Current TV, From Here to Awesome and the Workbook Project are doing a FREE event on July 26th in Los Angeles that you should attend if you’re in town.

DIY DAYS
How do we sustain ourselves as filmmakers and storytellers in this day of shifting film distribution systems? How do we monetize our film and get the word out? Presented by From Here to Awesome the Workbook Project and Current TV – DIY DAYS aims to answer these questions with a day of panels, roundtable discussions and workshops: A look at how to fund, create, distribute and sustain.

Proposed Discussion Topics
- New Forms of Storytelling
- New models of Finance, Production and Distribution
- Audience Building & The Audience Becoming Collaborators
- War Stories: “What’s The Real Deal?”
- Self-Sustaining: what to know when trying to make a living from your art
- Case Studies (Arin Crumley, Lance Weiler, M dot Strange and others discuss the making and
distribution of their work)

Open Discussion Topics
- What are you working on? What are you looking for?
- How do you consume your media?
- What needs to change in order for you to sustain?

We’ve lined up a diverse group of speakers from all sides of the industry.

Speaker List
Robert Greenwald – Outfoxed, Wallmart the High Cost of Low Price, Iraq for Sale
Tommy Pallotta – producer of A Scanner Darkly and Waking Life
Mark Pellington – director of Henry Poole is Here, Arlington Road and Mothman Prophecies
Marshall Herskovitz – Blood Diamond, Quarterlife
Lance Weiler – The Last Broadcast, Head Trauma
Arin Crumley – Four Eyed Monsters
M dot Strange - We Are the Strange
Ondi Timoner – DiG, Join US, We Live in Public
Saskia Wilson-Brown – Current TV
Micki Krimmel – expert in social media and online community
Jon Reiss – Bomb It
Alex Johnson – digital media strategist / filmmaker
Christy Dena – cross-media strategist and designer
Matt Hanson – filmmaker and founder of A Swarm of Angels
Timo Vuorensola – director of Space Wreck and co-founder of wreckamovie.com

More info at diydays.com

What would a new entertainment media company, producing original content, look like in the age of the Internet?

• Starting from the end of the process: you know distribution is now nearly free. Put it up on the Internet and let people stream or download it.
• Marketing is also free, due to virality. Let people email your content to their friends; let people embed your content in their blogs and on their social networking pages; let your content be searchable via Google; let your content be easily surfaced using social crawlers like Digg. All free.
• Production is very cheap. Handheld high-definition video cameras cost nearly nothing. You can do almost every aspect of production and post-production on any Mac. Hell, you can even score an entire movie for free — there are hundreds of thousands of bands on the Internet who would love to have their music embedded in a new entertainment property as promotion for the bands’ concerts and merchandise.
• The creators of the content are the owners of the company. The writers, actors, directors — they are the owners. They have a direct, equity-based economic stake in the company’s success. They get paid like owners, and they act like owners.
• Financing is straightforward: venture capital, just like a high-tech startup. We live in a world in which financing a high-quality startup is simply not difficult — not for a high-quality technology startup, and increasingly not for a high-quality media startup. Modern financiers love being co-owners of a new company with the talent that will make the company successful — and that’s how it will happen here.

We want to tell you about tech wunderkind filmmakers like Lance Weiler who is spreading the knowledge so brilliantly with his Workbook Project.

And talk about innovators like Matt Hanson with Swarm of Angels, M dot Strange with We Are the Strange, and Matt Gaylor with Open Source Cinema.

And show you the filmmakers who have ventured into the scary territory of self-distribution and survived to tell the tale. Filmmakers like Arin Crumley and Susan Buice with Four Eyed Monsters, Hunter Weeks with 10MPH, and Todd Rohal with The Guatamalan Handshake.

And investigate the filmmakers who are partnering with non-profit organizations to promote their films and change the world in the process, filmmakers like Marc and Nick Francis with Black Gold, and Paul Taylor and Teddy Leifer with We Are Together.

And we want to talk about cool blogs and podcasts, interesting plugins and widgets, new online social networks and video hosting sites, and anything else Web 2.whateveritisnow that takes our fancy.

But we also want to hear from you about your experiences and about the resources you have found useful so please leave comments and get involved. We’ll have guest bloggers posting too so that you get to hear a variety of perspectives from all over the world.

Bring it on!

You can download the first chapter for free here:

shootingpeople.org/shortsbook

The Shooters gang are all up in Edinburgh for the film festival there at the moment. There is a limit to how much time I can spend on the road (unfortunately!) so I can’t be there this year. But you can follow the adventures of Shooting People on the Festival Focus blog and on Ben’s Blog – Ben is currently developing a feature project and has written lots of brilliant entries that I’m sure other filmmakers will identify with. He’s also a much better writer than me. Damn him.