Tag: collaboration

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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!

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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

The Only Logical Response For A Creative Person To This Age Of Abundance

I write today in honor of the Sundance Film Festival (which kicks off today) and if it wasn’t for, I probably would have not been able to do what I love for so long.  Here’s to new models that are designed with large heart and a complete commitment to the welfare & progress of the artist and their community.  Thank you, Mr. Redford, and may you continue to give rise to so many diverse creatures.

I trust that by now all of you who read this blog understand that the Film Biz still functions on an antiquated model that has no applicability to today.  That is, the film industry was constructed around the concept of scarcity of content and control of that content — and our life is nothing like that now.  Yes, there is still money to be made via the antiquated model, but it only benefits a very few beyond those that control it.  It survives because all industries are essentially designed to keep the jobs of those that have them.  So it goes.  But eventually, we all confront reality, and it often is not pretty.

I also trust that if you are reading this you also recognize that we live in the time of Grand Abundance of produced stories, total access to that content, and a general tendency to be thoroughly distracted from that content.  Looking at the state of film from this perspective can be pretty discouraging, but it is only a partial picture.  I state all of this again, in the hopes that we can soon walk together into the future I know can be before us.

I took to blogging & public speaking because I was frustrated that the film business leaders were only talking about the business aspects of our situation and were neglecting that this is a wonderful time to be a generative, creative person committed to the passion industries.  

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Truly Free Film

Only YOU Can Stop Our Indie Film & Media Culture From Vanishing

I was invited to contribute to the “Wish For The Future” series on Good.is.  This is mine:

When do we stop just thinking about ourselves and instead start working together? I am not talking about saving the world; I am writing about preserving and advancing ambitious film and media culture. It’s threatened, and no one individual will ever rescue it. My wish for the future is for the creative community, locally, nationally and globally, to work together to build the better indie infrastructure that is now possible.

For the past four years, I have been

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Truly Free Film

How Many Ways Can We Collaborate Around A Single Film?

We will work together to build it better.  We will use the tools we have, but not let them restrain us. Let’s turn our limitations — financial & otherwise — into assets (may our chains set us free).  We will not let ego drive us away from an ambitious and interesting cinema.  Let’s acknowledge that defining a true author in cinema is hard, and the act of creation is rarely original. Everything is a remix.In an era of Grand Abundance, it is best practice to be even more generative, but less authorial.  And if all that is where we are, where does it leave us?

I am always looking for new methods of collaboration and new ideas of how someone else might riff off of one artist’s work.  Multiple authors have multiple arms and louder voices; their success is everyone’s & their failure no one’s.  If we

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Truly Free Film

Have Crowd. Will Collaborate.

by Angie Fielder

Crowdfunding is definitely the social media flavour of the month as creative people connect with online audiences who want to help finance their dreams. On Kickstarter alone, nearly 3 million people have helped over 30,000 projects, generating more than $US300 million in pledges.

As producers of The Second Coming, a feature film that is currently seeking funds via crowdfunding site Pozible (www.pozible.com), we recognise the need, in this fast-becoming-saturated crowdfunding environment, to think outside the box when it comes to incentivising people to pledge. Particularly if we want to go beyond our personal network of family and friends. That’s the real challenge with crowdfunding – engaging people outside of your own contacts, outside of your existing support networks.

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Truly Free Film

Thoughts On Collaboration…

Ah, the windfall of public speaking.  My two stop tour of Sydney & Auckland generated a lot of material.  I did a handful of interviews with some very knowledgeable journalists/filmmakers.  They have been coming to print and pixel. I spoke to Fiona Milburn from Transmedia NZ for the big idea on several subjects.  You can read the whole article here.  Amongst the questions I was asked about collaboration:

The key to collaboration is: the acknowledgement of what you don’t know; respect for the experience and contributions of others; and a general level of openness and discovery.  I don’t think that changes.  It is still at the core of everything.  However,

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Truly Free Film

Is There A Possibility For Brand & Content Collaboration?

Can we move beyond product placement for a collaboration between those that fund the production and those that create stories?  Can it be done without compromising the integrity of the work.  Steve Wax and I wrote a blog discussion about this last year and I recently stumbled across this video of Steve and I.