Filmmakers Zak Forsman and Kevin K. Shah of Sabi Pictures arrive at Park City with an intent to define the questions most relevant to independent distribution options. Insights from Brian Newman, Dan Mirvish, Jon Reiss and Ira Deutchman open a path toward discovering some real solutions.

SABI filmmakers Zak Forsman and Kevin K. Shah move away from identifying the questions toward some possible answers that may, in fact, lead to the solutions we seek. Insights from Linas Phillips (Bass Ackwards), Habib Azar (Armless), Dan Mirvish, and Brian Newman are fleshed out with more thoughts from the pre-Filmmaker Summit roundtable.

SABI filmmakers Zak Forsman and Kevin K. Shah move away from identifying the questions toward some possible answers that may, in fact, lead to the solutions we seek. Insights from Linas Phillips (Bass Ackwards), Jon Reiss and Brian Newman are fleshed out with more thoughts from the pre-Filmmaker Summit roundtable.

Esther Robinson tells you how to keep your credit sweet.

And Jon Reiss gives some great pointers on marketing DVDs on the web.

Filmmakers talk about shooting films with still camera.

And Lance Weiler talks about building community on torrent sites.

A THOUSAND PHOENIX RISING
How The New Truly Free Filmmaking Community Will Rise From Indie’s Ashes

I can’t talk about the “crisis” of the indie film industry. There is no crisis. The country is in crisis. The economy is in crisis. We, the filmmakers, aren’t in crisis.

The business is changing, but for us –us who are called Indie Filmmakers — that’s good that the business is changing. Filmmaking is an incredible privilidge and we need to accept it as such – and accept the full responsibility that comes with that priviledge.

The proclamations of Indie Film’s demise are grossly exaggerated. How can there be a “Death Of Indie” when Indie — real Indie, True Indie — has yet to even live?
Yes, there’s a profound paradigm shift, and that shift is the coming of true independence. The hope of this new independence is being threatened even before it has arrived. Are we going to fight for our independence and can we even shoulder the responsibility that independence requires? That is: will we ban together and work for our communal needs? Are we ready to leave dreams of stardom and wealth behind us?

When someone says “Indie is dead”, they are talking about the state of the Indie Film Business, as opposed to what are actually the films themselves. They can say “The sky is falling” because for the last fifteen years, the existing power base in the film industry has focused on films fit for the existing business model, as opposed to ever truly concentrating on creating a business model for the films that filmmakers want to make.

This is where we are right now: on the verge of a TRULY FREE FILM CULTURE, one that is driven by both the creators and the audiences, pulled down by the audience and not pushed onto them by those that control the apparatus and the supply. We now have the power and the tool for something different, but will we fight to preserve the internet, the tool that offers us our new freedom? Can we banish the the dream of golden distribution deals, and move away from asking others to distribute and market it for us? Can we accept that being a filmmaker means taking responsibility for your films, the primary responsibility, all the way through the process? That is independence and that is freedom…

Read the full transcript on Filmmaker Magazine’s website.

Rather than debate business models, this poster said, why don’t filmmakers just focus on making a good picture? He (or, perhaps another anonymous poster) wrote, “I don’t see distribution as the thorn in indie’s side. I see quality as its biggest shortcoming. Seriously. Where are the filmmakers with the ambition to makes sex, lies & videotape or She’s Gotta Have It or Reservoir Dogs or Clerks or Gas Food & Lodging or Blood Simple or Stranger Than Paradise or Pi or whatever else?
 Those movies weren’t just made for nothing (though the budgets and name actors varied), they were GREAT MOVIES made by directors who really had personality and style.”
My response was that if the above films came out today, half wouldn’t get theatrical distribution and of the ones that did, half of those would be IFC releases. And I also think that bringing the conversation down to a basic question of “good films versus bad films” is too simplistic. In fact, I think the one of the biggest challenges for the independent scene right now is to come up with new notions of “what’s good” that we can all agree on and share among ourselves. I think there’s a relationship between viewing platform and one’s impression of a film. Buying a ticket and seeing something in a theater places you in one kind of critical mindset while clicking on a website and sitting through three bumper ads while watching a streamed film places you in another. Is “what’s good” when discovered through one experience the same “what’s good” that’s discovered in another? And does the price leveling effect of the Internet, Chris Anderson’s dictum that everything wants to be free, apply to quality as well? Will the dog on the skateboard – or the Burger King employee in the sink – always trump the well-crafted narrative? Lots of people – everyone from Josh Whedon to struggling indies who are dicing up their unsold features into five-minute webisodes – are trying to figure this out.

I think that it is absolutely true that context changes our viewing experience in very important ways. If you are watching something at home or in the office (especially if you are watching it on your computer with other applications open) you will often be in a state of continuous partial attention. Kathy Sierra’s Twitter Curve gives us some idea of the contemporary assault on our attention:

I think one of the wonderful things about going to a movie theater is that it serves to remove us from the world of cell phones, IM and Twitter for a couple of hours – in theory at least (and hardly ever in press screenings!). All we need to do when we go to the cinema is sit in a dark room and watch the flickering screen – like an updated version of sitting around the campfire and listening to stories – and this experience fulfills a primordial need in us. Nicholas Carr’s recent Atlantic article Is Google Making Us Stupid? made me think about the parallels between deep reading and deep cinema experiences:

The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.

If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with “content,” we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture.

I’m not claiming that watching a movie will do what reading War and Peace does to our brains but there is something thoughtful and contemplative about the space of the cinema (although perhaps not The Dark Knight at 7pm on a Friday in Union Square!) that you simply cannot get when you’re at home surrounded by technology and other distractions.

I’m not a luddite. In fact, the older I get the more I love to delve into the possibilities of technology. I even have aspirations of geekdom. But I am becoming more and more aware of how much the space and context of a viewing experience affects my feelings about the film I am watching. This was one of the many things I really appreciated about the Flaherty Seminar that I attended back in June. It was simply a huge pleasure and privilege to watch films in such a highly-curated atmosphere, where we were introduced to the bodies of work of directors and given time to talk to the filmmakers and to debate and think about what we were watching. I feel a connection to all the films I saw at Flaherty as a result, even the films that I didn’t much like and I have a much deeper appreciation for filmmakers like Pedro Costa, Bahman Ghobadi, Oliver Hussain, Syliva Schedelbauer, Alison Kobayashi and Ursula Biemann, many of whom I wouldn’t have known about if it hadn’t been for Flaherty and the excellent curation of Chi-hui Yang.

So what is my argument here? I guess it is just to say that I absolutely agree that the way we live digitally now is opening up all sorts of exciting possibilities – and it is a given that new distribution models will have to be figured out because the technology is going to continue to change, and us along with it. But the medium is still the message and I still long to be thoroughly immersed in films. Long, difficult, beautiful films that I pay money to see in a dark room full of strangers. I don’t want everything to be reduced to “content” because this obfuscates the very different experiences we have when we watch work in different contexts. And I don’t think it is anti-progress, or anti-technology, to argue that spaces for deep-viewing, deep-thinking and deep-curation are perhaps more important now than ever.

Still from 34x25x36

First Green Porno. I love Isabella Rossellini – she’s beautiful, funny and the sort of person I would love to eat cheese with. Christopher Barry, who does digital media and business strategy at Sundance Channel, spoke after screenings of Snail and Praying Mantis from the Green Porno series and he seems like a smart guy. He sees both the possibilities and the limitations of digital distribution – speaking of ad-supported models he said “50% of nothing is still nothing.”

I was also impressed with the work of m ss ng p eces. I loved their Pangea Day film, Moving Windmills. They know how to use the limitations of the short form to create strikingly visual pieces, even when they are making corporate vids like their films for TED (I challenge you not to be inspired by them!).

Overall, it was very gratifying to see how much creativity/activity there is out there, even without all the revenue models in place. Here are some links to other work that screened that you should check out:

The West Side

Drawn By Pain

Jamie Stuart’s NYFF45

Beyond the Rave