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Truly Free Film

30 Really Bad Things In FilmBiz 2014

IMG_9903It is now time for my complete list of The Suck In Today’s Film Biz. Earlier this week, I’ve dropped some bits on Keyframe and Filmmaker Mag. IndieWire picked it up. There’s so much that is wrong, it is easy to share the wealth. But here is all of those combined lists  plus many more. Can’t you hear everyone screaming “OMG, there is so much too fix! It is time we made this really work for ambitious and diverse film once and for all!”?  We wish, right?

I have been chronicling the negative in our film industry for sometime now — six years in these type of posts, but my original rant goes back to 1995 for Filmmaker Magazine.  Much of what I have stated in years’ passed remains still in need of getting done. Dig in to my past lists and when you combine them you will have well over 100 things that we could be doing better.  You’d think with so much wrong, more people would stand up and say “this has got to change!”. Where is the film industry’s national leadership? For the first time I believe we are capable of conceptualizing what an entire systems reboot could be — and one that looks out for ALL the stakeholders.  Isn’t it time for a international summit on this?

I have been also chronicling the good too, but today that’s for another day. Come back tomorrow for my comprehensive list of 30 Good Things In The Film Biz 2014.

By detailing what we have failed to do, done wrong, or continue to ignore, we build a road map of how we can improve things for the future. Here’s my contribution to that map for 2014.  Let’s build this better together.

  1. The “Winners Take All” Blockbuster Model Has Stomped “The Long Tail” Flat (in Hollywood). And as much as I hoped people would try to resist
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Truly Free Film

5 More Qualities Of Better Film

Note: If you’d like to share this post, please use this shortened link: http://bit.ly/1gjyJmd

I can’t seem to leave good enough alone.  Previously I worked hard to list out the qualities that I felt lifted a mediocre work into something more crucial, and ushered a good one into greatness.  I hit 32 qualities of better film.  But I have known I have left some things out.  Today I will try to expand the list. Luckily I had some helps from the good people on the comment section too.

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Truly Free Film

The Discovery Of Good Movies Is A Job For The Community

If you make films, it is your responsibility to help others discover what is good to watch.  If you love films — or a particular type of film — it is your responsibility to help others learn to appreciate those films too.  “Discovery” is not something you can expect others to EVER do unless you yourself embrace the practice first.  “Spreading the word” is part of a filmmaker’s job description, albeit sincerely & authentically.

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Independent filmmaking must be a community activity if it is to survive.  You can’t leave good films alone. You have to make it your battle to get those movies seen.  If you don’t accept this as your mission, you are helping to hand indie it’s death sentence.

I love

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Truly Free Film

Its About The Art, Not The App

By John Root Stone 

Online video is exploding

The global market for online video is expected to grow to $37 billion by 2017. In April, according to Comscore, 182 million Americans – 83% of US Internet users – watched 38 billion videos online. This growth is fed by a vast and ever-growing supply of content that is original and archived, professional and amateur, and distributed across more platforms than anyone cares to remember.

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It’s a challenge and an opportunity

For filmmakers, this growth and complex market mix makes it increasingly difficult to find useful and profitable distribution channels. The film distribution hierarchy of yesteryear is flatter than ever with first run premium content competing nearly side-by-side with user-generated content (UGC) for the audience’s time. While this offers both challenges and opportunities to filmmakers, understanding how to take advantage of this new marketplace is anything but simple.

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Truly Free Film

Discovering Great Movies Just Got A Whole Lot Easier

Admit it: these are overwhelming times we live in.  Supposedly over 50,000 feature films are generated on a global basis each year.  In America we manage to consume about 1% of the year’s supply — and that makes up the top consumption market for films worldwide.  Good movies just don’t get seen.  People find it hard to connect with the films that may suit them best.  So what can we do about it?  Well…

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Truly Free Film

Useful New Discovery Tool: BlipSnips

Discovery is deeply connected to relevance.  In our time-challenged culture, getting quickly to the meat of the message is crucial for attention gathering (granted, deep context is required fo true understanding, but that’s an issue for later).  You don’t want to just send your friend an article, but you want to tell them why you find it interesting.  The same holds true for videos, but it has been difficult to tell them what point of the video demands their attention.  Problem solved!  BlipSnips to the rescue!

TechCrunch reported late last month on the new video tagging tool BlipSnips:

BlipSnips allows users to mark “moments” within videos that mark specific events. Users can also caption these moments with comments and descriptions.

Another unique capability within BlipSnips is the ability to

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The Next Good Idea

New Discovery Tool: SkyGrid

Okay, it doesn’t discover movies for you, but it does help you track those subjects that are of interest to you. I have just started to use it, so I don’t have much to report on it yet. Stay tuned.

You can check it out on iTunes here.

Hat tip to David Tisch for pointing this out to me!