Tag: Scott Kirsner

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Truly Free Film

Aggregate NOW!!

I was listening to Scott Kirsner‘s podcast from Futures Of Entertainment 3 Conference on Digital Distribution recently, and heard Jim Flynn of EZTakes say they currently don’t charge clients to digitize and upload their content — that is clients that provide twenty or more titles.  Since the two approved indie aggregators for iTunes (New Video & Docurama) evidently charge $500/title, EZTakes is looking like a sweet sweet deal.  

This gives every Truly Free Filmmaker out on the festival circuit the mandate to aggregate on their own: you have got to find the other 19 filmmakers you want to keep company with AND YOU HAVE TO FIND THEM NOW.  There’s got to be some young smart producer out there who wants to curry favor with 20 good filmmakers, right?  If I was such a filmmaker I would definitely pay a cut of my revenue to whomever pulled such a feat together.
Maybe saving $500 is not enough of an incentive for you, or even getting your film up on the internet for digital download to own is still not enough of an incentive.  All I can say is the reasons to keep good company, and as much of it as you can, will continue to multiply.  I think at every festival the Truly Free Filmmakers need to organize their own summits and band together to maximize future opportunities for their films — be it building their own traveling festival, sharing theatrical booking tips, accessing download sites, or whatever: the filmakers united, will never be defeated.  The others on the other hand…
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Truly Free Film

What Scott Learned

Scott Macauley interviewed Scott Kirsner for Filmmaker Mag Blog about Kirsner’s new book “Inventing The Movies”.  Scott’s answers about what he learned from self-publishing and self-distributing the book are directly applicable to fimmakers:

Three things. You really need to have a platform and a built-in audience to really be successful promoting something now. The platform that I built over a couple of years is the CinemaTech blog, and that has a couple of thousand people who come to it every week. Two, you want to make things available in a lot of different ways that are convenient for people. A lot of publishers don‘t pay any attention to the ebook, but I wanted to have the book available in print and, for instant gratification, in digital form. I had a debate at the IFP conference with Tom Bernard from Sony Pictures Classics where I argued that the moment a lot of movies get the most attention is when they appear at a festival, so why not let people pay a premium price and download the movie then, or the week after? I wanted to do that with the book. And the third thing is something I did a little bit of, which is sharing the material as I was gathering it. I did a couple of interviews with Mark Cuban, and I posted those interviews on the blog and it was interesting to see other people‘s comments. He even posted some comments on the blog himself. So, by posting raw material and seeing what people want to know about [the audience] can steer you in directions you never would have thought of. I‘m trying to carve my way through the jungle of a new approach to book publishing in the same way that filmmakers are trying to find a new way to make movies.


Or in other words: seed, sort, and test.

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Truly Free Film

New Revenue Models: #1 of ?

In Filmmaker Mag, Scott Macauley interviews Scott Kirshner about his new book “Inventing The Movies”.  In the interview, one thing caught my eye:

Another concept I really like is letting people quote sections from a movie, and that‘s something you can only do in digital form. For example, there‘s a great car chase in this movie, and I want to quote it on my blog. That‘s something that can be ad supported. And people can say, “Wow, this car chase is great, I‘d like to see the context around it,” and they can buy the whole movie. It‘s the same way that publishers are beginning to sell individual chapters of books. As a writer, I‘d rather someone buy one chapter of my book than none at all.

Whether it is in narratives or docs, we are all in need of a new sort of editor — one not to cut our features together, but one to take them apart so that audiences can more easily find how the film relates to them.  Points of access are not always at the beginning — and we have to not only accept that, but promote that.

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Truly Free Film

Precisely: The Conversation

Scott Kirsner has blogged about the the highlights of The Conversation last weekend, which I had the pleasure of participating in.  

film is just one component of a story that you start telling before your first festival showing… and continue to build on and embroider even after you’ve released the DVD and digital download. The “movie release date” becomes just one milestone in this conversation between you and your audience. Some people who participate in the conversation may never actually buy a ticket or a download… while others may become so engaged that they buy everything you offer, and help market your movie to everyone they know.

Bill Cunningham riffs on that further at Pulp 2.0:

This is two things:

1) utilizing the power of the internet to be different media all at once.

2) This is branding. Intellectual property building.

Filmmakers and novelists and other creatives need to figure this out now. Their book, comic, movie, animation, music, radio drama, is only the beginning. A book isn’t just between the covers. A movie isn’t just onscreen.

Don’t think small. Think about how you can add to your creation. How you can translate it. How it can have further value – both to you and your audience

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