The G-Tech “Driven Creativity” competition closes on the 30th September so get your entries finished soon in order to stand a chance of winning a 4 terabyte raid array. That’s four hundred quid’s worth of storage…
Here’s someone else’s entry.
Et Miaow Alors from Adrian Westbrook on Vimeo.
Better than that? Enter here… http://www.g-technology.eu/competition/
I’m not much of a fan of horror but Iove the welsh and am a huge fan of awful puns so I thought I’d bring to your eyes this trailer for the Aberystwyth Horror Festival – Abertoir.
or if you’re a local…
The UnderWire Festival aims to showcase the raw cinematic talents of women with four days of screenings and events in London from 18th – 21st November 2010. With a particular focus on filmmakers at the beginning of their careers, the festival will bring attention to the work of women, who are still massively underrepresented in the film industry. The closing date for submissions is 10th September.
There are Directing, Producing, Editing, Screenwriting and Cinematography categories that open to submissions from women only. In recognition of the fact that it is not only women who can make films about women, there is also a Representation category that is open to all. This category will recognise films that challenge the sexual objectification of women and tell their stories presenting diverse characterisations and avoiding stereotypes. Each category is being sponsored by an industry partner.
UnderWire is proud to be partnered by Birds’ Eye View, Women in Film and Television, Euroscript and Object, and has received encouragement from Patron Rebecca O’Brien, “UnderWire will provide a much needed impetus to take a look at what new female voices in film can do. I’m really looking forward to watching the talent emerge.” Other patrons include Nira Park and Rachael Prior.
The backlash has started! For everyone grinding their teeth over the over exuberance surrounding DSLRs (for the ungeeks these are digital stills cameras that shoot HD video which have in many quarters been hailed as the future of low budget filmmaking) here’s something that should bring a smile…
In today’s Filmmaker’s bulletin the expertly knowledgable Andrew Doughty describes the DSLR as “…an abomination. They are a mistake…” and he was arguing with the equally sage Karel Bata who’d just called them “…most certainly NOT the future…”
To be fair it’s quite an odd argument because Andrew also calls DSLRs “bloody marvellous” and Karel says “they are fantastic” so both men appear to be actually agreeing with each other both about how bad and how good the new cameras are… which doesn’t seem to leave much room for anyone else in the discussion but I’m going to try and stick my oar in anyway…
The main area of agreement seems to be that no matter how amazing these new devices are they will be superseded. Vitally they will be bettered by something more recognisably a “video” camera, ending the affront to nature that is the “stills” camera shooting movies. Like a duck singing bird song it seems that no matter how beautiful the result, for many it’s just too weird to enjoy.
To add to the oddly consensual nature of this debate I must point out that I don’t doubt the central assertion that the “video” camera style device will surely soon trump the offering of the DSLR. I wouldn’t though see this as cause for dismay amongst fans of the DSLR, nor even proof that it was an evolutionary dead end. If the pro-sumer video camera market is reclaimed by machines less intended for stills then it will only be because these machines have taken on all the advantages offered by the current crop of DSLRs. Female politicians don’t wear crinolines but I wouldn’t say that the Pankhursts were not the victors of history, similarly whatever form it takes the future in low budget filmmaking is most definitely going to be more like the 5D than the Z1.
I would go further though because there are some physical things about using a DSLR that I prefer. For starters it’s much easier to use in tiny spaces; not that everything my brother and I do takes place in cars and bathrooms but a surprising amount does… more importantly people still respond differently to a stills camera than they do to a video camera. I don’t know why and I’m sure one day we’ll all grow out of it but I’ve found that nervous interview subjects and untrained actors find it far easier to forget that they are being watched when the device is less like a gun.
This is not an argument to say that the traditional video camera is dead, nor that we shall see real cameras like the Red or the Electra take on DSLR shape. Rather though I’m saying that the choice of camera for a project is dependent upon a myriad of factors, not just budget, not just resolution and certainly not just depth of field. The DSLR as a class is a fantastic addition to the tools we have at our disposal and it offers a diversity of benefits beyond being comparatively cheap and new. Sure once the rest of the market picks up its game they will be used less but for the right project, the right shot even, they are irreplaceable. The DSLR is here to stay.
The odd thing about the internet is people still treat it as if reverses normal logic, rather than magnifying it. This was one of the key problems behind the dotcom boom and, like radiation lingering long after the blast, echoes of this emotion are still with us today. That’s why I warned you at the outset that I wasn’t going to come any surprising or new revelations by examining the questions posed by online distribution. Putting films online doesn’t make unsaleable films suddenly appealing, nor does it change the way people approach art and entertainment.
People want to watch amazing films (shorts, features, fictions, documentary, animation, music video, unless otherwise stated from hereon I’m using films to mean the works). People are not only happy to pay for things they want, they prefer to. The things we need, like gas and pasta, that stuff we want as cheap as possible but the things we want, like strawberries and Inception, with that stuff we want to know we’re getting quality.
You don’t go to the cinema to see the cheapest movie. If you love a particular actor or genre or director (in that order) you may turn your attention to their budget price films but no one visits the bargain bin until they are seriously obsessed with cinema or shopping for presents for someone they hate. Films are entertainment and though we all find different things entertaining no one wants unentertaining entertainment. Some people are entertained by hilariously bad filmmaking, some people are entertained by examining an early film for faltering glimpses of future promise. Most people just want something well made that takes them out of themselves.
OK enough with the glaringly obvious, enough with the patronising finger wag. Well perhaps not quite because the entirely bankrupt model we have had for monetising film through the internet runs directly contrary to these obvious facts of life. Short films are a superlative example of this failure in operation but the British film industry as a whole seems half poised to head down the same crumbling path to futility and tedium and so whatever you are planning to make next I beg you to take a moment to think.
Lets look at shorts again. As I said yesterday, now that there finally is a perfect market place for the medium, the problem shorts face is that for years they’ve been made without a commercial purpose and consequently have grown up unmarketable. This hasn’t stopped them blossoming on the internet, but they’ve been handled as the toxic goods that they are and consequently remain the last chicken in the shop.
Films of all sizes have been online for a long time now but directly paying for them is a surprisingly new innovation. For an age it seemed like the only way to generate income through online distribution was to book end, or even break-up the film with advertising. This model seemed exciting because it suggested that revenue could be generated just by tempting people to click; it’d cost the viewer nothing but their passing interest would eventually translate into hard currency. This seemed perfect for shorts since it felt like a way of generating money out of something most people wouldn’t ever pay for. The lack of a groundswell of micro studios, self-supporting through the ad revenue generated by their million plus hits, suggests that short films aren’t even something most people want to casually click on to watch for free. Please do correct me with your own examples of break-even success but it seems to me that the Free Ad model has done nothing perpetuate the underlying problem – normal people think shorts suck.
By inherently accepting that shorts were not something people would pay for, this free-to-see model just encourages a viscous circle because stumbling upon a wealth of bad films always discourages anyone in their right mind from looking again. This is why I say long live iTunes for even bothering to put shorts in their shop. This is why I say all praise MiShorts for being one of the few places that recognises short films have a value. MiShorts is the best place on the internet for short films because rather than simply bombarding the visitor with shorts like penny sweets, their offering is intelligent, curated, detailed and encourages the visitor to fall in love with the films they can buy there.
This is important. For years filmmakers like have me have complained about the way the internet offered no distinction between the tiny slices of hand crafted joy that we’d created and wobbly videos of cats on skateboards. If great shorts – and there are many – are to reach the audience they deserve then we need to give them value. The first and simplest step in this process is not giving them away for free.
The harder, more important step is to think clearly about what the audience actually values – and what they don’t. Sadly these values tend to be the opposites of what directors and producers are proud of.
How often do you boast about how little your film was made for? How often do you talk about how new you are? How often do you talk about how hard you’ve struggled to make your film? How much do you talk about the struggle you’ve had in getting it put on anywhere? In the real world these are not especially powerful arguments for making people part with money, where what matters is cast and genre.
What the internet offers is a chance to sell direct to your audience – but it doesn’t change that audience. If I miss a film in the cinema I may catch it online rather than on DVD, some films I may happily let slip until they are online or on a disc, other films never reach a cinema near me and so I am only too excited to find them online and watch them… but these are all films I wanted to see. There aren’t films that I didn’t want to see that I’ll watch online because they’re cheap or well meaning.
The decision to axe the Film Council has created a healthy outpouring of talk about where our industry is heading. It’s clear that whoever is in charge of the money there is going to be less of it. It is also clear that with the rise and rise of affordable HD cameras with primes (I’m talking as much about the Red and the Alexa as the HD DSLRs from Canon and Nikon) this decline in budgets doesn’t necessarily force us into the ugly DV aesthetic of the last decade.
Online distribution, because it offers a way to reach an audience without fighting for space in cinemas, is always lurking in the back of these predictions as a way in which ultra-low budget indies can still fight their corner. I think there’s a lot of truth in this, it is a market with an amazing potential. But if you are forsaking the “calling-card” short film for the “calling-card” ultra-lowbudget first feature then think carefully about how you approach your audience. A slew of films that have nothing to recommend them save their cheapness and efficiency or the inexperience of their directors will sink without a trace whether they are released online or in every cinema in the world…
Short or long, fiction or documentary, if you want people to part with their money be proud of what you have created. Small budgets don’t have to mean small stories, it doesn’t have to be two men in a room moaning about films they’ve seen. The internet does not change the rules about what’s interesting – it magnifies them. If we are to take advantage of the opportunity that this moment brings then we have to be bold and unapologetic. Make films people want to watch, not films that merely feel affordable.
Whilst pontificating about the purchase and viewing of moving pictures using the internet my scope has been general. However a few of the responses I’ve had suggest that some have seen my comments squarely aimed at short films, rather than features, music videos or any of the other myriad categories used to subdivide the rainbow nation that is Shooting People.
It’s not surprising, the case studies I’ve used have all been lazily if accurately drawn from my own short films. Besides ever since the first downloadable quicktime files began appearing online about ten years ago, people have been talking about the internet as something that will radically alter the way short film is perceived, consumed and paid for. So before I focus my thoughts on the effects that increased online sales will have on short films as a form, I’d best warn you that this blog is written with the cynicism of ten years disappointment. I’ve spent a long time being told in excitable terms that “the internet is going to make short films cool”. These days, when arranged in a sentence, there are only three words I find more guaranteed to disappoint than “internet”, “short” and “film” and those are “england, “world” and “cup”.
To be fair though the internet has always suffered from hyperbole. Long before any normal person even had a dial-up modem we had William Gibson and War Games to excite us about the mind blowing, world destroying possibilities of a technology that was then still twenty years away from even being a genuine competitor to the rude magazines in the newsagent. Thanks to our wonderful imaginations the potential of the internet has almost always outstripped its practical capabilities.
Nope... still doesn't work quite like this William...
So it is with online shorts. When people first started assuring me that the internet would enable the entire world to watch short films and that would make them cool, they were severely over estimating the patience that normal people would have for downloading a highly compressed version of a badly made film. But now you can watch a badly made film almost instantly in almost the same quality it was shot in… so are short films going to be cool soon? Well, possibly…
Certainly the internet offers shorts a commercial platform they’ve never really had before. Selling shorts has always been difficult. They can slip in front of a feature in the cinema but rarely do as this takes up space that would raise a far higher price from advertisers. They have been released on tape and DVD but again only rarely and mainly when they are animated and aimed, at least partly, at children. Now, finally, shorts have a platform where they are just as accessible as features. By being packaging free and with almost no overhead for the virtual shopkeeper, the Download finally offers the short film the potential to be a commercial proposition. Now, finally, everyone is just a single click away from paying for your film. At last it makes sense to charge for shorts in a way that it never has before.
The iTunes store of short films may feel rather uncared for besides their feature gallery (for instance my film’s been on iTunes a month now but it’s still not listed under the alphabetical guide) but compared with the offering in HMV it’s like a paradise. Better still, fans of the medium can now turn to places like MiShorts and have their every whim lovingly catered for. MiShorts is like a rare records shop for an art form that previously couldn’t even sustain a grubby booth in a backstreet of Soho.
There is another consideration which may also yet see the sub 30 minute movie become economically viable. The next big change in our interaction with the internet could potentially give shorts a natural environment to rival the Cinema and the Television. As technology progresses and broadband rolls out across nations without our fixed line infrastructure, the internet is increasingly going to be found in the palm of your hand via smart phones, iPads, iPods, small, portable, mobile, wireless, internet devices. Such restless technology is ill suited to the depth of feature films or the drawn out exhausted slouch of television. So whilst you will still go to cinema to see a movie and still turn on the telly to watch a soap, the screen of your smart phone will become dominated by short films.
Except, of course, there’s a flaw in this argument. The problem is not in the logic of how the technology will change our habits but just that this glorious revolution is built around a product that currently doesn’t really exist. Before the internet it was almost impossible to sell short films and the medium has grown around this problem like plant bending towards the sun. Because there was no market for shorts there are now very few shorts that are marketable. That’s not what they’re made for. The few that do exist don’t even get considered as such. Chris and I once sited “The Wrong Trousers” as one of our inspirations for “Hallo Panda” and got glared at like we’d said we’d based the story on a ride at Alton Towers. How can you call “The Wrong Trousers” a short film? It was sold in shops… normal people bought it… eugh.
Short films are a training ground. They are made by innocents attempting to break into the industry. The entire culture of shorts is infused with this sense that the only audience that matters is the exec you are trying to impress. For decades this has been true because this has been the only audience you’re ever going to be sure of reaching… but now shorts could go wider are they going to be able to? Will the general public really pay to watch a ten minute business pitch? I mean, without the joy of watching a panel of millionaires sneer at the idea afterwards…
I’m hopeful for the future of a medium I have grown to adore. Not least because the collapse in feature film budgets and the rise of the DSLR means that more than ever those wishing to break into the industry are abandoning the “calling card” short film for the ultra-low budget “calling card” feature. With a way of reaching and building an audience finally in place and the ground no longer poisoned by amatuers only trying to shout louder than their peers, perhaps shorts will finally become more than a side-show…
If this is to be the case there’s some basics that we all need to remember whatever we’re making. These I will bark about tomorrow when I finally try and tie a knot in these thoughts on what the internet is doing to independent filmmaking.
The tireless observer will have noticed that over the past month or so I’ve been exploring some of the new online platforms that allow you to charge for your work. Most especially I’ve been dealing with the three outlets that my brother and I use, MiShorts, the Dynamo player and iTunes. But now that we finally have a series of workable, practical and efficient ways of bringing our films to an online market, what effect is that going to have on the way films are made and sold? Will downloads replace DVDs? Will short films finally find a commercial platform? Will this new platform, which makes it so much easier for filmmakers to sell direct to their audience, bring the old distribution model crashing to the floor and see us all able to turn a profit on much smaller budgets?
I think the answers to these questions are less surprising than the eager futurologist might assume, however they are nevertheless useful questions to think through.
So, will downloads replaced DVDs? It’s not crazy to assume they could. The VHS was killed by the DVD and already Downloads are defeating the CD so surely the days of the boxed set are as numbered as the discs within it. However for those fighting the cause of the Download there remains the problem of our deification of objects.
Anyone who visits my mate Adam is bound to realise that he’s not concerned about Commandments 1 and 2 because his movie collection clearly shows that he does worship another God and that whilst It truly resides in the darkness of the flicker theatre, these shiny plastic cases are his very own graven idols. No matter how much time software designers put into making graphic shelves to hold DVD box-like icons, a Download will never hold the sacred importance of a physical thing. Certain films I want to buy even when I own them already, I don’t, but it doesn’t take much to tempt me. This is a sensation I have yet to feel about a download.
Of course I was born in the last millennium so my thinking and my shopping responses were formed in a different age. Also whilst analogue media like vinyl albums and paperback books offer us a unique experience that the Download can imitate but never fully replace, the DVD does not. For the true fan a Download of Led Zeppelin is not the same as the plastic under the needle, but it is exactly the same as a CD. DVDs were never going to stop us going to cinema but for the vast majority of films, the vast majority of people are surely going to prefer to download the pleasure of viewing them, to buying all those pointless boxes.
But who wants a product that can only be sold once? Part of the reason the dirty “sequel” has evolved into the far more respectable “franchise” is that this means you can sell the film once on its own, then again in a box with its sequel and perhaps even a third time if you may be put it in a tin. The only difference is the box but it’s endlessly shocking how cheap a false sense of completeness can feel. Rather than letting Downloads destroy the DVD, the smart money is surely in finding ways to make Downloads provoke DVD sales. Here movies have an advantage over the CD since DVD sales have always been underpinned by attractive extra features.
Is a making of documentary and a handful of deleted scenes enough to keep DVD manufacturers in business? I admit it sounds thin and I’d love to think that one day content will triumph over frippery. But no matter how logical the argument is that people won’t continue to pay just to have a film in a box, I still think that the massed ranks of packaging designers will fight back. Even if just in the creation of boxes to put your media storage devices in. After all, what was it that really kicked off the Download revolution? The MP3 or the iPod?
Tomorrow I’m turning my thoughts specifically towards short film.
Oh what a lot of delicious bru-ha-ha there is on the Shooter’s bulletins at the moment. There’s the Ambleton Delight Debacle, where a couple of badly chosen words about DPs have sparked a furore, at least two different rows about the fall out from the axing of the UKFC and over on Screenwriters it seems like even a simple discussion of the worst lines in movie history is about to turn toxic…
It must be late summer. Either that or the Tories. Everything is the Tories. Despite the many vocal attempts to paint our new coalition government as a “new politics”, it is hard to shake the sensation that voting blue was the ultimate expression of retro chic. It wasn’t enough that we’d rediscovered the clothes, the hair and the synth pop, the 80s vibe would not have felt complete without having the Tories and the recession.
As a child of the 80s I can understand this. There is something comforting about our return to a world with clear battle lines drawn. Looking back on the period with the benefit of hindsight it is easy to see how complex the world remained but at the time there was a delicious binary simplicity about life.
If you want a funnier and more evocative sense of what I mean then watch “Death Of The Revolution” a short film my brother and I made which draws on the rabidly radicalised passions of our childhood. You can see this film on our website but better still, if you’re free on Friday, you can watch it at one of the coolest cinema venues in London as an appetiser for a screening of “Rebel Without A Cause”.
I am more chuffed and delighted by this pairing than I can quite say. “Rebel Without A Cause” may now feel a little clunky in places, if only because it created the template for films about youth in revolt. But it will sweep you up, drag you in and is bound to thrill the guts out of you. And after all, surely it’s about time we found a different period to get nostalgic about…
So anyway… a couple of weeks back the main topic of conversation on Shooting People was about online distribution. Whilst the discussion around the role the internet can play in a film’s distribution strategy has been rather overtaken by the hubbub surrounding the impending demise of the Film Council, the one thing that last week’s shock announcement makes clear is that more than ever the future of your film is in your hands. Whether they want to or not Independent filmmakers of all shapes and sizes are going to increasingly rely on the internet as a vital market place. Even if you’d still rather your film was seen in cinemas first, online sales are surely going to outstrip DVDs before any of the scripts you’ve just finished get released as finished films.
Rejoice then because at long last the technology is catching up with the hype and buying and watching films online is finally becoming as good as they said it would be years ago back when it wasn’t…
For instance if you’re fed up of hearing me bang on about my film “Hallo Panda” because you’ve not managed to see it yet and don’t really know why everyone loves it so much, then all you need to do is click on this link:
http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewMovie?id=374965584&s=143444
or alternatively just open up your iTunes and type “Hallo Panda” into the search window.
If you’ve already got an account with the iTunes store you can watch the film with one click. You’ll barely know that you’ve paid £1.49 and within moments you’ll have thirty minutes of bear shaped hilarity pouring out of your internet into the very room you’re sat in now. It’s well worth it, this is a film that, when it was screened late night on Channel 4, inspired the unprovoked adoration of an unoffical Facebook fan site created by lovely insomniacs. To convince you further there’s a delightful trailer on iTunes cut together by our friend and father-to-be, Mr.Ben Adam.
So how does iTunes compare to other delivery methods? Well, Apple are soon to overtake Microsoft as “the IT Giant everyone irrationally hates” and getting our film on the site is kinda how I imagine it would be for a small farmer getting his bacon taken on by Wal Mart. On the one hand it exposes us to a potentially staggering global market, on the other the cut is slender and the process of getting there has been numbingly painful.
Our distributor, Shorts International, have an exclusive deal with iTunes and seemed pretty confident from the outset that our film would be the sort of the thing that iTunes would want. First we were scheduled to be part of an anti-Valentine’s day theme. That was 18 months ago. Now, with the 4th anniversary of the film’s production just passed, the film is finally for sale though it’s not listed in their directory, not filed as a new release and they’ve not credited either my brother or one of the two producers…
So yeah, the massive global market that iTunes potential offers is appealing but if I’m honest what I’d love you to do is take a moment to go to iTunes, rate the film as high as you can, watch the trailer because it’s cool and then come to my website and watch the film using Dynamo player because that way more of your money will come back to us…
