Tag: Guest Post

Its About The Art, Not The App

Post author By Ted Hope
Post date June 19, 2013
57 Comments on 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.

Tags A2E, apps, Ben Bloch, Comscore, discovery, distribution, Epoch, Guest Post, John Root Stone, SFIFF

Truly Free Film

Ancillary Rights, The Devil is in the Lawyer

Post author By Ted Hope
Post date June 17, 2013
2,748 Comments on Ancillary Rights, The Devil is in the Lawyer

by Andrew Einspruch

Filmmaker Andrew Einspruch recently attended the Australian International Documentary Conference and wrote a series of articles for the event, which he’s graciously allowed us to reprint here. These articles originally appeared in Screen Hub, the daily online newspaper for Australian film and television professionals.

“You learn the most when you have a success,” said Marcus Gillezeau of Firelight Productions. That’s because you find out what exactly you signed away and what you held onto in your contracts back in the beginning. He also said that there are only two times that people read their contracts – when something fails (so they can get out of it) or when something does well (so they can figure out how to get some of the money).

Gillezeau should know. His company is riding the success of Storm Surfers 3D, a feature film that follows on from their previous Storm Surfers TV series. As the award statues cluster on the mantle, more and more people want to get in on the action. He has become something of a self-made expert on ancillary rights, and shared some of that knowledge in a session at this year’s Australian International Documentary Conference.

Gillezeau started by putting this clause up on the screen:

All rights in all media now known or that may be invented in the future in all territories including the universe… and it’s territories and colonies… in-perpetuity.

Tags Andrew Einspruch, Documentaries, Guest Post

Truly Free Film

Wish You Were Here: From Inspiration to Film

Post author By Ted Hope
Post date June 14, 2013
114 Comments on Wish You Were Here: From Inspiration to Film

By Felicity Price

I remember reading someplace that a good story often just falls into your lap fully formed. Now I don’t want to speculate over whether my story is a good one or not, that conjecture is now in the capable hands of film going audiences everywhere, so you can make your own decision, but that’s how it came to me – fully formed. However it still took four years to shape into a script that anyone was willing to finance.

I was stretched out on my couch testing a new theory that perhaps sitting with hunched shoulders and bleeding eyeballs in front of my computer was what was stopping that elusive story from falling… and there it was… I remembered a vaguely told story about a man who went missing in South East Asia while holidaying with his partner and another couple. Tragically, in that true-life story the man was never found again. I was horribly fascinated by the loss and responsibility those left behind might feel and the mystery of what had happened to him. I linked that with a story I already had in my mind about a couple who would fight to keep their relationship together even after the worst kind of betrayal and suddenly I knew I had the skeleton of a feature film.

Tags development, Felicity Price, Guest Post, Kieran Darcy-Smith, Story, Wish You Were Here

Truly Free Film

Diary of a Film Startup: Post # 29: The Vision Thing

Post author By Ted Hope
Post date June 12, 2013
141 Comments on Diary of a Film Startup: Post # 29: The Vision Thing

By Roger Jackson

Previously: Dough Ray Me

Crystal Ball

I thought I’d use this post to think about the future and some of the trends that will affect films & filmmakers, particularly in the video-on-demand space. I don’t want to sound like the pompous visionary. I’m not a visionary and I have no crystal ball — merely informed opinion. This is not what WILL happen, but what I think may happen. And much of what follows may be stating the obvious.

Languages & Territories

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The part of the future that gets me most excited is the global market. And I don’t mean just Europe and Asia. There are 7+ billion people on the planet. Right now most don’t have access to movies. Or at least not your movies. Early last year — just before we started KinoNation — I was working in a poor, village in a remote part of Africa, on the border of Mauritania and Mali. Despite extreme poverty and isolation, most of these rural subsistence farmers and their families had cellphones.

Tags Diary of a Film Start-Up, Diary of a Film Startup, Flicklist, Guest Post, HitBliss, KinoNation, Roger Jackson, VOD

Truly Free Film

From Out of the Wreckage, A Future Rights Model

Post author By Ted Hope
Post date June 10, 2013
260 Comments on From Out of the Wreckage, A Future Rights Model

by Andrew Einspruch

Film distribution is broken. Ask any producer who has ever felt that the amount they get for their work seems paltry compared to what others are making. For that matter, Peter Broderick has been saying this for years at SPAA Fringe.

There are lots of online film distribution platforms duking it out in the nascent VoD space. From the behemoths like iTunes and Amazon Instant to YouTube and Vimeo, to any number of small players trying to carve out a spot in the world. Andy Green’s Distrify is one of the ones actually making it work.

Green held an intimate session at this year’s Australian International Documentary Conference called Future Rights Model, and talked about how they built the platform. He’d been a filmmaker and experienced first-hand the frustration of getting stuff out into the world. For example, one distributor, when asked about making DVDs available for one of his titles, told Green, “It’s a small film. I’m busy.”

Tags Andrew Einspruch, distribution, distrify, Documentaries, Guest Post

Truly Free Film

Sherry B Ortner’s “Not Hollywood”: Post-Feminism?

Post author By Ted Hope
Post date June 7, 2013
139 Comments on Sherry B Ortner’s “Not Hollywood”: Post-Feminism?

We’ve got another excerpt from Sherry B Ortner’s new book Not Hollywood. Subtitled “Independent Film at the Twilight of the American Dream”, its an ethnographic look at Independent Film since the late 80s. This time Sherry looks at issues of sexism and Feminism’s current standing in the film world.

By Sherry B. OrtnerIt is a major point of the post-feminism literature that younger women ﬁnd second-wave feminism irrelevant to today’s world, a world in which virtually all occupations are open to women, in which women—like the studio heads noted earlier—have been very visibly successful in many endeavors, and in which many men have been sensitized to the need for egalitarian relations between the sexes. Moreover, in this view, younger women see second-wave feminists as having more or less abandoned an interest in attractive femininity in the pursuit of gender equality; younger women reject this de-feminization and refuse to identify with the older feminist generation and often with the very term feminism.

Tags Amy Pascal, Dawn Steel, Feminism, Guest Post, Irene Nesbitt, Lynda Obst, Not Hollywood, Post-Feminism, Rachel Abramowitz, sexism, Sherry B Ortner, Sherry Ortner, Stacy Snider

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