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Truly Free Film

Digital Hollywood NYC 2011 — Part 1

By Jacques Thelemaque

Conferences abound in the US Film Biz and sometimes seems like another example of industries that still financially prosper in a field that has regularly been headed downwards.  Yet, as corporate focused as they often are, they do point to a tendency to continued education.  Perhaps most hopefully they point to a willingness for our industry to evolve and embrace some aspect of change.  We sent Filmmakers Alliance founder and past HopeForFilm contributor  Jacques Thelemaque to Digital Hollywood NYC to get the perspective for the truly free film community.

— Ted

I don't go to seminars and conferences as often as I used to. Mostly because getting anything beyond a sales pitch out of them is like panning for gold. I've lost patience with sitting through hours of presentations to get a single nugget of new/good information. There are exceptions, however (such as Ted and Christine Vachon's excellent master class which I will post a blog about soon), so I was genuinely excited for the opportunity to attend Digital Hollywood NYC last week.

Frankly, I'm excited by anything that will help me try to understand the new media landscape, which I find frustratingly inscrutable. And given that the two-day conference is titled "Digital Hollywood" (with a subtitle of "Content is King") the natural assumption is that it is looking at the digital landscape from a filmmaking/entertainment/story-telling perspective, which is right in my wheelhouse.

So, I hopped a couple of trains and made it up to the McGraw-Hill building in mid-town Manhattan to see what I could learn. No signage, but lots of helpful people led me to the second floor balcony and suite of classrooms. I got there a bit early and was immediately encouraged by the fresh coffee and buffet of baked goods. No matter what happened, I wouldn't have to experience it on an empty stomach.

I also was happy to learn they offered wifi access, so I pulled up the conference schedule on my computer. Since they always had at least three panels going on simultaneously, you would have to choose one – or hop around getting bits and pieces, which they encourage you to do. It was tough choosing as they were able to get a number of impressive speakers – many CEO's and V.P.'s of both emerging and established companies working, in various ways, at the convergence of digital entertainment and social media.

For the first panel of the conference, I chose one on Social TV. There was also one on philanthropy in the digital age sponsored by Huffington Post that was tugging at me, but I chose Social TV because I felt I really needed to understand what the hell it was. The minute it started, however, I realized I'd be playing catch-up. The audience was clearly expected to already understand the term "Social TV" as well as the buzz-words that flew around the discussion. Here were the four most common buzzwords I heard there, and actually, throughout the conference:

Second screen (even third screen, sometimes) – The computer, tablet or smartphone you are looking at even while you are primarily engaged in some other screen (presumably the television).

Ecosystem – The digital world created by a specific film, tv/internet show, game or product.

Engagement – The connection between an audience and a specific film, tv/internet show, game or product created or enhanced through digital tools and websites.

Metrics – The data related to a specific film, tv/internet show, game, or product. How many eyeballs is it getting? How much activity is it generating? How much money is it making? Etc., etc….

As I sat through the discussion, it became clear to me that, at least in the context of this conference, Social TV seems to be a catch-all term for any tools/technologies that generate social interactions based upon media creation and consumption. It's all the stuff companies are devising to get and keep audiences engaged.

Now, none of this is all that sexy for an old-school film buff like me. But I felt like a six year-old eating my vegetables. It was necessary information I had to swallow. We need to learn about all this stuff and see if it will lead us filmmaking dinosaurs anywhere other than extinction. It turned out, however, that to swallow it, I also needed to interpret it. At this first seminar, as would be the case with nearly all the seminars throughout the conference, there was precious little specific discussion about content. Most speakers spoke in vague generalities about "content" and rarely did anyone discuss Social tools in direct relation to independent film – aside from a specific case-study panel on an Academy Award-nominated doc. The conference, over-all, was heavily slanted toward the television and advertising industries. That doesn't automatically mean there weren't meaningful analogies contained therein for independent filmmakers. But they weren't always obvious. And sometimes, the industry focus was far too tedious to sift through in hopes of finding that small nugget of informational gold. 

So, getting back to the Social TV panel, the combination of buzzwords, vagaries, and corporate agendas finally overwhelmed me and I skipped over to the philanthropy panel before it ended. It was mostly doc filmmakers talking about the globally-impacting work they were doing…and it felt like a breath of fresh air. But the disconnect between what they were discussing and the Social TV panel was striking. Yes, what these doc filmmakers were discussing was far more meaningful and interesting, but they did not seem to even consider employing the kind of audience engagement arsenal that the corporate types were obsessed with just down the hall. I asked filmmaker Laura Pohl how much she integrates transmedia concepts and strategies into her work. She said not at all. At least not on the project she was discussing.

But that is not too surprising because filmmakers in general are still pretty old-school. And, after sitting through most of the Social TV panel, I still had no real idea what the Social TV arsenal is comprised of. So, I returned to the Social TV panel just in time for Q&A and asked some specific questions.

Question: "What tools and techniques do you employ in your Social TV strategies"? Answer: "Well, we use Twitter and Facebook. We invite commentary. We create apps and games and other interactive content. We sometimes run contests. In general, we invest heavily in second, and sometimes third, screen activity…." Uh, okay. Nothing too cutting-edge here, obviously, but I get the idea. Just create as much stuff as possible that will broaden your audience base and/or keep it engaged. What that is specifically is clearly still evolving, and will necessarily be different for different kinds of shows. But between the two panels I came away feeling that all of the things these corporations are doing to sell shows and products can be used extremely effectively by the documentary world to engage people in causes, guide them to action-steps and effect global change.

I also asked Sara Passe of CAA (who works with new media creators and producers): "What kind of projects should indie filmmakers be thinking about in terms of new media/Social TV?" Answer: "The short answer is that it must be globally monetizable and easy to market. It should also provide some clear mechanism for audience engagement. I know it may be counter to what indie filmmakers want to do, but they should focus on creating films that can be cut up into bite-sized pieces – essentially serialized. Does that help? I hope so." Well, sorta.

I wondered why a representative from Sharp (the television manufacturer) was on the panel so I asked her what kind of relationship her company was looking to have with content creators. Her answer: none. She just thinks this Social TV space is really important and we should all be working to understand it. So, we're essentially in the same boat.

From there, I skipped around from "Merging Content with new Technologies" To "Video Across Platforms" to "The Social Experience: Personalized communication" to "Digital Media Investing" to "Transmedia Showcase" to "Cable TV and Broadband: New Content" to "Video on Smartphone and Tablet". Of course, I took a small break in between all this to chow down on the nice sandwiches and cookies they provided. So, here's what I took away from the rest of the day:

Nobody knows anything. Or, at least, nobody has any certainty about where all of this digital potential is leading.

Nobody has yet to hit on a great, consistent model for monetizing new media other than to start a "digital media" venture, get some VC to fund it and pay yourself a lot of money. There are people making small bits of money with web/tablet/smartphone-specific content, but no clear formula for how they've done it.

Nobody seems to talk specifically about content. Content did not seem like King. More like an indentured servant.

The killer spin-off "app" of all time is fantasy football in that it brings in a secondary, but very compelling level of engagement with the main show. Is there a film analogy to that? 

If given the opportunity, audiences will sometimes create their own, often surprising ways to engage with content. Give audiences opportunities to respond to your work and then pay attention to those responses.

Although the Investment panel was just for tech/media entrepreneurs, the key ingredients investors want is also applicable to film – What is the product (what is the film and is the script/concept any good)? What is the market (who will want to buy/see the film)? And what is the team (who are the filmmakers)?

The transmedia panel actually had filmmakers (content creators, as they were called) successfully creating alternative work. But none had an economic formula for what they do. None had a repeatable business model of any kind. They just created work (ALL short form) and were found by audiences (or media companies). 

The day finished with a very nice wine reception that allowed me to connect with a couple of interesting attendees, especially one guy from Germany working on a very cool next generation collaborative filter that could work incredibly well for films. Few of the panelists were anywhere to be found. Neither was dinner, even though it was listed in the program. But there were yummy leftover cookies. I pocketed a few on the way out so that I would end Day

Day Two had a bit more film-related stuff. I'll give you the lowdown and wrap-up in Part 2.

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Truly Free Film

Josef Astor on “The 4 Scariest Things About Kickstarter”

A few months ago, Jennifer Fox wrote a guest post for this very site, a three-part, 29-point guide to running a successful Kickstarter campaign. Fox’s groundbreaking documentary My Reincarnation had recently broken all Kickstarter records and would ultimately go on to raise over $150,000, so her posts weren’t just informative and useful, they were a manifesto, a victory lap for the very concept of crowdsourcing.

Over the past decade, I’ve been working on a film called Lost Bohemia, a documentary focusing on the semi-secret world of the Carnegie Artist Studios and the lives of her tenants, including such luminaries as Bill Cunningham and Editta Sherman. The project took a tragic turn in the middle of production, when it was announced that everyone, including myself, was being evicted from these studios due to a series of “renovations” proposed by the Carnegie Foundation. Lost Bohemia ultimately ended up being a chronicle not only of a community but also its destruction, a cautionary tale set in a world corrupted by real estate madness and gentrification.

Now, when I read Fox’s posts, Lost Bohemia was in a similar situation to My Reincarnation: We had a finished documentary that, while well reviewed, had not yet found distribution; naturally, I was inspired to try this Kickstarter thing out myself. I pulled together a team and, following Fox’s wisdom, amongst other sources of Kickstarter-lore, attempted to devise a sucessful campaign. But the best laid plans, etc, etc…

Cut to the 31st of October, 2011. The Lost Bohemia Kickstarter has a 4 days left to raise a third of its target $18,000. The campaign has not been a failure, not by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s scary sitting here, not knowing if we’re going to be able to secure distribution. And so, in light of that, and seeing as it’s Halloween, I give you the Four Scareist Things About Running A Kickstarter Campaign!

1. Technical Difficulties

When we launched on the 5th of October, we had everything set up and ready to go. We had made a great video, reached out through social media, compiled email lists of thousands of prospective donors, sorted out all the financial details; all we had left to do was push the button and LAUNCH. Unfortunately, fate threw a pretty massive gear into the works: for most of the first day, Kickstarter was experiencing some severe technical problems. That meant that a large portion of the people we told about our project went to check it out, saw that the site was down, and promptly forgot about it. This was completely out of Kickstarter’s control, let alone ours; sometimes these things just happen. This is port of the reason why it’s incredibly important to update regularly, to keep circulating the word, to never drop the ball: not only is it just a good idea to keep buzz circulating at all times, but also there will be times when you reach out and people will not be able to reciprocate.

2. Looking for an audience

A crucial difference between Lost Bohemia and My Reincarnation became painfully apparent as the campaign developed. While Reincarnation is, at its heart, a film about the relationships between fathers and sons, it’s also a film that will be of interest to anyone fascinated with Tibetan Buddhism. Lost Bohemia, on the other hand, is a film that is both limited and yet general in scope, and, as a result, difficult to find a specific demographic for. It’s a film about people losing their homes, but it’s also a film about artists and gentrification and what makes a community a community. It’s a film about old people that resonates most soundly with young people; in a word it’s a film without a specific niche so not the easiest to market.

3. Lulls

On the 20th of October, the scariest thing happened: nothing. No donations, no emails, no questions. We just kept on refreshing the page to see the same number parroted back at us over and over again: $6,231. I didn’t even have to look that up, it’s just seared into my brain. We sent out updates, Facebook notifications, emails, Victorian street urchins with wax-sealed missives, all to no effect. I went to sleep that night thinking, that’s it, we’ve ran out of steam, ran out of interested donors, it’s over.

When I woke up we had two new donors, and I could breathe again. But we never found out why exactly this lull occurred, and townsfolk say that on a full moon, you can still hear a lull howling out upon the moors…

4. Uncertainty

Here’s the thing: when it comes down to it, even after you’ve researched and compiled and perfected, even if you have a great team and a great video and great incentives and something great to give money to, there’s still a certain percentage of running a Kickstarter campaign that is pure crapshoot. And like all great gambles, Kickstarter is an all or nothing game; if we don’t reach our goal of $18,000 by the end of the week, we don’t get anything. You can never really relax. If you are halfway though your campaign and you’ve raised 33% of your target, is that good or bad? Can you rely upon other projects data as a control of any kind? Or does each project develop independently, in its own unique way, according to the mitigating factors surrounding it?

As confident as I am that our project will succeed, I can’t just pretend that the doubt and the uncertainty aren’t there. Kickstarter is about asking strangers for money so you can make your dreams come true. Sometimes it’s a bit hard to have faith in that.

Now let me make this clear: we here at Lost Bohemia HQ love Kickstarter, and we are awed by the 100+ pledges we have received so far. It’s an awesome site, and all the support that we have received from it has been phenomenal. I can’t say thank you enough to everyone who has donated to Lost Bohemia. I just want to make it clear that Kickstarter is tough, and on occasion… a bit scary.

For more on Lost Bohemia, check out the Kickstarter.

The official website: www.lostbohemia.com

Our incentives page: www.lostbohemia.com/kickstarter-fundraiser/kickstarter-incentives/

Josef Astor — Filmmaker, Photographer

LOST BOHEMIA is Josef Astor’s first film. In 1985, he opened his photography studio in
Carnegie Hall, living and working there for over twenty years. Astor is acclaimed for his
theatrically staged, historically informed portraits of individuals from the world of music,
architecture, dance, theatre and art.

His photography regularly appears in Vanity Fair, The New York Times, The New Yorker,
Newsweek, GQ, Esquire, Rolling Stone, House and Garden, Dance Ink. Astor’s advertising clients range from AT & T to Bergdorf Goodman, Absolut Vodka and Phillip Morris.

He directed sequences in the documentary PARASOMNIA and was also Production Designer for the PBS documentary Aaron Copland at 100.

Astor’s work has been widely collected and exhibited, including shows at The International Center of Photography, Julie Saul Gallery, Howard Greenberg Gallery, ‘Vanity Fair Portraits’ at the National Portrait Gallery in London, and upcoming exhibit “The Digital Darkroom” at The Annenberg Space for Photography. He has received the Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography. Astor is currently on the faculty of the School of Visual Arts in New York.

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Truly Free Film

Jennie Livingston on her Documentary “Earth Camp One” Part 1

PART 1. PHILOSOPHY. INTRODUCING MY FILM CURRENTLY ON KICKSTARTER, ALONG WITH SOME THOUGHTS ON SPEAKING IN THE FIRST PERSON
 
Earth Camp One is a work of creative nonfiction about how I lost four family members in five years. The film is also about a hippie summer camp in the 70s in Northern California, the connection between those two things being that when you’re young, you want to break away from your family, find different cultural markers. What happens when they leave you? The film also has animation about different conceptions of the afterlife. Earth Camp One  is about my experience of grief and loss and about a broader understanding, or exploration, of how our society’s denial of mortality leads to everything from people feeling isolated and alienated when they’re going through something which is THE universal human experience. To national policies (wars) that, in not just my opinion, are predicated on a core belief that  no soldiers and no civilians can die because, actually no one dies. 

Right now I’m nearing the end (Friday night at 8!)  of a Kickstarter campaign to raise money to get to a rough cut on the film. I’ve applied for a billion grants where people I don’t know go into a room and look at my project and come out and tell me “yes” or “no,” (usually no, and by email) so it’s incredible to build a web page, put a video on it and have 400+  people say “yes!” by backing the project. It’s pretty mind-blowing, that “yes.” All the endless reservations, differences in taste, politics, and sensibility that kept various granting organizations or corporations from supporting my project are absent. Of course they may be hundreds of people viewing my video and reading my text who loathe it, but fortunately Kickstarter and Indiegogo have no guestbook for people who looked and left. Whomever might’ve rejected my project and moved on, I’m blissfully unaware, checking my email and racking up the next 15 backers who write me messages about how much they love the excerpt, and the idea of the film, and can’t wait to see it!

 
There are a lot of precedents for the kind of first-person documentary I’m making: just about anything by Ross McElwee, Agnes Varda’s The Gleaners and I, Thomas Allen Harris’s That’s My Face, Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir, and films by Alan Berliner, Jem Cohen, Doug Block, Su Friedrich, and others. I am not inventing a genre, just finding an authentic voice and structure within it. But finding money to make it is another story. Earth Camp One has been turned down by just about every place you could go to for documentary funding, but it’s GOTTEN funding from The Guggenheim Foundation, Netflix, Chicken & Egg, The French American Charitable Trust, and like most nonfiction projects that aren’t works for hire, it’s produce-as-you-go. This one is tricky because there really is some kind of aversion, amongst funders, to work in the first person. I’m not fond of the term “personal doc” as it implies you’re telling the story as therapy or for a small group of friends. No one called Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking or Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius “personal books.” Films in the first person can be self-indulgent, but so can the majority of Hollywood blockbusters. What could be more self-indulgent than the studio exec, whose main purpose in life is to keep his job, so  that he green-lights a series of movies whose primary quality is that it looks like every film that came before them?  
 
I think at least some of the discomfort that people have with films in the first person goes back to a time when men controlled printing presses and universities, and women were barred from running presses or getting an education. Women had one form of writing: the letter. Their language was personal, it was domestic, and they took their “I-statements” very seriously because the personal realm was their realm . They might dare to think about literature or politics or industry, but they didn’t speak about them: they were allowed to reflect on one thing and one thing only: their own experience. 
 

I can’t help but think that the extent to which first person speech, in film, is considered too personal, or not appropriate to fund goes back to the sense that someone speaking in the first person speaks with a small voice, with a domestic voice, as opposed to with the authority of the state, the church, the university. Whether the filmmaker is Alan Berliner or Agnes Varda, there’s still a sense that if you are talking about yourself, it must be personal, and if it’s personal, it can’t be universal. Or, as a woman in the audience at a recent screening of Tiffany Shlain’s Connected, one of my favorite films of 2011, said, when I pressed her to tell me what she thought, “I think films like this one are self-indulgent because documentaries should be about something important, and if you’re talking about yourself, it means you think you’re important.” I appreciated this woman’s candor, but I think her views are not only unconsciously sexist, I think there’s an unfortunate sense that what’s important must be outside ourselves! And I would argue that what’s universal is not always what’s rubber-stamped by experts or confirmed by mass appeal,  but is always a good story well-told: and that Joan Didion is no less universal than Toni Morrison: and that Tiffany Shlain is no less universal than Steven Spielberg: the difference is the form, not the authority of the speaker nor the weight of the story.
 
 
Jennie Livingston works in both fiction and nonfiction. Her films include Paris is Burning, Who’s the Top? and Through the Ice. She lives in Brooklyn, NY. This summer she directed a video for Elton John’s Las Vegas stage show, a series of portraits of New Yorkers to accompany the song “Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters.”

 

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Truly Free Film

Jennie Livingston on her Documentary “Earth Camp One” Part 2

PART 2: COMEDY IN WHICH MY KICKSTARTER CAMPAIGN INSPIRES ME TO SEEK AN ENDORSEMENT FROM WERNER HERZOG

So, speaking of filmmakers who combine first person speech with observations of the world, I was (and still am as I write this) deep into my Kickstarter campaign for Earth Camp one, and thought I’d go to the opening of  DocNYC  last Tuesday night not only to see the new Werner Herzog film Into the Abyss but to ask Herzog if he would endorse my film Earth Camp One’s Kickstarter campaign.    

 
What, are you nuts? you’re asking. Well maybe in general, yes, but not in this case: when I was 22 I wrote Werner Herzog saying I wanted to make films and I wanted to work for him, and he answered my letter. 
 
He wrote: so you want to be a filmmaker? Have you robbed a bank? Can you hold the attention of a group of 2 year olds? Have you climbed a mountain? A whole series of riddle-of-the Sphinx-like questions written out by hand on blue onionskin air mail paper.  I wrote back (using a typewriter: this was two years before I got my first Mac Classic with a grant from the New York State Council on the Arts!), sending him some of my "street" photographs and telling him about  the film idea that would eventually become Paris is Burning. He wrote back: I’m coming to New York, let’s have dinner! And we did! He took me to Hop Kee in Chinatown and told me to make my film, to steal a camera if need be. And we've crossed paths and gotten together a couple of times since.
 
I thought  last Tuesday, he might, in the spirit of that dinner long ago, say something into my friend the filmmaker Hima B's camera, something I could post right here, like “give money to Jennie’s film now” or “I’m Werner Herzog and I endorse this Kickstarter campaign.”
 
So Hima and I go into the Skirball Center and the first person we see is Werner.  I also see the crowd and realize this is a pretty big premiere. The wrong time to ask for anything. We say hello. Then everyone goes into the theater. Forget the endorsement, enjoy the film.
 
Well I did enjoy the film. The subject, death row in Texas, was compelling enough. There was an amazing interview with a retired executioner and a surprise ending having to do with smuggling some very unusual contraband OUT of a prison.  It was, for Werner Herzog, an uncharacteristically emotional film. At the film’s center wa s father-son relationship, not something you see much of in Herzog!
 
At the reception afterwards, the Poland Springs was flowing and I was feeling very free. I thought, what the heck?  I met Werner's daughter, a photographer who had a gracious and bemused air towards the people pressing in to talk to a man who'd earned cult status for 40 years and 60 films. I told Werner about this campaign and about Kickstarter, how and why crowd-sourcing works. He said, “I barely look at the Internet.  I don’t even have a phone.” He said that  raising money that way is asking for a handout and I shouldn’t do it.  “Well, how should I raise the money to edit my film?” I asked? “You should be a bouncer in a sex club!” he told me. ( If you think I’m making this up to be colorful, go here, 4 paragraphs down.) 
 
Bouncer in a sex club? I flexed my muscles in a bouncerly way. FYI I’m 5’5” and 120 pounds. “Werner, you think they’d hire me?” He saw my point. “You should work in a brothel!” (I hoped he meant as a decorator or pornographer.) He advised “you should work out in the real world, earn money, and make your film for $10,000. You should be self-reliant!”
 
Now I don’t disagree that it’s honorable to earn money with the sweat of your brow and put that money back into your art. But the film we saw at DocNYC was funded by The Discovery Channel. No doubt Herzog was paid, the editor was paid, the producers were paid, the composer and the musicians were paid. The budget was not $10K.
 
Am I begrudging a filmmaker whose work I hugely admire the status he's earned? Certainly not. Look, there are a lot of ways to flex muscles. It’s like the difference between third and first person. By supporting my film my backers on Kickstarter are acknowledging we can’t depend only on corporations or on artists’ savings to get good culture made. And from my point of view, their pledging is a great reason to wake up in the morning and feel I’ve got a shot at finishing a film I’ve been working on, on and off, for 10 years.  And I know that even if a veteran filmmaker like Werner Herzog hasn’t heard of Kickstarter yet, I choose to believe that, in the deeper recesses of his own heart, he would endorse any filmmaker who's doing what it takes to make a film.  I might feel shameful for a filmmaker of Herzog’s generation to write everyone he knows and ask for $10 or $1000 to get in the editing room, and although I didn’t grow up on the Internet (I grew up on the telephone!)  I’m glad I’m flexible enough to do what needs to be done to make a film, and if crowd-sourcing is one tool in the toolbag right now, I’m happy to use it. Plus, there’s something amazing about the people for whom you intend the film giving it props before it’s even done. It’s very satisfying. It’s radical and democratic and actually makes you realize that you are making your work for people. Actual people. 
 
A final word on Herzog. Into the Abyss contains a remarkable portrait of a woman whose brother and mother were murdered. Then a few other family members died and she didn't leave the house for four years. Got rid of her phone, afraid of the news that could come with each ring. I told Werner that my film was about that kind of loss in my own life [though fortunately not that kind of depression]  and he said “well make the film, but get it over with!”   I completely agree. 
 
As of writing this I have 2 days left in the Kickstarter campaign. It ends Friday night and 8 and I hope it works, so I don’t have to work as a bouncer in a sex club.

Jennie Livingston works in both fiction and nonfiction. Her films include Paris is Burning, Who's the Top? and Through the Ice. She lives in Brooklyn, NY. This summer she directed a video for Elton John's Las Vegas stage show, a series of portraits of New Yorkers to accompany the song "Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters."

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Truly Free Film

NYFA’s Consulting Program for Filmmakers

Matthew Seig informs of a helpful new program for New York Filmmakers. Don’t miss out on it!

Filmmakers can have a tough time finding professional guidance on new work or works-in-progress. The critiques they attract before reaching their audience are usually limited to acceptance or rejection letters, perhaps accompanied by a few brief comments. Filmmakers’ written material, social-media and distribution strategies, and sometimes the films themselves, are often created single-handedly by the artists and could be improved with a little professional advice.

For those who can be in New York on November 10, New York Foundation for the Arts has developed a unique consulting program for filmmakers. It was modeled after one of NYFA’s signature services for visual artists, called “Doctor’s Hours,” which provides one-on-one consultations with museum curators and gallery owners. Similarly, Doctor’s Hours for Filmmakers will offer an opportunity to meet with fundraisers; social-media producers; festival, art house and television programmers; and grass-roots and theatrical distributors, many of whom are familiar names in the indie community.

During each private one-on-one twenty-five-minute session, filmmakers can present a work sample or trailer, written material, or web content.

There is a fee of $35 for each consultation, and a filmmaker may have up to three consultations during the evening (6:00 PM to 9:00 PM). Registration opens on October 25. Further details, a list of the consultants and their bios, and registration pages can be found at nyfa.org

Consultants: Thursday, November 10th, 6-9pm

Caitlin Boyle, Grassroots and advocacy-driven distribution, community screening initiatives, grassroots marketing and communications, audience outreach and engagement.

Jim Browne, Distribution, festivals, exhibition, digital distribution options

Anne del Castillo, Submitting work to television and navigating PBS

Amy Finkel, Websites, interactivity, documentary production

Eliza Licht, Social media, community outreach, developing audiences

Victoria Linchong, Proposals, grants, written materials

Lynn Lobell, Proposals, grants, written materials

Michael Tuckman, Distribution, festivals, promotional campaigns

Chris White, Preparing work for television, website content, trailers and editing

*If you will be requesting feedback on a grant application or written material, please be prepared to provide it to us at least one week in advance

For consultant bios visit our website
These bios provide an opportunity for you to research which consultants would be appropriate for the advice and feedback you are seeking.

Perhaps best known for its programs for visual artists but serving all disciplines as well as other arts organizations, NYFA’s Fellowship, Professional Development and Fiscal Sponsorship programs have served thousands of filmmakers, including Barbara Kopple, Joe Berlinger, Todd Haynes, Reginald Hudlin, Tamara Jenkins, Nathaniel Kahn, Spike Lee, Mira Nair and Kimberly Price. A series of presentations for filmmakers on subjects such as social media; grass-roots outreach; DIY and split-rights distribution; transmedia; and new technologies; some now available by podcast, was begun in 2009 (with an inaugural presentation by Ted Hope) and has now led to the development of Doctor’s Hours for Filmmakers.

In the era of multidisciplinary art and transmedia, NYFA is a unique resource. The email list for notifications of future Doctor’s Hours for Filmmakers is at nyfa.org > Email List > Artist Learning.

Matthew Seig is a Media Specialist for New York Foundation for the Arts.

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Truly Free Film

John Bruce on “Far From Afghanistan: Mission, Means, and Movement Building”

I think it is more than three years ago now that I first spoke of Truly Free Film. My hope then, as it is now, that artistic, social, and political motivations would harness the new technologies and it’s tools to usher in a transformation from a mass-market driven entertainment economy to a community-based approached to media and art. The examples of this are still few and far between. I remain very optimistic nonetheless, and am heartened by all of what “Far From Afghanistan” represents.

Far From Afghanistan: Mission, Means, and Movement Building

“If today I choose to make films it is to remind myself first and foremost that there are a lot more important things than films,” says filmmaker John Gianvito.

Last week, amidst a media brush fire of images from Occupy Wall Street and obituaries for Steve Jobs, the unfortunate 10-year anniversary of the start of the war in Afghanistan “passed quietly at the White House”, as TIME magazine barely reported. Meanwhile, streaming for free online Far From Afghanistan: The October Edition, presents work-in-progress segments from the forthcoming film Far From Afghanistan, October 6 through October 12, only.

Inspired by the 1967 film, Far From Vietnam (Loin du Vietnam), John Gianvito conceived of Far From Afghanistan as a project to bring together some of the boldest, most politically-progressive US filmmakers. The final version, to be completed in 2012, will also include contributions from native filmmakers throughout Afghanistan. Together they will utilize a mosaic of approaches, and explore issues of shared responsibility, history and memory, in a concerted effort to help accelerate resistance to the war.

Contributing segments to Far From Afghanistan: The October Edition, are John Gianvito, Jon Jost, Minda Martin, Travis Wilkerson, and Soon-Mi Yoo, with a special prologue by Rob Todd and Pacho Velez. From inside Afghanistan several Afghan filmmakers working as part of the group Afghan Voices also provided material.

Operating as a true collective, the filmmakers along with producers Steve Holmgren and Mike Bowes, platform producer John Bruce, and production coordinator Matt Yeager supported one another and enlisted dozens of others in order to make manifest this idea, without the hierarchy or procedure typical of most film development and production. “Putting together this film from scratch in about six months was a massive challenge. It would not have been possible even a year or two ago I think, certainly not in the same way. Working with no budget and with a team who were literally traveling around the world throughout production, we relied heavily on different web technologies to keep things moving… we used Vimeo to host cuts where we could provide comments, transferred final files through Dropbox rather than physically mailing drives, and had regular Skype calls to check in,” says Steve Holmgren.

Exposing selections from a film to audiences before the usual route of a major festival premiere is risky business. Traditional distribution cycles can take many months and sometimes years. Far From Afghanistan as a project has greater goals, beyond successfully navigating business-as-usual distribution channels. With the October 2011 10-year anniversary of war upon us, our mantra became “sooner rather than later”, and thus we made the choice to actively participate in, and ideally spur more, vital dialogue that needs to occur in order for people to better grasp the issues, and move collectively toward greater responsibility and resolution. Further, we hope to foster partnerships and collaborations with individuals, groups, and organizations at home and abroad. Most centrally, the project plans to connect with and provide assistance to humanitarian organizations with aligned missions, both in Afghanistan and domestically.

Far From Afghanistan: The October Edition streams online for just a couple more days. You can watch it on www.farfromafghanistan.org and also on www.fandor.com. Support the project on Kickstarter.

John Bruce is the platform producer for Far From Afghanistan, and works as a strategist for .John Bruce spent over a decade working in feature film and television production for NY-based independent producers. He is currently a strategist for Forward Mapworks, serving media ventures and organizations with social and environmental missions, and is the platform producer for Far From Afghanistan.

Far From Afghanistan: The October Edition brings together some of the best-known political filmmakers from the US, along with contributions by Afghan media makers from inside Afghanistan, in a special online event streaming segments from the forthcoming film Far From Afghanistan, during the week Oct 6-12 to mark the 10-year anniversary of the war.

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Truly Free Film

Enzo Tedeschi on “Distributing Films via the Ipad” (aka Tool Review: MoPix)

I don’t know about you, but I am pretty astounded by all the opportunities before us for Direct Distribution. If you recall, I have listed 32 different Platforms and Tools that filmmakers can now utilize. One such tool is the MoPix.

I am excited that the Truly Free Film Community is coming together to try inform each other of what works (or doesn’t) in this plethora of riches. Today, one of the producers from the great experiment in both Free & Crowdfunding, The Tunnel, is here to tell you about the mobile & tablet App building tool MoPix. Ladies & Gentlemen, Enzo Tedeschi:

Distributing The Tunnel as an iPad app using MoPix.

In making and distributing The Tunnel, my co-producer Julian Harvey and I have broken a few traditions. In fact we kinda threw out the playbook, from crowdfunding by selling off the frames of the film, to direct-distributing as much as possible, as globally as possible, and as close to a day-and-date release as possible. Our theory was simple – if our audience could find our film simultaneously on as many platforms as we could muster, the film would have its best chance at success. And one global platform that seems to be growing in audience at a rapid rate is the iPad.

Pricing up the development of a custom mobile app in Australia was discouraging. At $10,000 – $20,000 AUD to get it done properly, that was simply not going to happen on our paltry budget.

We were only a few weeks out from release when we heard about MoPix – and we got excited. These guys had built a platform for iPad, iPhone, and Android that would enable us to create an app to distribute The Tunnel directly via the App Store.

Talking to Ryan Stoner at MoPix, we were able to get in during their beta stage, and in a matter of weeks we had a custom-branded app that did everything we needed it to. The Tunnel was now going to be the first Australian film ever to be , and we were going to be able to do it alongside our other release platforms.

The process from our end was actually quite painless, and involved cropping a few images to size and sending those and the video assets over to MoPix. An iPad app came out the other side.

The benefits for us seemed obvious – the film was presented in a very slick way, completely branded so that it felt like OUR product, not theirs, and we could circumvent the pain that just about every indie filmmaker knows – trying to get our film into the iTunes store. The feature set was simple, but had everything it needed to feature an equivalent to our DVD extras. It also let us add a really slick behind-the-scenes photo gallery, which gave us a point of difference from all the other avenues in which the film was available.

If you think about the marketing and distribution of your film in the long term – which we always try to – App updates also create a way for you to keep your audience active. Soon, we’ll be updating the Tunnel app to include in-app purchases. This feature is great for two reasons. First, it enables us to keep selling content to our audience who have already purchased the app. Someone who has already put money on the table for your film is far more likely to keep buying, than someone who hasn’t invested at all. Secondly, when we push out the update, the act of downloading it to see what features have been added creates another interaction with our audience. It’s another small part of the ongoing conversation we’ve been having with our fans since the beginning – even before we had a film.

And while we’re on the subject of marketing – another thing that an app can do for you brilliantly is combine your marketing and distribution into one.

For our next project, we’ll be going back to MoPix to create an app that, unlike The Tunnel, is free to download. The audience will still need to buy the film in order to watch it, but we will create a free app with compelling media-rich content which basically serves as marketing material for the film, which will then be accessible via the in-app purchasing mechanism. Once again, if you can get your audience engaging with your ‘brand’ – your film – they are much more likely to part with their hard-earned.

I will say though, that being in the beta stage, it’s not a perfect solution just yet. It would be cool to see some more platforms integrated, like logging into GetGlue while they are watching The Tunnel on their iPad. But knowing how switched on the guys over at MoPix are, I’m sure they’re working on it. For now the ability to tweet a photo from the gallery, for example, or post it on Facebook directly from the app works great.

MoPix are currently still looking for films for their beta slate – and even though we haven’t set the world on fire with sales of our app just yet, we’ve sold more than enough units for the endeavour to have paid for itself. All in all it has been very worthwhile.

You can learn more about The Tunnel at www.thetunnelmovie.net
The Tunnel App Store link – itunes.apple.com
Facebook – www.facebook.com/thetunnelmovie
Twitter – @thetunnelmovie

Enzo Tedeschi is co-founder of Distracted Media along with Julian Harvey. Together they wrote, produced and edited The Tunnel – a project whose innovative approach has seen it hit international cinema screens despite being crowdfunded and given away for free online.

Before Distracted Media, Enzo co-produced and edited the controversial independent feature documentary Food Matters in 2008, a film which is still enjoying success around the globe, having now sold over 200,000 DVDs. He produced and cut the epic World War 1 period film Ghosts of War, and the award-winning short The Last One with director Carlo Ledesma.

As an ASE Award nominated editor, Enzo has worked on numerous television series, documentaries and award-winning short films. Recently he edited and oversaw the post-production path on Channel Nine’s observational documentary series AFP for Zapruder’s Other Films.