Category: Truly Free Film

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

The Case for Widescreen Key Art

Post author By Ted Hope
Post date January 28, 2014
180 Comments on The Case for Widescreen Key Art

by Bill Cunningham

Ted invited me to expand on a comment I made here on how the case can be made for rethinking the design standard for movie poster artwork in order to maximize the visual value to today’s audience, considering a film will likely be discovered online. What I’m proposing is taking the movie poster and turning it on its side, filling our view on the screen and our heads with storytelling potential. Not so much a radical rethink of key art design, but the next step in what has been an evolutionary process tied to distribution. People do judge a movie by its poster, and if independent filmmakers and distributors are to maximize their resources without maximizing costs, then the role and design of key art is definitely in order.

THE ROLE OF THE MOVIE POSTER

A picture is worth a thousand words, but a (good) movie poster ignites a thousand ideas – an expression of both art and commercial intent, selling the movie to the audience. It does this through craft, style, technique and marketing – ballyhoo made manifest. This is why key art is important, especially to the indie, because if it makes a positive impression, it means the potential for financial as well as artistic success. The better your key art, the lower the sales resistance.

THE TRADITIONAL MOVIE POSTER / KEY ART

It’s important that we understand the basics of what we call the movie poster. The standard movie poster has become a vertical 27” x 40” design originally made to fit inside a theater’s display. [This ignores lobby cards, window cards, the insert, the half-sheet, and the 3 and 6-sheets as well as the European and Asian anomalies.

Tags art, Bill Cunningham, Design, Guest Post, Marketing

Truly Free Film

Screen Forever 2013: Co-Financing with the USA

Post author By Ted Hope
Post date January 27, 2014
1 Comment on Screen Forever 2013: Co-Financing with the USA

by Andrew Einspruch

Filmmaker Andrew Einspruch attended Screen Forever 2013, the conference of Screen Producers Australia, this past year and wrote a series of articles for the event, which he’s kindly allowing us to reprint here. These articles originally appeared in Screen Hub, the daily online newspaper for Australian film and television professionals.

A session at Screen Forever looked at some of the ins and outs of financing a feature film with some amount of money from the USA. Andrew Einspruch reports that success factors range from making sure the Aussie elements of the project work to developing credibility as a producer.

One of the key differences between making a film with a USA-based company versus, say, a Canadian, British or French firm, is there is no official co-production treaty. In fact, co-pro treaties are in place specifically to counter the might of Hollywood.

Even so, plenty of Australian productions have a USA component, and the lack of official co-pros simply means the deals have to stack up on some other basis. These elements were explored in a session called “Working with the USA: the Eagle and the Kangaroo”, moderated by lawyer Craig Emanuel of Loeb & Loeb, and which brought together producer Tony Ginane of FG film Productions, sales agent Clay Epstein of Arclight Films, distributor and EP Greg Coote of Larrikin and China Lion, and Tracey Vieira, representing Ausfilm.

The bad news is that the USA remains difficult terrain. It is still very hard to pre-sell North American rights, and the trend with studios (as reported previously) is they are making fewer, more expensive, mostly tentpole films. This, in turn, puts pressure on North American distribution, and forces projects to get financed without it.

Tags Andrew Einspruch, Australian International Documentary Conference, co-production, financing, Guest Post, screen forever 2013, Screen Hub

Truly Free Film

Tell Me Something: Advice from Martin Scorcese

Post author By Ted Hope
Post date January 24, 2014
46 Comments on Tell Me Something: Advice from Martin Scorcese

Jessica Edwards of First Film Co. has kindly offered us some excerpts from a new book she edited Tell Me Something: Advice from Documentary Filmmakers. Look forward to more excerpts in the weeks ahead, and for now enjoy these words of wisdom from Martin Scorcese:

The only thing you need to make a film is to not be afraid of anybody or anything. John Cassavetes said that. John was inspiring, but he was also direct. He knew that there was no time to be indecisive, or to worry about whether the decisions you’ve already made were right or wrong, good or bad. I think that for John, there was no such thing as a “mistake”—you can only move forward, you can never move backward, and you can profit from absolutely everything.

Many times in my life, I’ve told the story of John’s advice to me after he saw a cut of Boxcar Bertha, a picture I made for Roger Corman. In essence, what he said to me was: Just concentrate on making the movies you need to make. Of course, many directors have approached this in many different ways—Claude Chabrol, for example, who never stopped working and made many, many movies, personal and impersonal. Even John made pictures like Gloria and Too Late Blues. The point is this: Protect the ones that you need to make, keep them alive for yourself, and then make them.

Tags advice for documentary filmmakers, directing, Documentaries, Guest Post, jessica edwards, martin scorcese, tell me something

Truly Free Film

Standing On A Seesaw, Balanced On The Cliff’s Edge, Reaching For The Brass Ring Clutched In The Eagle’s Claw

Post author By Ted Hope
Post date January 23, 2014
81 Comments on Standing On A Seesaw, Balanced On The Cliff’s Edge, Reaching For The Brass Ring Clutched In The Eagle’s Claw

Producing is a precarious business. You should not do it if you don’t believe that by producing your projects you can make the world a better place or advance the art form. You are not just the one that feels they know what must be done. You have to know that the unknowable becoming known through your labors is a real possibility. Producers can’t be the people who settle for the way things are. They shouldn’t be the sort that takes the easy route or are willing to sacrifice nuance or beauty in service of just getting it done.

The goal of every film should be

Tags ambition, creative process, producing

Truly Free Film

$50,000 and a Church in Brookyn

Post author By Ted Hope
Post date January 22, 2014
3 Comments on $50,000 and a Church in Brookyn

by Matt Thurm

ROVER (www.ROVERthemovie.com), which premiered this week in Narrative Competition at Slamdance 2014, tells the story a hopeless hapless cult leader who, losing control of his flock, fakes a prophecy instructing them to make a movie in hopes of bringing them together.

But the real story of ROVER is how it came to be. The film was entirely reverse-engineered from the question: “what kind of story can you tell with a beautiful – but broken-down – 19th-century church and $50,000?”

Tags Guest Post, Matt Thurm, Rover, Slamdance

Truly Free Film

Nobody Knows Anything #1: Marketing and the Collective Unconscious

Post author By Charles Peirce
Post date January 22, 2014
51 Comments on Nobody Knows Anything #1: Marketing and the Collective Unconscious

By Charles Peirce

Nobody1-300 In Adventures in the Screentrade, William Goldman famously opined that “nobody knows anything” in Hollywood, a curious concession for a man with such a marked record of success. The truth, though, is that Hollywood has always known something — its very business centered not just on creating hits but also on predicting future ones.

Originally the Studio System developed a series of principals which, if not always guaranteeing success, at least mitigated against disaster. That legacy persists today, albiet more loosely: in coverage, screenwriting structure, and the identifying of a film with its stars. The rise of the blockbuster didn’t undo the Studio System legacy, but it did change the metrics of success — once the end product becomes less bodies in seats and more associated merchandise, the thinking on what makes a good movie changes significantly. New aims call for new methods, and Hollywood has evolved its strategies with the times.

Truly Free Film

Beer Buzz: Strong Bones Discovered in “Fragile” Cinematic Ecosystem

Post author By Ted Hope
Post date January 21, 2014
51 Comments on Beer Buzz: Strong Bones Discovered in “Fragile” Cinematic Ecosystem

By Steven C. Beer

The state of the independent film business is a hot topic this week following the January 12 Manohla Dargis New York Times piece. The article cautions that an abundance of “lackluster, forgettable and just plain bad” films flooding New York City theaters distracts the entertainment media, overwhelms audiences and threatens to destroy the health of our “already fragile cinematic ecosystem”. As we head to Park City to attend the Sundance and Slamdance film festivals, Dargis urgently requests that distributors stop buying so many movies. She proposes that we focus on curation, not consumption.

While the article makes some good points, it also raises some critical questions about the condition of the American Independent Cinema. How many films should be produced and released in theaters and on other platforms (cable, internet, broadcast, DVD) each year? Is it possible to have too many films?

Tags Beer Buzz, curation, Guest Post, independent film, Manohla Dargis, Steven C Beer

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