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Truly Free Film

Screen Forever 2013: Dude, Where’s My Audience?

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.

With VOD, catch-up viewing, second screens, time-shifting, cord cutting and all manner of changes looming over the content consumption landscape, it makes sense to ask, as a session did at Screen Forever 2013, “Sorry, Where Has My Audience Gone?” Andrew Einspruch tells us that the answer might surprise.

Let`s cut to the chase. Australian audiences are still couch potatoes. According to statistics shown by Dough Peiffer, CEO of OzTam, the TV audience measurement company, in 2008, the average time viewed (ATV) in the five main cities was 3:08. That`s three hours and eight minutes per person per day watching broadcast TV.

Flash forward to 2013, and the number is smaller, but not a lot — 3:03. So even with all the new technologies, devices and competing media, the amount of time Aussies sit in front of the box has been pretty steady.

Not what you might have guessed. If the question is “where`s the audience gone”, the answer, at one level, is “nowhere”.

Total use of the TV set has actually gone up, even if what is being done with it is in the throes of shifting. Live viewing declined from 2010-11 to 2012-13 from 12.5% to 11.7%. In the same period, playback went from 0.7% to 1.0%. The biggest change is everything else, the “Other Screen Usage” category, which went from 2.9% to 3.8%. This is all the other things people do with their sets, like playing with the XBox, watching a DVD, or streaming from the Apple TV.

So changes are happening, just not at a cataclysmic rate (yet). Take time-shifted viewing as an example, where people watch a show within seven days of the live broadcast. The most time shifted program in 2013 was the final ofPacked to the Rafters, which saw an extra 257,000 people watch the show after the original broadcast, an increase of just under 20%. 

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Truly Free Film

Nobody Knows Anything #3: What Makes A Film Successful?

By Charles Peirce  

Nobody3-300There’s a certain watercooler betting-pool mentality that accompanies the box office results of movies, as though their success were completely encapsulated in a single opening weekend’s results. This despite the fact that everybody knows Hollywood accounting is particularly slippery, that budgets never reveal the accompanying marketing costs of films, that foreign market revenue is increasingly important to the success of many films, and that ancillarly sales can be a primary rather than secondary revenue stream. Nonetheless, we seem to equate box office numbers with whether a film worked, whether it’s worth anyone’s time, and whether it’s going to ruin somebody’s career or save it.

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Truly Free Film

Why on Earth Would I Give Away My Academy Award Shortlisted Film For Free?

By Rahul Gandotra

A few days ago I shared a sampler that allowed people to watch my film for free with a dear friend. Just to make sure the sampler worked and she could put it on her website, I followed up and got this response from her:

“I got everything and it works. I was just not sure that this [your film] is what you actually want to be giving away for free.” I paused and asked myself, “Yes, why the hell are you doing this?” – momentarily ignoring all the months of research I had done.

I replied, “Long story. For now, just share the sampler and let people see the film for free”. This post is about that “long story”.

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My film “The Road Home” is about a boy who escapes from his boarding school in the Himalayas to get back to his parents in England. As you might imagine, I poured my sweat and soul into making it. And given I didn’t want this film to be seen only by friends and family, I worked equally hard submitting the film to festivals and trumpeting from the rooftops of Facebook about each screening.

But I was left with a sour taste in mouth after my festival run. Why? Because I got invited to some festivals where I saw 30 people in a 500-seat theatre watching my film. All the while I’d continue to get Facebook messages and emails asking, “Hey when can I watch your film?” I’d reply, “Well it was playing in your city on this date.” And the common refrain I would hear is, “Why didn’t you email me?”

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Truly Free Film

Theatrical is Dead – Long Live Theatrical: Events, Experiences, Scarcity & The Age of Abundance

Part 3 of How to Make Money in the Age of Abundance

By Jon Reiss

Theatrical is Dead Long Live Theatrical. The holy grail of a theatrical release still rings as a delusion for many.  Fighting words still for untold thousands of filmmakers. Who doesn’t want their name in lights – long lines around the block – a packed theater of adoring fans.  I believe this live engagement with fans is crucial for artists.  But traditional theatrical is probably not the way you are going to do it.

In the first post in this series, I indicated that filmmakers need to create scarce resources in order to compete with the abundance of digital.  Today’s post will focus on events – or what I have termed Live Event/Theatrical. The essence of this renaming is for filmmakers to reformulate and to reclaim what the industry calls theatrical – for more on that see Think Outside the Box Office. (PS – I first said this was a two part series – then I said three parts – well I lied again and now it will be four parts – with Part 4 tomorrow).

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When films were only available in a movie theater – that was a scarce resource that could be charged for – it was the only way to see films.  

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Truly Free Film

Ask Not What Your Audience Can Do For You – But What You Can Do For Your Audience

Part 2 of How to Make Money in the Age of Abundance

By Jon Reiss       

When I wrote the first post in this series, I thought this would only be a two-parter, but I decided to expand this to a 3-part series because of a little voice in my head that said I needed to talk about audience engagement more. 

Yes, I said in Part 1 that I wasn’t going to address it in this series because I had addressed it before – sue me. The truth is, audience engagement is so central to this whole process that I needed to add my evolving thoughts on it. I think you’ll appreciate my change of heart.

Audience engagement is a term that I have recently come to use interchangeably with “distribution and marketing.” What else is distribution and marketing – if not enticing, conversing with, and ultimately wooing your audience?

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Truly Free Film

19 Things Regarding Our Current Culture That Should Completely Alter Your Creative & Entrepreneurial Practice

Don't Let The Foxes Get You!
Don’t Let The Foxes Get You!

Note: If you’d like to share this post, this is the shortened link: http://bit.ly/AlterCreative

If we want to move forward, we need to recognize where we are currently standing, and adapt our behavior to the reality we encounter.

Warning: Such recognition, often makes people think everything is getting worse. That simply is not true; that is just nostalgia playing havoc with your perception.  There never were good old days because back then people still needed to find best practices too.  They did not know then what you know now, just as those coming down the pike will have full benefit of all your excavation tomorrow.  So be it.

So…

  1. This is an Era of Grand Abundance.  There are more things to do than ever before. Everything is competing for increasingly limited available leisure time. As many of 50,000 feature film titles are generated on a worldwide basis annually. Good movies don’t get seen.
  2. Movies are not the dominant option for leisure time activities for most people
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Truly Free Film

17 Things About The Film Biz That Should Significantly Influence Your Behavior

Note: If you’d like to share this article, this is the short link: http://bit.ly/FilmBizRealities

On May 2nd, 2013, I launched the A2E (Artist To Entrepreneur) program at the San Francisco Film Society with OnRamp (The Direct Distribution Lab).  This is a pilot lab of a pilot program designed to give filmmakers the necessary entrepreneurial skills to achieve a sustainable creative life amidst this changing paradigm.  We will be working out some bugs but I hope to launch the second iteration as soon as possible (but to do so requires some support, both financial and otherwise, so if you know anyone or any organization that might be interested in advancing film culture and enterprise, please do send them my way!).

As part of the lab, we have a first day of big ideas and case studies that hopefully will give the participants the foundation for a design for living and thriving on their art.  As part of that I have prepared three brief lectures focused on what every filmmaker needs to recognize about the business, the culture, and their practice if they want to have a sustainable creative life.  Split between the three categories, I came up with fifty things you should know.  I will provide them to you over the next week or two, but I wish you all could have been there.   It’s always different when you are in the room.

Today, I will unleash what I think it is necessary to recognize about our industry if you are a filmmaker looking to survive from the work you generate.

It's Not That We Are Alone, It's That We Are Still Green

WARNING: taking any of these points out of context, could create unnecessary fear or depression. If you want to