We are on the verge of a new film culture and infrastructure.
By Mike Hedge
Every summer, deep in the Nevada desert, a temporary city is created by tens of thousands of people. This week-long celebration is known as Burning Man. Radical participation, gifting, self-reliance, and self-expression, are a few of the core principles.
After many years of post production, we have finally finished our huge participatory documentary, As The Dust Settles, which was shot out at Burning Man during the summer of 2008.
By Scott McMahon
Filmmakers, what comes to mind when you think of 1%?
The “Occupy Wall Street” movement perhaps?
1% Milk?
Hmm … maybe …
1% RULE OF THE INTERNET
(From Wikipedia, because it’s fact)
In Internet culture, the 1% rule is a rule of thumb pertaining to participation in an internet community, stating that only 1% of the users of a website actively create new content, while the other 99% of the participants only lurk.
A creative life is a precarious thing. Actions occur that could profoundly effect your ability to earn a living doing what you love. We get blindsided again and again, sometimes not recognizing things until they are too late to alter them. It’s one of the reasons I have tried to meticulously track for you what are the good thing and bad things happening in indie film these days. Yet, it seems to me we all need to do a better job of tracking them if we don’t want to get trapped in a future we won’t be part of..
My thought is that we should be able to define a series of issues in which we can put events, ideas, and articles into as they occur, helping each other stay on top of them.
The first step is to define the issues. That is what I am doing today .
By Roger Jackson
Previously: Quality Control or Why Films Fail
Filmmakers frequently upload their movies to Kinonation after they’ve submitted to Amazon’s CreateSpace service. This is a truly excellent service for book authors, musicians and filmmakers to self-publish their creative work and make it available on Amazon.com. And in the context of films, a good way to make DVDs available without upfront expense.
BUT: for getting a film onto Amazon there are many reasons to use a specialist VOD aggregator like Kinonation, instead of CreateSpace. I’m not saying that out of self interest. Yes, Kinonation (or any aggregator) takes a fee or percentage of gross revenue – in our case 20%. But it’s much more about video quality, speed, marketing and, above all, access to many more Amazon US and global platforms, including Amazon Prime.
Building a business is an incredibly challenging task. You must recognize a problem. You must find a solution. You must structure a business model that is viable, strong, and withstanding. You must raise money on an idea alone. You must assemble a team. You must prove a market. You must acquire a customer base. You must create. You must operate efficiently and effectively. You must scale. Most importantly – you must provide a return.
By Paul Osborne
There’s been a recent battle-cry within the independent film community – lead by folks like Ted Hope and Jon Reiss – urging us filmmakers to publish the revenue generated by our movies, specifically in regard to new forms of distribution. Unlike the weekly box office reports of studio films, the actual figures for indies, particularly those using newer release methods such as Video-On-Demand, are hard to come by. Without them, and subsequently without any way of determining the success or failure of specific releases, it makes perfecting and improving new avenues of distribution quite difficult. How do you know what’s working, and what’s not, if you don’t see the results?
As every facet of the film industry has experienced, the digital era has drastically shifted the economics of how films are produced, marketed, and distributed. Camera technology has reached a level that provides filmmakers at any stage of their career the ability to produce content with the potential of landing a fruitful distribution deal as the world has witnessed with films such as Beast of The Southern Wild, Like Crazy, Another Earth, and Martha Marcy May Marlene – all produced at 1M or under and distributed theatrically through studios. 
