Tag: Scott Macauley

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Truly Free Film

It Could Be Getting So Much Better All The Time #10: A National Film Board

Look at what Canada has!  Free streaming of great films!

Imagine if we had government funding for the arts in this country. For a brief moment I had hopes that the stimulus plan would include something more than a token.  As Scott Macauley at Filmmaker Blog reported with a good round-up of the lack thereof, it ain’t gonna be so?  You’d think with almost 3 million people employed in the arts in this country, they’d be more of demand for such a stimulus.  It’s crazy that when investments like this and the state based film tax credits bring more revenue in, that the politicians don’t make the happen.  Sigh…

Well, image if we had a website like this promoting our culture.  What would be the ramifications of that?  Would media literacy increase?  Would artists prosper? Would that be so bad?
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Truly Free Film

Tips From The Gotham Breakthrough Directors

Scott Macauley of Fimmaker Mag Blog moderated a discussion between the The Gotham Awards Breakthrough Director nominees. They are a great group of directors and a great group of films. Many of them also made the Hammer To Nail list too. They all had different approaches to their filmmaking. 

We don’t usually focus at all on production related issues here at TFF as our efforts are towards finding a new way to get films to audiences (and how that in turn will shape the film you make). I have been preparing a post on all you need to do when and, well, it is surprising how much of it needs to be done even before pre-production and continued into the production and post process. 
I wasn’t at the panel so I can’t vouch why the same concerns did not appear to reach these filmmakers – maybe they did and you needed to be there. I wish the IFP put video of these events online.  Nonetheless I like the takeaway synthesis Scott put together. It clarifies that really is no common template.  Read about it here (click to link).
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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

Navigating Film Festivals

Scott Macauley linked to yesterday’s post on the Filmmaker Magazine Blog and included a link to Chris Holland’s book “Film Festival Secrets”.  Seems like a good thing to read up on as you dream about being selected for Sundance.  I am going to give it a look.  You have to sign up, at least temporarily for Chris’ newsletter and then they send you the book — so I haven’t gotten to look at it yet.

I am going to be posting some basic advice over the next few days on how I personally recommend viewing the festival circuit, and in particular Sundance, — once you are in.  Chris’ book is a very comprehensive overview on selecting your festivals,  how to get in (and manage when you don’t), marketing, building your team, preparation, troubleshooting, and followup.  It’s a quick read and an incredible resource.  It compiles what took me years to learn.  It does though take festivals a bit as an end into themselves, whereas Truly Free Filmmakers must see them as just the first step in building awareness about their films.  
Festivals have to be used very judiciously these days.  Festivals are going to change from many diverse and singular events to much more of a unified community focused on year round programming.  They are the keepers and maintainers of aggregated film lovers and cinephiles nationwide.  They will be able to leverage that community into a truly valuable resource for TFFilmakers, but a new model needs to be found.