We are on the verge of a new film culture and infrastructure.
I posted today at InfoWantsToBeFree on what should be one of the top concerns of all Truly Free Filmmakers in this coming year.
The Knight Citizen News Network site is a good resource for good advice on a lot of the issues that bloggers face.
The Knight Citizen News Network is a self-help portal that guides both ordinary citizens and traditional journalists in launching and responsibly operating community news and information sites and that assembles news innovations and research on citizen media projects.
We have gotten several requests from filmmakers regarding whom they could hire to help them design plans for their films. First, I think those filmmakers need to move beyond the focus on the film itself, and ask how they can design a web strategy for their work in general. But moving beyond that issue, I unfortunately don’t have many people to point them to (I would love to hear any recommendations you have). Fortunately, once again, a lot of great resources and individuals have been gathered over at The Workbook Project.
We started the list here (click to link). Now we continue onwards. We will only get to 52 with your help. What else gives you reasons to be hopeful for film culture?
Eugene Hernandez had a good post regarding festival prep on indieWIRE yesterday. Click on it here if you missed it.
“I think there is a moral imperative to articulate our path towards something better. Not to leave it a vague post-modernist muddle. Not to shirk from the complexity and realities of costs. And not even to expect everyone to consent.”
I was catching up and reading Kevin Kelly’s great blog The Technium. Although his post “The Missing Near Future” was about this world in general and all the various problems facing us, it is equally true about the state of independent film worldwide. His quote above could be our new mantra: we have to all articulate a plan.
With full-blown visuality, I should be able to annotate any object, frame or scene in a motion picture with any other object, frame or motion-picture clip. I should be able to search the visual index of a film, or peruse a visual table of contents, or scan a visual abstract of its full length. But how do you do all these things? How can we browse a film the way we browse a book?
There’s a lot of effort going on to blaze the path into the new future for film. I would have loved to have attended the MIT “Futures Of Entertainment” Conference. IndieWIRE ran a good story on it, focusing particularly on the “collaborative filmmaking” movement that they have also covered well in the past.
Jon Riess returns to TFF!:
I developed and teach a class at Cal Arts that addresses Ted’s concerns about making a living as a filmmaker. It’s called “Reel World Survival Skills: Everything I Wish I Had been Taught in Film School”. I developed the class because I as the title suggests, I would have been greatly served at the beginning of my film career had I been taught some very practical skills while I was attending the UCLA film school -at that time in my case – pitching.
While teaching for the past 8 years at LMU and I Cal Arts I noticed that the curriculums were still not teaching skills to prepare students for making a film career once they left school. So I developed this class – in addition to pitching it covers literary rights optioning and development, basic film contracts, financing, LLCs and web fund raising, grants, getting a job out of film school, writing resume’s and cover letters (which most people are shockingly deficient in), music videos, commercials and webisodes and then of course the fun wide world of film distribution – making a career from the films you make. The distribution component includes an overview of old distribution models but then leaves those behind for the new hybrid approach to distribution including: new film festival strategies, DIY theatrical and non theatrical distribution, DVD distribution, digital rights, traditional and non traditional marketing, Web 2.0, and most importantly new strategies for developing audiences – for your film and the film community at large.
I am currently in the process of writing a book based on this class – which I hope will be out next year. I am also preparing a weeklong crash course to offer to film schools based on the class and weekend seminars to offer to non film school folks. For the class I have assembled a ton of documents, contracts and articles that I give out on CD Rom. I am actually going to start posting these to my website by the time my 2nd article comes out in the next issue of Filmmaker Magazine. You will be able to sign up and download these documents for yourself. If you have any interest in any of this drop me an email at jon@jonreiss.com. You can also sign up for the mailing list on my website www.jonreiss.com to be notified of when the documents will be loaded, when the book is coming out or any seminars.
