Super producer and super nice guy Ted Hope gave a keynote address at Film Independent’s Filmmaker Forum in Los Angeles over the weekend. If you need to gird your loins for the challenges and opportunities ahead you should read it because you, dear readers, are the TRULY FREE FILMMAKERS he is talking about, or at least you can be. A THOUSAND PHOENIX RISING How The New Truly Free Filmmaking Community Will Rise From Indie’s Ashes I can’t talk about the…

Hi everyone, I’m Patrick and this is my first time posting on Shooting People. Two weeks ago I was approached by James Mullighan to blog about a self-distribution project I’m running at Met Film. Some of you might know the Met Film School, it turns out we’re actually a group of three companies, Met Film Post, Met Film Production and the Met Film School and we develop, produce and post-produce a variety of feature films and television programs… Bet you…

Message from Andrew Berends via D-Word sent on Wednesday this week: As you may know, I’m back in the U.S. after ten days being detained by the State Security Services in Nigeria. I’d been in Nigeria for six months filming DELTA BOYS (http://deltaboys.com/) about the oil conflict in the Niger Delta. I was picked up while filming at the Nembe Waterside in Port Harcourt. Nembe Waterside is a bustling port through which all kinds of traffic flows. It’s a point…

Just a heads up that I am also blogging over on the Shooting People TOOLS blog about the new(ish) digital, webbified world of production and distribution. Check it out for a link to download the Shooting People/BAFTA Short Sighted book of contacts for filmmakers making shorts (including some tips for filmmaking in a Web2.0 world written by moi), plus lots of other good stuff: most recently links to the Peter Broderick indieWIRE articles on new distribution strategies and The Film…

I was lucky enough to attend the Flaherty Seminar this year and was thrilled to be introduced to so much great work and so many wonderful filmmakers so it’s good to see that they are launching a monthly screening series in NYC so that more people can access the work that they curate (this year’s curator was Chi-hui Yang, director of the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival). I was a particular fan of Oliver Hussein’s short films so…

Instead of yelling at your TV, send your thoughts via Twitter during the debate tonight. Some tweets will be added to the Current live broadcast. And if you’re in NYC you can participate in Hack the Debate in 3-D at Galapagos Art Space in DUMBO: HACK THE DEBATE – 3D! video_dumbo presents Current TV’s “Hack the Debate,” an interactive broadcast of the first presidential debate. For visual enhancement, video_dumbo will transform the Broadcast into 3D based on a new polarized…

I wasn’t able to attend the Shooting People/BAFTA Short Sighted event in London earlier this month due to the very inconvenient fact that I was in New York! But all the feedback has been excellent and it sounds like filmmakers really benefited from the day’s panels and case studies. I particularly like this comment: “The event was motivating due to the knowledge of panel members as well as the clever filmmakers attending. Shooting People is ‘as yellow as the generosity…

Catch up on some of them on The Film Panel Notetaker blog. All the good stuff is here including some really useful and indepth coverage of the No Borders International Co-Production Market presentation of the Case Study on Single Picture Financing with John Hadity, President and CEO of Hadity & Associates, Inc., a consultancy firm that specializes in risk management and production finance for film and television.

Been meaning to blog this since it came out last week during Independent Film Week. Some of you may already be familiar with the new distribution strategy that Peter Broderick advocates but he lays it out very clearly in this two part article for indieWIRE. Part 1 Part 2 This chart illustrates the differences between what Broderick calls the old and new worlds of distribution. And he finishes with some solid tips: Be strategic – In the Old World, most…