Two fun events in Brooklyn tonight for New Yorkers wanting some Monday night doc-action. Me! Me! First, Sync or Swim is playing at McCarren Park Pool – fun starts at 6pm and the film starts at 8pm. This will be one of the last events held at the venue before construction begins to turn the pool back into a, um, pool! Meanwhile across Brooklyn, the Brooklyn Independent Cinema Series, curated this week by Michael Tully, brings a screening of John…

We’re doing a bit of a catch-up on things that have been happening in the blogosphere over the past few weeks and wanted to draw your attention to this piece by Noah Harlan on the Filmmaker Magazine blog – written after he returned from the Sundance Producer’s Lab. In it he addresses online, ad-supported business models and comes to the conclusion that “In an ad-based model you would need a minimum of at least 800,000 viewers and possibly as many…

HD EXPO is coming to NYC (September 22-25) after seven successful years establishing itself as the premier trade show, education, and community event for the content creation industry. Registration for the EXPO is FREE in advance and includes all panels, exhibit hall and Intensive Workshops which sounds like a very good deal to us indeed! Workshops include Sony, Panasonic and Adobe equipment and software and there will be panels on subjects like The Art of Editing in the 21st Century:…

We blogged earlier about Laure Parson’s excellent new blog on digital distribution. She has recently relaunched the site with even more resources for filmmakers including a list of online markets and a discussion board. The latest interviews on the blog include Doug Block, Sujewa Ekanayake, Caachi, IndiePix and Shooting People’s Ingrid Kopp. This is a great resource for folk trying to get a handle on all the latest distribution options. If you find this helpful be sure to check out…

From the Tribeca Film Institute’s website: The Tribeca Film Institute asked Intelligent Television to launch an examination of the current economics of independent film and video distribution in the United States to help producers, distributors, and funders better understand current realities and trends in the film and video distribution market.  This study, supported in part by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, is intended to be of mainstream value—documentary films and education film and television remain popular, and…

Scott Kirsner has a useful post on CinemaTech entitled How To Get Your Film on iTunes (… It’s Not Easy) – which explains how you have to go via an aggregator first. Kirsner says Amazon’s CreateSpace is the best alternative option if you just want to do it yourself (films can then be sold via Amazon Unbox, a digital download service) but “you’ll have to drive customers to your work — unlike iTunes, where the customers are already buying movies…

Moviestorm has launched some free software that allows you to make simple animated films, quickly and easily. This is obviously great for first-timers but perhaps it could also be useful for more experienced filmmakers who want to test out ideas quickly? The basic package is totally free so give it a try and see what you think. Thanks to SXSW News Reel for the info!

Gee Whiz kids, sorry about our long blogging silence. The writers all buggered off on holiday and left nobody in charge. Fools! Anyway, our last post was about DIY Days in LA and now you lucky West Coasters get to do it all again in San Francisco tomorrow (Sunday, August 17th). So if you’re in the Bay Area get yourselves to 111 Minna Gallery tomorrow. Registration starts at 10am and as before there are lots of great folk involved and…

Belated congrats to my friend and Shooting People colleague, Jesse Epstein, for being one of the “25 new faces of independent film” in Filmmaker Magazine. In addition to getting to pose in a big red truck for Filmmaker, her film 34x25x36 is also playing in the YouTube screening room. Ms Epstein is awesome. Still from 34x25x36

Sorry for protracted blogging silence. Like last year, I disappeared after BRITDOC into the rural wilderness of South Africa (with a little urban time in my birth city of Joburg too). It was strange how fast the chaos of my working life dropped away and felt so far away. I started to think I had made up Shooting People and BRITDOC and the world of docs and independent film in general. In a weird double-move it all felt very irrelevant…