Some useful ideas explored here from New Breed – these are part of an on-going series from Filmmaker Magazine and The WorkBook Project to document the Filmmaker Summit held last Saturday at Slamdance (more about this to follow soon). 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…

We’re big fans of Jon Reiss’ book, Think Outside the Box Office. Jon is offering filmmakers a really great consultation opportunity so if you’re headed to Park City you’ll want to read this: As some of you might know, one of the reasons that I wrote Think Outside the Box Office was after those first Filmmaker articles I wrote in Fall ‘08 about my experiences distributing my graffiti doc Bomb It, many filmmakers contacted me to help them with their…

If you haven’t picked up a copy of Jon Reiss’ Think Outside the Box Office do yourself a favor and grab one now. Whatever kind of distribution and marketing strategy you are pursuing for your film (and if you haven’t got a strategy yet this book will help you develop one!), there are loads of good tips and ideas in here for you. This is a time when we all need to be sharing as many resources as possible to…

Select stories from the Spring issue of Filmmaker Magazine are now online and there are a couple of articles I particularly recommend as far as tools you can use goes: 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.

Sundance is going to be interesting this year. With the economy in the dumps there is almost certainly not going to be the usual sales activity, and hopefully filmmakers will be going there with expectations firmly in check. This could actually be a good thing for Sundance. As Steven Zeitchik writes in the Hollywood Reporter: But what these breakouts show is that the fest’s main value might now lie in the classic indie model, in which little money is spent…