Vanessa and I sat in our car waiting for Little Star’s great pizza to be ready last night, rapidly scribbling notes from this awesome KQED radio show
Tag: innovation
By Mohammad Gorjestani
This last month, Volio, the company I co-founded 2 years ago and head creative for, launched in a partnership with Esquire Magazine.
Volio is an interactive storytelling platform that basically feels like a “facetime” or “skype” experience except the person you’re talking to isn’t live. We take pre-recorded scripted video segments of a talking head and let you engage in a bit of a choose-your-adventure re-imagined type of way, powered by your voice.
Volio is another product and example of the merger between tech and creative thats happening around the
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.
Chris Dorr’s recent post on MoviePass helped me recognize the world as it truly is today. It wasn’t MoviePass that I needed to recognize. It was that the same thing that allowed Independent Film to flourish is the same thing that is now spurring on innovation everywhere. Once filmmakers stopped asking for permission to tell their stories, the floodgates opened to a far more diverse approach to culture generation. To the powers that be the end of permission looks like anarchy, but to the leaders to come, this is the stepping stone to necessary change. And we are seeing that now.
Diary of a Film Start-Up Part 1: Every movie ever made, in any language, anytime, day or night…
By Roger Jackson
I joined the short films website iFilm.com in 1999 and stayed until 2006, after we sold to MTV. By then we’d also sold out our original vision, captured perfectly in this 1999 commercial. Since iFilm I’ve produced war-zone documentaries for the Annenberg Foundation, started a production company, and for the past year run humanitarian projects in Afghanistan and West Africa. But I often thought of that iFilm vision…and now, more than a decade later, I find myself the co-founder (with film composer Klaus Badelt) of a digital film startup with a similar mission. This is the first of a series of weekly guest posts as we bootstrap this new venture — ideally with a ton of critique and input from you.
Or for that matter, what do you think can really change and move things forward in both the near and distant future? If we could ask five key people what they saw on our various horizons, what would they show us? Who should we ask? One of the great things about being pointed in a direction, is that it is almost a path. Could we have walked down that road when Francis Ford Coppola predicted YouTube in 1991:
It is not easy to just boil down to one specific all the various change that is swarming over us at this point. I see major shifts coming in so many different aspects of cinema: discovery, consideration, value/return, participation, collaboration, transitioning, immersion, and many others.
It took me a week but I finally caught up with Mynette Louie’s IFP Blog Post “Innovate Or Die“. She does an excellent job at capturing the Indie Producer’s life at this point in our cultural era. More importantly, she makes a fantastic and necessary plea to us all:
“let’s put our heads together and figure out how to sustain not only ourselves, but ultimately, the art that we love so dearly, and the diversity of artistic voices that make it. There is a better way, and we’ve got to find it soon.”
Read the whole post here.
