure, you already know that, but it’s something else entirely to see it in person.

It got me thinking about how over the last year or so there seems to have been an influx of filmmakers who are making a name for themselves outside of NY and LA, thanks to the rise of social media and transmedia all those web 2.0 buzzwords we’re always hearing about. Whereas before, you had to be in NYC or LA to get your projects made, people are starting to find ways to be successful in out of the way places like Minnesota and Idaho and Georgia and the deep woods of Northern Maine. How? What are they doing to make that happen? And just how connected are we by social media and all of our hip technology?

That’s why I’ve decided to embark on quite possibly the craziest project around.

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Truly Free Film

Recognize The Time We Are Living In

If you didn’t notice this is a new year.  It is also a new age.  My resolution is to help all filmmakers and members of the film industry to understand it.  Hopefully we can also all get started on adapting for this Age too.

This is The Age of Access & Surplus.

This is no longer the Age of Control & Shortages (that was last decade).

These times require New Rules & New Emphasis:

  1. Discovery
  2. Participation
  3. Demystification

We need to conceive of both our creative and business practices in terms of how they incorporate these three elements.

When 45,000 films are made globally each year

Continue reading “Recognize The Time We Are Living In”

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Truly Free Film

Slow Print, Slow Films…

There’s been more chatter about The Death Of The Book, than there has been about even The Death Of Film, yet the book has proven to be pretty damn resilant as it morphs into new forms.  We can only hope that film follows suit.  The LA Times had a nice overview on the opportunities that digital offers over print, and vice versa.  It can’t help prod you a bit to answer what can be analogous in the film space to some of the innovative solutions both sides of the publishing world that the film biz can mimic and expand upon.

Publishing also shares many of the vulnerabilities that film does

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Truly Free Film Uncategorized

New Blog Sections: I Need Your Help

You may have noticed on the bottom right hand corner of this HopeForFilm blog that I’ve started having a roll of other indie film thought bloggers — rather an ever changing list of their most recent postings.  Hopefully you already follow all of these good minds, but regardless I think they are all raising issues about making indie films that can’t be missed — and hence their inclusion on this site.  These are smart folks sharing their knowledge and musings — providing the crucial ingredients needed for the culture to work better.  I am sure there are others I should include too, so let me know of them if you find them first.

I have added a similar blog role on LMBF “Aid To Making Better Films” but could use some suggestions there.  I would also like to add curators to TheseAreThoseThings and welcome suggestions.  Issues&Actions has a good list “YouAreNeededToDoSomethingNow” but they all slant towards Net Neutrality and I could use recommendations for more general film issues.  I would like to do the same for TheNextGoodIdea (and have some ideas for that) and BowlOfNoses.  Your help is appreciated.

I’ve long dreamt of an indie film journal that wasn’t about deals or celebrity, but was about process: creative, production, and presentation — a journal that was about the Hows, and the Whys, and the How Comes?.  This is my step towards that work.  I KNOW I would read such a journal.  Would you?  Can we build it?

And while I am at it, I have another question for you.  I’ve noticed some blogs have a curated twitter follow list, providing a feed of select individuals.  Would you like me to include such a thing here on HopeForFilm or Truly Free Film?  Perhaps the same folks who blog articles are currently being featured?  Anyone I forgot? If so, please let me know why they should be included.

Just trying to make it all a little bit better, step by step, with your help and input.