The other newish internet service that I think has a lot to offer filmmakers is Tumblr which can be found at http://www.tumblr.com and which claims of its self:

“Tumblr lets you effortlessly share anything. Post text, photos, quotes, links, music, and videos, from your browser, phone, desktop, email, or wherever you happen to be. You can customize everything, from colors, to your theme’s HTML.”

In effect Tumblr is just another blog cum social network but it’s super simple interface and superb ability to easily lift content from the rest of the internet (as well as your own uploads) make it the perfect online scrapbook. Obviously if you wish you can just use it to post pictures of “Panic! At The Disco” and at the moment most of tumblr seems to consist of fashionista photography of girls in fields generally not wearing much and often holding old school 35mm stills cameras or of psychedelic kittens eating cake and macaroons.

However, Chris and I have been using it for a few months now as an online look book for our most developed feature film script. In putting together a package to accompany the script we took the not unusual step of gathering a couple of actors and taking some stills that we thought represented some of the key visuals from the story. We were greatly helped when bringing this photo shoot together by being able to send our stylist, make-up artist, photographer and cast to our Tumblog, where they could simply browse through (and add to) a collection of similar images.

Look books are nothing new but having one so easily accessible online and so easy to put together and share is proving very useful, especially as the service is entirely free. And of course it can include music and movies as well as text and pictures.

There is an added benefit too, in that Tumblr is a social networking/micro blogging site in the vein of Twitter (and yes you can tweet your tumbles…) As a result we’re hoping that we’re already starting to reach out to our prospective audience. Without us doing anything our tumblog has already gathered a handful of followers, who check our feed simply because they like our style. They have no idea that one day it’ll be a film, but when they find out they’ll hopefully be desperate to see it…