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Truly Free Film

How Chris Christie and Ira Deutchman made me a SEO Master of the Universe

By Reid Rosefelt 

When you finish reading this post you will possess the key to becoming a mighty internet power user.

For no charge, I’m going to share a huge breakthrough I made. That’s the kind of guy I am.

Chris-Christie-Ira-Deutchman 1It all started just as the Chris Christie Bridge-ghazi scandal was gathering steam. Like many, I googled the besieged Governor to see if there were any new developments.

One day, I saw something that surprised me: on the first page, right under CBS News, MSNBC, Chicago Tribune, the Office of the New Jersey Governor, Christie’s Wikipedia entry, the Chicago Tribune again, and the Washington Post, was a link to something from my friend, celebrated indie film man Ira Deutchman. “Wow,” I thought.  “Ira must have generated something pretty big to generate a search engine smasheroo like that.” As you might imagine, I was on pins and needles to find out what Ira had come up with.

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Truly Free Film

Tell Me Something: Advice from Morgan Spurlock

Jessica Edwards of First Film Co. gave us some excerpts from the excellent new book she edited Tell Me Something: Advice from Documentary Filmmakers. This week’s advice is from Morgan Spurlock: 

Photo by Jon Pack
Photo by Jon Pack

I feel like it was junior high when my parents REALLY started giving me advice. Maybe it was because they thought I desperately needed it, or maybe they believed I was finally smart enough to actually absorb some of it. Whatever it was, from the moment I became a “teen,” my folks bombarded me with a deluge of southern-fried logic that helped deep-fry my brain and make me the crispy human I am today.

When I turned 13, my mother said, “You’re officially a little man today, time to start acting like one.” What exactly she meant by that, I don’t know. I mean, I’m sure I did plenty of stupid things before that, but come on, Mom, when you say something like that, you’re only setting me up to do even MORE stupid things afterwards! Parental logic is confusing to me sometimes—speak up but don’t run your mouth, do your best but don’t try too hard, have fun but not too much fun.

Is there really such a thing as “too much fun”? For my parents, that essentially meant “Don’t do anything stupid,” a.k.a. “Don’t do anything that would get you arrested.” 

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Truly Free Film

4K: The New HD

By Jon Raymond

JR1If you aren’t shooting in 4K (aka Ultra HD or UHD), you’re two years late. In two years from now any film you shot in HD will be as obsolete as the stuff you shot in SD.  But don’t take my word for it, and expect that within a few weeks or sooner, there will be new advances announced. Keep tabs on 4K news here.

4K is just slightly smaller than digital cinema resolution (6% smaller at 3,840 × 2,160 pixels, 256 pixels less wide) to accommodate the TV 16:9 standard  as opposed to cinema’s 17:9. Purists will be annoyed (although 1080 HD is also 16:9).

Could 4K become the new near-first run releasing window (instead of VOD), just as theatrical once was before Day and Date, Ultra-VOD, VOD, and digital platforms became the rage? With 4K Blu-ray, disks become very attractive, versus buffering HD streaming or cable.

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Truly Free Film

Nobody Knows Anything #2: What Makes A Film Good?

By Charles Peirce  

Nobody2-300

Everyone, I’d hope, has some thoughts about what makes a film good. Perhaps it displays a degree of craft or a particular aesthetic sensibility, covers specific subject matter, has a quality story, certain stars, etc. As you get older and your exposure to cinema becomes both richer and more refined, that definition probably becomes more nuanced. Still, if further pressed most people will also have some few “guilty pleasures” — films that don’t fulfill all their own requirements of what makes for a good film but which they like anyway. Perhaps they were childhood favorites, particular genres or kinds of stories that give comfort, or they just have an indescribable something. It can all seem very subjective, but that discrepancy, between our self-defined tastes and our secret loves, is a telling one.

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Truly Free Film

IndieStreet Post #10: Sundance 2014 — a Microcosm of a Greater Divide

By Jay Webb 

Screen shot 2013-08-19 at 4.51.06 PM

Previously: A 2014 Resolution 4 Independent Artists — Separate Your Egos

Screen shot 2014-01-28 at 12.44.50 PMWalking down Main Street of the Sundance film festival this year, it felt like there was an ever-growing gap between the east and the west side of the street.   Hollywood and Independent seem to be growing further and further apart, making the Sundance film festival, and other L.A. hyped festivals like it, such an increasingly awkward phenomena.  You have a festival director who wants to keep the slate as Independent, fresh, and intriguing as possible, an audience that attends who has come to expect way more “accessible” stories, and big biz owned media companies like Variety claiming the festival “suffered from too much Brooklyn” and squawking at 2 million dollar advance tags for indie films in today’s market.  We feel for you Mr. Redford, we do…but you created this monster, and now it ‘s become a near perfect representation of the dichotomy within the film Industry.   

The divide:  

This is not an East vs. West thing, but more of a continued divide in mentality and approach to film.  It is exclusivity, public relations, and celebrity versus collaboration, community building, and storytelling.   Old Hollywood versus new thinkers.  Creatives vs. creative exploiters.  I think there is some ancient adage about a poor old man with a paint brush who grew frightened he may never be able to buy paint again if something were to happen to his even older brother who convinces the village people that the old man’s art is worth money.  If there is no adage, then now there is.  The artist and the thinker are inherently self-critical and the Hollywood older brother is inherently opportunistic.

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Truly Free Film

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

1It’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.

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Truly Free Film

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.