Guest post by Gregory Bayne
On Saturday, October 2nd, PERSON OF INTEREST screened at the 2010 Open Video Conference as part of the Shared Film Festival. This event was sponsored by BitTorrent, and curated by our partners at VODO (http://vodo.net). The screening was well attended for an obscure film playing on a Saturday night in the heart of Manhattan, drawing in just over 60 filmgoers to a mid sized auditorium at the Fashion Institute of Technology. In many respects, the screening went off like any other. A short intro, the film, then the Q&A, which was moderated by the very adept and prepared, Brian Newman, distribution consultant and former CEO of the Tribeca Film Institute. We were quite happy with how the entire event went off, but it was what was happening beyond the screening, out there on the interwebs, that kept my collaborator, J. Reuben Appelman, and I brimming with excitement. As the film played for the 60+ attendees generous enough to lend us a couple of hours that evening, PERSON OF INTEREST was being released worldwide as a free to share P2P download via VODO to a potential audience of hundreds of thousands, if not millions.
I originally heard of VODO in late 2009, and was very intrigued by this idea of using P2P (peer-to-peer) file sharing networks as a means to distribute, and gain potentially massive exposure for, independent film. After I witnessed Jamie King’s (one of the ring leaders of VODO) presentation at the 2010 Slamdance Film Festival, I was convinced it was the way to go for PERSON OF INTEREST.
