Category: Truly Free Film

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

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Truly Free Film

Integrating Entrepreneurial Training Into Graduate Film Programs

I was excited to learn recently about how entrepreneurial skills are in integral part of the University of Central Florida MFA filmmaking program.  I gave a talk at LAFF on “The Rise Of  The Artist Entrepreneur” and find many filmmakers woefully under-equipped to navigate the demands of both survival and creation in today’s world.  Randy Finch helped start UCF’s innovative program in 2005 and I asked him to explain it a bit further. This is his guest post:

By Randy Finch
Not all filmmakers want to know about writing business plans, entity formation, the uses of social media and DIY distribution strategies. The MFA program at UCF is not for everyone. Our program is designed for a small group of microbudget digital filmmakers. If you are not prepared to do everything (including raising your own financing) that it takes to get a feature made and marketed for under $50,000, we’re not for you.
While I agree with Ted that financing, distribution and marketing should be woven into today’s independent filmmaker’s education, I also understand the recent backlash from filmmakers who have no interest in these subjects. The reason most of us got into this was not to become experts in distribution, marketing or finance. But in the 20+ years since I first became an independent filmmaker, I’ve been compelled to learn about VHS deals, sale leasebacks, foreign presales, negative pick-ups and all sorts of other arcane (and now mostly useless) business practices.

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Truly Free Film

Can We Build A Bigger Community Of Film Lovers?

I recently got a message from filmmaker Keith Bearden, the director of Meet Monica Velour.  He wrote:

Just got back from the Seattle Film Festival, which in a city of 1.5 million fills 500-800 seat theatres for a month with 400 plus films–that’s a huge percentage of the population seeing films that have no publicity, including many that will open in theatres or on pay per view days or weeks later. Even in a very sleepy, tech savvy city with bad parking, they still get people to stand in line for indie, foreign and odd films. Is it because they have created a cultural context for seeing these films, that people are part of a cultural event? Something social that people can talk about before and after, like going to a sports game or rock concert? How does that translate into cinemas in other cities not part of a film festival?

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Truly Free Film

Seize the Power – Why You Should Pay Attention to the LAFF Symposium this Weekend

We are now treated to another Jon Reiss guest post.  Jon holds the world record for the most comments on a single TrulyFreeFilm post, but he is one of our New Model Gurus, helping to pave the path to the emergence of a sustainable Artist/Creator Middle Class.   We he speaks, I listen.

Two weeks ago I wrote a guest post here about the need to educate filmmakers on distribution and marketing their films.  This weekend the Los Angeles Film Festival is hosting a truly wonderful event which I am proud to have developed in collaboration with LAFF and Film Independent (with strong push and support from Ted):  Seize the Power: A Marketing and (DIY)stribution Symposium.

The Symposium is designed to focus on the nuts and bolts solutions to the current distribution and marketing malaise plaguing our industry.  The intention is to provide an introduction to a wealth of new tools for filmmakers (and all artists/media content creators) as well as strategic guidance from many of the key practitioners and thought leaders in our field.  It is an antidote to the concerns of too much talk talk talk on this subject with little true education.

In addition there is a non-public component that you can participate in via twitter.  I will be giving a distribution and marketing boot camp to the LAFF competition filmmakers Friday June 18th 9am – 12:30pm and 2:30pm – 5pm and Saturday June 19th from 9am-11:30am.  All times PST.   We will be tweeting bullet points on #totbo  We have done this in the workshops I have given in the past month – and we have found that people around the world start to participate and chime in – creating a global discussion around these topics.

The Symposium: Starting Saturday afternoon at 1pm – Ted kicks it off with a presentation on the need for the artist entrepreneur to encourage filmmakers to think expansively about their creative output in order to create sustainable careers.  

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Truly Free Film

The Power Is In The Shoe – the inspiration for politics in film (and film in politics)

Although I understand it in terms of the dictates of the infrastructure, it has always surprised me that we don’t have more films that are truly about politics and the world we live in.  It seems that creators are afraid to even wade in those waters.  That can not be said about filmmaker Raoul Peck, who will be in NYC this weekend to present his latest feature “Moloch Tropical” at The Human Rights Festival.  I couldn’t resist asking him about the need for film to address politics, about where his inspirations come from. Today’s guest post is from Raoul, in reply.

I will always remember one of these rare press conference of then President GW Bush on the eve or after the bombardment of Bagdad by American forces. In the room the best and brightest mind of the world press. In particular the US pundits known for their incorruptible defense of freedom of speech.

And there we were, with a president obviously lying every single lines of his declaration, with nobody having enough guts to ask even one hard question, let alone to counter his transparent lies.

We came to a point where words didn’t mean anything anymore.

Flash forward, …years later in December 2008, the same president, another press conference, in Iraq.

There, for the lack of a better “word” to address the – again – lying president, this young journalist throw his shoe at him.

It was the only answer possible: absurdity, derision, ridicule.

With these same feelings I started to work on “Moloch Tropical”.

The ritual of democracy had reached such a cynical point, that only derision and irony could really address it.

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Truly Free Film

Looking Through The Rubble, Ending The Silence, Celebrating The Risktakers, Hoping For A Few Good Leaders

You’d think with all the collapse in the “Film Business” we’d have a whole lot more experimenting going on.  Or at the very least the encouragement for experimentation.  Why is it that everyone wants to keep doing it “business as usual”.  It’s broken!  Those days are over!  The sky has fallen!  Dust yourself off and let’s begin something new!  Stop sniveling.

It is a different business now than what it used to be.  There is no U.S. acquisition market for films, even if the movies are good.  Library value as an asset is a thing of the past (or at least libraries being something you could base easily predictable cash flow or resale on is over).  People don’t want to pay to see movies — unless they are the sort of culture (including niche culture) unifying event film.  It is truly hard to get people’s attention when they are overwhelmed with the plethora of choices — we are a world of distraction and rapid attention shift.  It is even more difficult to get people to talk about good stories, even when more are told and made than ever before. Everything requires more work and more thought than it used to.

Which is not to say that the art and industry of film is over.  Far from it.  It is just a different business.

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Truly Free Film

Why Can’t Producers Get Along & Work Well Together?

Today’s guest post is from NYC-based feature film producer Adam Brightman.

Recently I was asked by a couple of smart but fairly inexperienced producers some good questions about how producing teams can work well together (and not so well).  For better or worse, in my career, which is now in its third decade (ouch), I have averaged about 70/30 good to bad.  Maybe that is par for the course.  Maybe it is reflective of how much of my film work has been on non-studio, extremely challenging films.  In any case, since they asked, and since it is a crucial and, perhaps, unappreciated part of the filmmaking process, here are my thoughts.

1.  Everybody counts.  All producers on films today are important, and unless they are clearly dead weight or baggage (a star’s manager, an executive’s friend, what have you) then every producer makes a valuable contribution.  And whatever the credit one gets on a movie, if you are part of the producing team then you are a producer.  Plain and simple.  So as I said, everybody counts, and the producing teams that recognize and acknowledge that fact work well.  The ones that feel a need, for whatever reason, to undermine and minimize each other’s contributions do not work well.

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Truly Free Film

Seize The Power: LAFF’s Film Financing Conf Now TWO-DAY DIY MARKETING & DISTRIBUTION SYMPOSIUM

Film Independent sent out the following email:

We have spent the last ten years making the Film Financing Conference an invaluable experience for filmmakers, and as the industry is swept by very significant changes, we want to rise up to meet those changes with programs that meet filmmaker needs at this moment.  With that in mind, the Los Angeles Film Festival has created Seize the Power: A Marketing and (DIY)stribution Symposium, a new program specifically designed to help filmmakers navigate marketing and distribution in the growing age of new media and to promote an open dialogue on the impact and exciting possibilities the changes in our industry bring.

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